Alexander Nemerov, the 2024-25 Una's Lecturer, is joined in conversation by UC Berkeley faculty member Elisa Tamarkin.

Nemerov is an art historian and the author of many books including Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York (Penguin, 2021), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography and named by Vogue one of the best books of the year. His most recent book, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s (Princeton, 2023) has been called by the novelist Annie Proulx “one of the richest books ever to come my way — deeply beautiful . . . astonishingly tender . . . singular and moving.” Nemerov is the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University, where The Stanford Daily named him one of the university’s top ten professors.

Nemerov is in conversation with Berkeley faculty member Elisa Tamarkin (English), a scholar of American literature and topics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual history, philosophy, and art. She is the author of Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance (2022) and Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (2008). Her current book project explores Herman Melville’s lifelong fascination with questions of visibility and consciousness in literature, art, and life.

Nemerov delivers the Una's Lecture on Monday, Oct 21.