Past Una's Lectures

Documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman uses the “direct cinema” tradition of documentary filmmaking—continued filming of human conversation and the routines of everyday life with no music, interviews, or voice-over narration—to powerfully examine social institutions in America.

Novelist and nonfiction writer Nicholson Baker is the author of The Mezzanine; Room Temperature; Vox; The Fermata; and The Everlasting Story of Nory, among others. Often addressing provocative topics such as voyeurism and planned assassination, Baker’s work is known for its focus on minute details and careful characterizations through the exploration of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness.

Eva Hoffman is the author of several books, including the widely regarded Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language and Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews.

Anthony Grafton is Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University. His work focuses primarily on the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, scholarship and education in the West from Antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from Antiquity to the Renaissance.

South-African novelist, literary critic, and translator J.M. Coetzee is the recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature and a two-time winner of the Booker Prize. His writing often uses his country's apartheid system and its post-apartheid transition as a mirror for the bleakness of the human condition.

Photographer and educator Wendy Ewald is known for her documentary-style investigations of places and communities, which probe questions of identity and cultural differences. Ewald collaborates with children, families, and women around the world, often encouraging them to use cameras to record themselves, their families, and their communities.

A regular broadcaster and critic on television and radio, Michael Ignatieff has hosted many programs including Voice; the BBC's arts program The Late Show; and the award-winning series Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, which examined the issue of nationalism in the late twentieth century.

Essayist, poet, novelist, theorist and critic, Silviano Santiago is one of the leading Brazilian modernists focusing on concepts of “inbetweenness” and “hybridity.”

Art historian, art critic and literary critic, Michael Fried is J.R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and Art History at Johns Hopkins University. In his work, Fried engages questions of modernism, realism, theatricality, objecthood, self-portraiture, embodiedness, and the everyday. He has also written histories of modern art, focusing on Edouard Manet, Gustave Courbet, and Adolph Menzel.

Andrei Pleşu is professor of art history, philosophy and religion at the University of Bucharest.