USC STAGE
TUES/4/20 :: 6:00p
Making History: Media, Stories, History, and Memory
Presented by USC
A lively panel of celebrated USC authors will come together to discuss their work and the fascinating connections between stories, media, history, and memory. Panelists include Viet Thanh Nguyen, USC English professor and the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer and The Committed; USC cinematic arts professor Howard Rodman, author of the inventive literary adventure novel, The Great Eastern; USC history professor William Deverell, author of Kathy Fiscus: A Tragedy that Transfixed the Nation, about the first live, breaking-news TV spectacle in American history; and moderator Priya Jaikumar, USC cinematic arts professor and author of Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space.
Priya Jaikumar
Priya Jaikumar is Professor of Cinematic Arts in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of two books, CINEMA AT THE END OF EMPIRE (Duke, 2006); WHERE HISTORIES RESIDE: INDIA AS FILMED SPACE (Duke, 2019), and a co-edited dossier on “Teaching Cinema and Media Studies Against the Contemporary Global Right” (2018), among several other articles and book chapters, all of the non-fiction and academic variety. Prior to her University career, Priya was a journalist and television reporter, with the briefest of stints in advertising.
William Deverell
William Deverell is Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and Professor of History at USC. He also directs the USC Libraries Collection Convergence Initiative. He writes and teaches on the history and culture of the 19th and 20th century American West.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed. His other books are a short story collection, The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction); and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He has also published Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his six-year-old son, Ellison.
Howard Rodman
Howard A. Rodman is the author of the novels The Great Eastern, a sprawling literary 19th-century anticolonial adventure, and Destiny Express, described by Thomas Pynchon as “daringly imagined, darkly romantic—a moral thriller.” As a screenwriter, Rodman wrote Savage Grace, with Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne; August, starring Josh Hartnett and David Bowie; and Joe Gould’s Secret. He is the past president of the Writers Guild of America West; professor of screenwriting at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts; a member of the National Film Preservation Board; an artistic director of the Sundance Screenwriting Labs, and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
