The American Library in Paris

(In Person Only) Play and Creativity with Lillian Davies and Chloe Briggs
2024-04-18 19:00 - 20:30 (Europe/Paris) | The American Library in Paris
Writer Lillian Davies and artist Chloe Briggs’s collaboration began with a conversation while observing their children at play in the Parc de Belleville in Paris. Their resulting book, Playgrounds, is set up like a workbook and uses images and text to explore how public spaces can activate creativity and create a sense of community and connection. The authors also show how play—the freedom to imagine the world differently—is essential to our artistic endeavors.
Guided by the authors, participants will complete creative exercises inspired by Playgrounds. The workshop wraps up with participants sharing their creations to foster a sense of camaraderie and mutual inspiration.
Maximum 40 participants. Open to all ages.
About the speakers:
Chloe Briggs is an artist and educator based in Paris. In 2013 she created the Drawing is Free project, which makes connecting through drawing available to everyone. She runs drawing workshops both online and in person and offers a free weekly online portrait drawing session that is open to all. On Briggs’s Patreon account you can read her writing about drawing and listen to conversations with fellow artists about the experience of drawing a human face, and art as a means of connection. @drawingisfree_org
Lillian Davies is a Paris-based art historian and writer. Author of multidisciplinary artist Mounir Fatmi’s monograph, Suspect Language, Davies contributes to Artforum, Flash Art, Interview Magazine, Numéro and Objektiv as well as writing for art books and museum catalogs. You can read her work on her website. Davies is guest lecturer at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris; Ecole W (Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas); and Parsons Paris, and is Adjunct Professor at Paris College of Art. She is a recipient of AICA France’s Bourse Ekphrasis and holds a BA in Art History and Comparative Religions from Columbia University, a MA in Curating Contemporary Art from Royal College of Art, London, and recently conducted doctoral research in a Troisième Cycle at École du Louvre. @lillian.davies Learn more:
Playgrounds is available for purchase at independent bookstores Librairie Yvon Lambert, The Red Wheelbarrow, and After8 Books. Read about the project on their website. Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (the speakers will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

History Tour at the Library
2024-04-19 11:00, 2024-04-26 11:00, 2024-05-03 11:00, 2024-05-17 11:00, 2024-05-24 11:00, 2024-05-31 11:00, 2024-06-07 11:00, 2024-06-14 11:00 and 1 more date | The American Library in Paris
The American Library in Paris invites you to register for a History Tour. Come visit us in person at 10 rue du Général Camou and discover:

Our origin story, when our Library warehoused a collection of books donated to the Doughboys fighting alongside Allied troupes in WWI
The establishment of the American Library in Paris as a private library
The famous writers of the Lost Generation (Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, and more) who explored our stacks during their time in Paris
Our Paris Library School, which brought American innovations to French libraries in the 1920s
The true stories of the brave Librarians who kept the Library open during the Occupation of WWII
How the Library has evolved over its 103-year history into the largest English-language lending library on the European continent

All tours are on Fridays at 11h00, last one hour, and take place in person at the American Library in Paris.
Tours are free of charge and open to the public. Pre-registration is required. Please email us if you are reserving for 4 or more people. (Do not reserve through the site.)
Please email tours@americanlibraryinparis.org with any questions.
This initiative is made possible through the generous support of the Florence Gould Foundation and the American Center for Art and Culture.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.

(In Person Full) (Hybrid) The US Presidential Elections: Journalists Look at What’s Ahead
2024-04-23 19:00 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
The US presidential race has provoked intense anxiety, not only among voters but also around the world. The results could have profound implications on almost every front: immigration, the war in Ukraine, the Middle East, NATO, Russia, the Supreme Court. Join us for an extended, 90-minute media panel moderated by Vivienne Walt, in partnership with the Overseas Press Club of America, to discuss how the campaign is going, what to look for in the months ahead, and to answer your questions.
Please note the early start time of this event.
Please note that while in-person registration to this event is now full, registration to attend on Zoom is still available.
About the speakers:
Vivienne Walt is a Paris correspondent for TIME Magazine and Fortune Magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, BusinessWeek, and more. She is governor of the Overseas Press Club of America.
The Washington Post’s senior national political correspondent, Ashley Parker has covered the White House since Trump’s 2016 election, a campaign she also covered. She has shared two Pulitzer Prizes, one for Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections, the other for the January 6 insurrection. Ashley will Zoom in from the campaign trial to talk about Biden’s strengths and weaknesses, and a Trump victory might bring. She recently described the feeling in the Democratic Party: “There’s a deep concern Biden may not be the best candidate to beat Trump…There’s a desire among some for a plan B.”
The New York Times chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe, Steven Erlanger has covered about 120 countries. He’s been bureau chief in eight cities, including London, Moscow, Jerusalem and Paris, and has also served as the Times’ chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington. He has shared two Pulitzer Prizes for the New York Times, one for covering Al Qaeda after 9/11, the other for coverage of Russia in 2017. Steve will talk about how the U.S. elections will impact the world. Recently he wrote: “For most European governments, the prospect that Trump could return to the White House is a prime topic of private discussion. Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016 gave a major boost to European populist politics, and another victory would almost surely do the same.”
Guillaume Debré, Deputy Editorial Director of TF1, France’s biggest TV news network, was based in Washington for 16 years, working for CNN and French TV, covering the Obama and Trump presidencies. He’s the author of several books on US politics, including on Obama and Trump, and a book titled “How Money Ruined American democracy.” Guillaume will talk about how the elections are being covered by the rest of the world, from his Paris perch, and how the stakes are truly global.
For years, Cuban-American illustrator Edel Rodriguez has captured the dark absurdity of US politics on the covers of TIME, the New Yorker, and others. His “Meltdown” and “Total Meltdown” TIME covers became iconic representations of the Trump presidency. He will join the panel on Zoom to talk about how to portray the election’s epic importance amid media overload and voter dissatisfaction. Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (the speakers will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions. Please note the early start time of this event.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

(Hybrid) Looking to Art, At Home and Abroad with Benjamin Moser
2024-04-24 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
In 2002, at the age of twenty-five, Benjamin Moser moved from New York to the Netherlands. In search of places to anchor him in his new home, he began paying visits to Dutch art museums, where he developed a fascination with the “Dutch Masters” (a term given to a group of 17th-century Dutch painters, including Rembrandt and Vermeer, who developed distinctive styles and produced works that continue to inspire viewers). In his new book, The Upside-Down World, Moser delves into the details of the lives of the Dutch Masters, drawing from scant historical records to generate speculative musings and biographical accounts of these beloved painters.
Moser has also produced several other award-winning biographies and translations. His 2009 biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector has been instrumental in securing Lispector’s rich literary legacy among global audiences. His 2019 biography of Susan Sontag was widely praised and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Through his biographies and his translations, Moser bridges both linguistic and cultural gaps, deftly introducing the complexities of foreign literature and the lives of international artistic figures to the English-speaking world.
Moser will be joined in conversation by Pamela Druckerman, a cultural writer and journalist. Druckerman has published five books and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Le Monde, among other publications.
About the speakers:
Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, including through publishing her complete works in English, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. For Sontag: Her Life and Work, he won the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, was published in October 2023. He lives in the Netherlands and France.
Pamela Druckerman is a journalist and the author of five books including Bringing Up Bébé, which has been translated into 31 languages. She won an Emmy for The Forger, a New York Times documentary about a French teenager in WWII. Her op-eds, essays, articles and reviews have been published in the The New York Times, The Economist, The Atlantic, Le Monde and many other publications. Learn more:
Moser recently translated an interview with the renowned Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector from Portuguese to English. You can read his translation, and listen to the original Portuguese recording, in a piece for The New Yorker. Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (the speakers will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes. Read along with the Library! If you want to prepare ahead of this event, copies of The Upside-Down World will be on sale one week in advance, as well as after the event. Stop by Member Services to purchase your copy. Books are generously provided by Smith&Son.
Attendees will have the opportunity to have their copy signed following the conversation.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

(Hybrid) Lunar Horizons: To the Moon with NASA Experts
2024-04-25 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
NASA’s upcoming crewed mission to the Moon, Artemis III, is currently scheduled for 2026, marking humanity’s first return to the lunar surface in over 50 years and the first-ever visit to the lunar South Pole. During this mission, two crew members will descend to the Moon’s surface, near its South Pole, for approximately a week. The astronauts’ objectives will include conducting scientific research and performing a series of moonwalks.
Scientists Ryan Zeigler, Lunar Sample Curator at NASA, and Christine Shupla, responsible for scientific engagement at the non-profit Lunar Planetary Institute, will share the latest and greatest advancements in lunar research. They will share ideas on science education and literacy, and how we can make learning about lunar science accessible to all.
This event is organized in partnership with Ephémerides, the organization founded by French astrophysicist Fatoumata Kébé.
About the speakers:
Christine Shupla manages the Lunar Planetary Institute Science Engagement staff, with 16 years of experience in NASA’s planetary science education community and 15 years of experience in informal science education. She also leads the Lunar Planetary Institute’s scientist engagement efforts, providing professional development and resources to assist planetary scientists in their efforts to share their science with public audiences.
Ryan Zeigler is NASA’s Lunar Sample Curator in the Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office of the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division at the Johnson Space Center. The principal focus of Ryan Zeigler’s research is the geochemistry and petrography of lunar samples to better understand how the Moon formed, how it differentiated and how impacts have subsequently altered its surface. Learn more:
Ephémerides founder Fatoumata Kébé spoke at the American Library in Paris last year about her book Lettres à la Lune, which explores how humans across history, from astrophysicists to poets, have about the moon. Rewatch the conversation on the Library’s YouTube channel.
With Artemis III, humankind will return to the surface of the moon. Discover the mission and explore the scientific innovation behind it. Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (the speakers will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

(In Person Full) (Hybrid) Annie Ernaux & Photography with Lou Stoppard and Lauren Collins
2024-04-30 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
French author Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, writes of her desire to “describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer and to preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered.”
Curator Lou Stoppard’s exhibition “Exteriors—Annie Ernaux & Photography” (at La Maison européenne de la photographie, now through 26 May) traces this close relationship between Ernaux’s autobiographical prose and the medium of photography. She juxtaposes passages from Ernaux’s book Exteriors—a collage of observations and reflections on the streets, shops, and public transportation networks of Cergy-Pontoise—with an array of photographs from the museum’s collection.
Stoppard will appear in conversation with writer and journalist Lauren Collins.
The program is produced in collaboration with la Maison européenne de la photographie and art book publisher MACK, which has released a book accompanying the exhibition.
Please note that while in-person registration to this event is now full, registration to attend on Zoom is still available.
About the speakers:
Lou Stoppard is a British writer and curator. She has written for The Financial Times, Aperture, The New York Times and The New Yorker. Her books include a survey of the work of street photographer Shirley Baker, published by Mack in 2019, ‘Pools’, an exploration of swimming in photography, published by Rizzoli in 2020, and Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography, published by Mack in 2024, to time with an exhibition of the same name at MEP, Paris.
Lauren Collins began contributing to The New Yorker in 2003 and became a staff writer in 2008. Her subjects have included Michelle Obama, Donatella Versace, the graffiti artist Banksy, Emmanuel Macron, the refugee crisis, and equal pay. Since 2015, she has been based in Paris, covering stories mainly from France. She is the author of “When in French: Love in a Second Language,” which the Times named as one of its 100 Notable Books of 2016. She is working on a second book, about a coup d’état perpetrated by white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, and its effects over the past hundred and twenty years.
This event is in partnership with the Maison Européenne de la Photographie.
Learn more:
You can check out Stoppard’s exhibition on Annie Ernaux & Photography yourself by visiting the MEP before 6 May 2024.
In 2020, Stoppard edited a photography collection called Pools, bringing together a dazzling array of contemporary photographs featuring poolside parties, submerged swimmers, and other pool-related objects and events. You can peruse a preview of the book (or order a copy of your own) here.
Lauren Collins has appeared at the Library several times, both as a guest and as a moderator for our programs. You can watch a recording of her presenting her memoir When in French: Love in a Second Language at the Library here. Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (the speakers will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

(Hybrid) The Anatomy of Privilege: Nick McDonell on Quiet Street
2024-05-02 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
Nick McDonell has written eleven books, ranging from novels (the first of which he wrote at the age of seventeen) to nonfiction accounts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. With his latest book, a memoir called Quiet Street, McDonell turns his gaze inward, taking his own upbringing in a wealthy New York family as his subject. Among other institutional contexts, he considers the private all-boys school that he attended in Manhattan, his time as a student at Harvard, and his summers spent at the Devon Yacht Club. Across these accounts, McDonell reflects upon the machinations of privilege, using his own life as a prism through which to understand larger dynamics of class, race, and inequality. He will appear in conversation at the Library with photographer and filmmaker Roopa Gogineni.
About the speakers:
Nick McDonell has published eleven books. His work has been translated into 23 languages and appeared on bestseller lists around the world. He is the author of the novels Twelve, The Third Brother, An Expensive Education, and The Council of Animals, as well as a work of political theory, The Civilization of Perpetual Movement, and five books of reportage on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including The Bodies in Person. He has contributed reporting and essays to Harper’s Magazine, The London Review of Books, Libération, The Paris Review, newyorker.com, and TIME, among other publications. He has also written for film and television.
As a reporter, McDonell has covered the wars in Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine. He helped found The Zomia Center, which is dedicated to the study of ungoverned and semi-governed regions known as non-state spaces. He grew up in New York City and studied literature at Harvard and international relations at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford.
Roopa Gogineni is a filmmaker, photographer and curator from West Virginia whose work considers historical memory and modes of resistance. After a decade in Nairobi she is now based in Paris. Suddenly TV, her latest film about magical thinking and revolution, was nominated for the IDA Awards and earned jury prizes at SXSW, IndieLisboa, and Kasseler Dokfest. She holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Oxford and teaches at Parsons Paris. Learn more:
You can read an extract from Quiet Street here.
A review of Quiet Street in the Chicago Review of Books describes the book’s success in tracing the “violence” of the “one percent.” Read the review here. Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (the speakers will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes. Read along with the Library! If you want to prepare ahead of this event, copies of Quiet Street will be on sale one week in advance, as well as after the event. Stop by Member Services to purchase your copy. Books are generously provided by Smith&Son.
Attendees will have the opportunity to have their copy signed following the conversation.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

(Hybrid) The Examined Life with Scott Hershovitz and Sarah Bakewell
2024-05-09 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
The Library will be closed on this day for the Ascension holiday.
Library services will not be available.
Doors will open at 19h00.
Event will be followed by a reception. In Nasty, Brutish, and Short, Scott Hershovitz, co-writing with his two young children, uses the child’s sense of curiosity and simplicity as a starting point from which to investigate ethics, existence, religion, identity, and justice from fresh perspectives. In his latest book, Law is a Moral Practice, Scott Hershovitz approaches the relationship between moral action and the law with refreshing frankness and levity, uncovering a very human history of setting, breaking, and remaking rules for good living.
Sarah Bakewell’s work is similarly engaged with the idea of ethical living. Her latest book, Humanly Possible, masterfully recounts the long history of humanism and freethinking. Join these two professional philosophers to discuss the big questions of life: the nature of goodness, the possibility of ethical living, and the meaning of being human.
Join the two authors as they consider philosophy’s most fundamental questions, the eternal urgency of philosophy, and the necessity of making philosophical thought accessible to all.
About the speakers:
Scott Hershovitz is director of the Law and Ethics Program and professor of law and philosophy at the University of Michigan. He holds a BA in philosophy and politics from the University of Georgia, a JD from Yale Law School, and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. Professor Hershovitz served as a law clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court. He is the author of Nasty, Brutish, and Short, co-written with his two young children. He is married to Julie Kaplan, a social worker, whom he met at summer camp. They live in Ann Arbor with their two children, Rex and Hank.
Sarah Bakewell is the author of several works of biography and philosophy, including At the Existentialist Café and How to Live: a life of Montaigne. Her latest, Humanly Possible: 700 years of humanist freethinking, enquiry, and hope, was a New York Times bestseller in 2023 and was named by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year. Learn more:
Hershovitz’s first book, Nasty, Brutish, and Short, takes the hilarious and profound questions of young children as the starting point for serious philosophical inquiry. You can read an excerpt from the book here.
A New York Times review of Humanly Possible explains that Bakewell “delights in the paradoxical and the particular, reminding us that every human being contains multitudes.” Read the review here. Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (the speakers will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes. Read along with the Library! If you want to prepare ahead of this event, copies of Nasty, Brutish, and Short and Humanly Possible will be on sale one week in advance, as well as after the event. Stop by Member Services to purchase your copy. Books are generously provided by Smith&Son.
Attendees will have the opportunity to have their copy signed following the conversation.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

(Hybrid) The Art of Biography with Stacy Schiff
2024-05-14 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
Stacy Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and one of the leading non-fiction life writers of our time. Schiff’s biographies animate the lives and legacies of time-hallowed historical figures such as Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Cleopatra, countering popular narratives and misunderstandings with meticulous historical detail.
The Library is delighted to host Schiff as our Writer-in-Residence this May. In this program, the author will appear in conversation with Elaine Sciolino, a contributing writer for the New York Times. The event will be followed by a reception, to which all attendees are invited.
About the speakers:
Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize. Published to ecstatic reviews, her Cleopatra: A Life was a #1 bestseller. Named one of the New York Times’s Top Ten Books of 2010, it has been translated into thirty-five languages and won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. David McCullough greeted Schiff’s 2015 The Witches, also a #1 bestseller, as “brilliant from start to finish.” Schiff’s most recent book, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, was a Wall Street Journal Top Ten Book of 2022 and figured as well on President Obama’s list of Favorite Books of 2022. The Wall Street Journal has called Schiff “perhaps the most seductive writer of nonfiction prose in America in our time.” Among other honors, Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, where she has been named a Library Lion.
Elaine Sciolino is a contributing writer and former Paris bureau chief for the New York Times. Her forthcoming book, Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World’s Greatest Museum, will be published in 2025. Decorated Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French state, she is the author of the national best-sellers The Seine and The Only Street in Paris. She has lived in Paris since 2002. Learn more:
Shiff’s most recent book is a portrait of the American revolutionary activist and politician Samuel Adams. You can read NPR’s enthusiastic review of the book here.
Schiff’s biography of Benjamin Franklin has recently been adapted into a miniseries, with Michael Douglas starring as the beloved Founding Father. Watch the trailer for the miniseries here. The Writer-in-Residence program is generously supported by The de Groot Foundation.
Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (the speakers will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

(Hybrid) Warming Up with Madeleine Orr
2024-05-15 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
We have all seen the headlines. At the Australian Tennis Open in early 2020, heat and smoke from bushfires caused players to collapse. Skiers across Europe have canceled trips to mountain resorts due to an unsettling dearth of snow. And extreme heat killed hundreds, if not thousands of migrant workers who were building infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Temperatures have reached new heights around the world, dramatically altering the experience of sporting events for players, fans, and support staff alike.
In her book Warming Up: How Climate Change Is Changing Sport, Madeleine Orr marshals her unique academic background in sports management and ecological research to consider the implications of a warming climate for one of the largest entertainment industries in the world.
The conversation will be moderated by UNESCO’s Director of Social Polices, Gustavo Merino.
About the speakers:
Madeleine Orr is a leading sport ecologist and professor at the University of Toronto. A Forbes 30 under 30 inductee, she is the founder and co-director of The Sport Ecology Group, who consult on international climate issues for sports organizations such as the Commonwealth Secretariat, the UNEP, World Athletics, Adidas, F1 teams, and the NCAA. Madeleine has worked closely with the BBC and ESPN to further public understanding of climate issues in sport. She is a 2023–24 Future of Canada Fellow. www.madeleineorr.com
Gustavo Merino has been the Director of Social Polices at UNESCO since January 2024. Previously he was Leader of the Public Policy Unit at the Institute for Obesity Research and as Research Professor and Leader of the Public Policy Health Initiative at the School of Government and Public Transformation of Tecnológico de Monterrey, where he was also Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Government for Mexico City Region. Prior to that, he was Director of the Investment Center Division at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). He has held senior positions in the Government of Mexico including Deputy Minister of Social and Human Development, Deputy Minister for Prospective, Planning and Evaluation and Head of the Planning and International Affairs Unit at the Ministry of Social Development. He was also CEO of Mexico’s national development bank for agriculture and rural areas, Financiera Rural. Dr. Merino has also been a Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Public Policy Research at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de Mexico (ITAM) in Mexico City and a consultant in the field of social development, public finance and competition policy. He has a master’s and PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University and a BA in Economics from ITAM. Learn more:
A BBC article titled “What Would a Greener World Cup Look Like?” draws heavily upon Orr’s work. Read the article here.
Orr appeared as a guest in a 2022 episode of the podcast The Bunker to discuss the ecological future of the Olympics. You can listen to the podcast here. Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (the speakers will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes. Read along with the Library! If you want to prepare ahead of this event, copies of Warming Up will be on sale one week in advance, as well as after the event. Stop by Member Services to purchase your copy. Books are generously provided by Smith&Son.
Attendees will have the opportunity to have their copy signed following the conversation.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

(In Person at Amphithéâtre Farabeuf) An Evening with Poet Terrance Hayes
2024-05-21 18:00 - 19:00
Terrance Hayes is a pivotal figure in contemporary poetry. His work crackles with rhythmic innovation, deft lyricism, and poignant insight while exploring themes ranging from music to masculinity to African American experience. He revitalizes traditional structures, such as the sonnet, infusing them with an energy that speaks to our contemporary moment. His collection Lighthead won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2010, cementing his position as a significant voice in American literature, and he has since received the highly esteemed MacArthur Fellowship.
This program is presented in partnership with the Department of Cultural Affairs of the Faculty of Letters of Sorbonne University and the Sorbonne’s Poetry Beyond project. Hayes will read from two of his recent poetry collections, “So to Speak (2023) and American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018). The reading will be followed by an exchange with the public.
Learn More:
To read a selection of Hayes’s poems, check out his profile on The Poetry Foundation.
The musicality of Hayes’s writing is best appreciated when his work is read aloud. You can listen to Hayes reading a sonnet from his collection “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin” here.
About the speaker:
Terrance Hayes is the author of seven poetry collections: So to Speak; American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin, a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and TS Eliot Prize; How to Be Drawn; Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Muscular Music, recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Hip Logic, winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series, and Wind in a Box. His prose collection, To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. Hayes has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and Whiting Foundation, and is a professor of English at New York University.
Important information: This event will not take place at the Library. Hayes will speak at the Sorbonne’s Amphithéâtre Farabeuf (15 rue de l’École de Médecine).
Access to this event requires purchase of a ticket through BilletWeb.fr. Click on the button below to sign up

(Hybrid) The Forgotten Soldiers of D-Day with Linda Hervieux and Raymond Kemp
2024-05-21 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
African Americans served with bravery and distinction in every conflict since the American Revolution. Yet the stories of these heroes have been consistently omitted from our collective memory. From the now-famed Tuskegee airmen to the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, D-Day’s only all-Black combat unit, modern historians have been tasked with setting the record straight.
As we approach the 80th anniversary of D-Day, join the author of Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day’s Black Heroes, Linda Hervieux, and Commissioner of the American Battle Monuments Commission Raymond Kemp as they discuss the achievements of the more than one million African American men and women who served in uniform during World War II.
About the speakers:
Linda Hervieux is a Paris-based American journalist and teacher who has lectured extensively about the forgotten African Americans of D-Day and World War II at venues including Harvard, Princeton, and the National African American Museum of History and Culture in Washington, D.C. The men of Forgotten will be featured in an episode of the upcoming National Geographic/Disney+ series Erased: WW2’s Heroes of Color.
Raymond D. Kemp, Sr., was appointed by President Biden to the American Battle Monuments Commission. During a 33-year career in the U.S. Navy, Kemp served as the first Black Fleet Master Chief for the U.S. Naval Forces Europe and Africa. He is the CEO of Kemp Solutions, a best-selling author, and executive coach. Learn more:
Tom Brokaw calls Linda’s book “utterly compelling,” and best-selling historian Douglas Brinkley writes, “All Americans should read this World War II history, which doubles as a civil rights primer, to learn the true cost of freedom.” Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (the speakers will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes. Read along with the Library! If you want to prepare ahead of this event, copies of Forgotten will be on sale one week in advance, as well as after the event. Stop by Member Services to purchase your copy. Books are generously provided by Smith&Son.
Attendees will have the opportunity to have their copy signed following the conversation.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

(Sold Out) (In-Person Only) Film Screening: Winner of the American Pavilion’s Emerging Filmmaker Showcase
2024-05-28 18:50 - 21:45 | The American Library in Paris
Join us at the Library for a celebration of cinema and emerging filmmakers.
The American Pavilion’s Emerging Filmmaker Showcase gives filmmakers an opportunity to share their work with Cannes Festival and Film Market attendees. We will screen the winners of the American Pavilion’s 2024 Showcase, announced in May following the conclusion of the Cannes festival.
Please note that this event will be in-person only.
Program:
EL PAISA
Best LGBTQ+ Showcase Film
Director: Daniel Eduvijes Carrera
UNDER THE BLUE
Best Emerging Filmmaker Showcase
Directors: Linda Ludwig, James Curle
SPEAR. SPATULA. SUBMARINE.
Best Emerging Filmmaker Documentary
Director: Shannon Morrall
OJUE
Best Emerging Filmmaker Student Film
Director: Fernando Alberto Broce
SAR: SEARCH AND RESCUE
Best Emerging Student Documentary
Director: Tristan Owen
Followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers appearing over Zoom, moderated by Ben Croll.
About the American Pavilion’s Emerging Filmmaker Showcase:
Since 1989, The American Pavilion has offered unparalleled experiences in Cannes to film students and emerging filmmakers from around the world. AmPav’s Emerging Filmmaker Showcase provides an opportunity for filmmakers to have their works seen by Cannes Festival and Film Market attendees.
About the Moderator:
Ben Croll is a Canadian critic and journalist based in Paris. He writes about film, art, and industry for the U.S. trades and covers cinema, theatre and contemporary art as a roving critic in broadcast and print. He is an on-air contributor to France24 and author of The Art of Eric Guillon.
Learn more:
Check out the website for the American Pavilion’s Emerging Filmmaker Showcase, where you will find information about finalists and winners of this award from previous years.
Important information: This event requires advance registration. The discussion will be in person only. Our partners and filmmakers will appear in the Reading Room, and the discussion will not be recorded.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.

(Hybrid) The Poetics of Loneliness with Catherine Barnett and Maureen McLane
2024-05-29 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
Catherine Barnett is celebrated for her exploration of human fragility, loneliness, and connection. In her new collection Solutions for the Problems of Bodies in Space, Barnett probes the complexities of love, loss, and deliberate living.
Maureen McLane’s new book, My Poetics, explores poems as speculative instruments and as ways of registering our very sense of being alive.
Barnett and McLane will read and discuss loneliness as a source of artistic creation and the urgency of poetry in an increasingly isolating world.
Join us as we explore the problems of being human brought into new relief through the contours of poetry.
About the speakers:
Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (2024 Graywolf); Human Hours (New York Times “Best Poetry of 2018” selection); The Game of Boxes (James Laughlin Award); and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Beatrice Hawley Award). A Guggenheim fellow, she received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, The NY Review of Books, The Yale Review, The Nation, Harper’s, and elsewhere. She teaches in NYU’s MFA Program and works as an independent editor.
Maureen N. McLane is the author of eight books of poetry, two critical monographs on British romantic poetics, an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism (My Poets), and numerous essays on romantic-era and contemporary literature and culture. Her most recent books are What You Want: poems (2023) and My Poetics (2024), an adventure in poeticriticism. She is the Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. Learn more:
Read glowing reviews of Solutions for the Problems of Bodies in Space in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Publishers Weekly.
Discover an interview with Maureen McLane in the Paris Review. Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (the speaker(s) will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

Critical Conversations Meeting Seven: Why Bad Decisions Happen to Good Groups
2024-05-30 19:00 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
Complex systems science can help us understand how individuals who are each trying to do the right thing can create collective disasters. In this session, we will explore some examples of this— including social dilemmas and local optima traps— as well as some of the often non-intuitive approaches to solving these kinds of collective-action problems.
Readings to prepare:

“What is the Tragedy of the Commons?” (video)
“The Prisoner’s Dilemma” (video)

Some details: Whether in France or America, debate is central to healthy democracy. Critical Conversations encourages both disagreement and agreement through thinking, talking, reading, and actively participating in community. Since the series’ inception in 2020, we have tackled race in America, the climate crisis, migration, and technology. Across seasons, participants have challenged themselves, their peers, and the world in which we live.
Please note, this event and all event in the Critical Conversations series require advance registration and payment. Please register here by filling out the form at the bottom of the page.
Please write to programs@americanlibraryinparis.org with any questions or thoughts.
About Critical Conversations: Whether in France or America, debate is central to healthy democracy. Critical Conversations encourages both disagreement and agreement through thinking, talking, reading, and actively participating in community. Since the series’ inception in 2020, we have tackled race in America, the climate crisis, and migration. Across seasons, participants have challenged themselves, their peers, and the world in which we live.
About the Critical Conversations 2023-24 leaders:
Prof. Lex Paulson is Executive Director of the UM6P School of Collective Intelligence (Morocco) and lectures in advocacy at Sciences Po-Paris. Trained in classics and community organizing, he served as mobilization strategist for the campaigns of Barack Obama in 2008 and Emmanuel Macron in 2017. He served as legislative counsel in the 111th U.S. Congress (2009-2011), organized on six U.S. presidential campaigns, and has worked to advance democratic innovation at the European Commission and in India, Tunisia, Egypt, Uganda, Senegal, Czech Republic and Ukraine. He is author of Cicero and the People’s Will: Philosophy and Power at the End of the Roman Republic, from Cambridge University Press, and is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance.
Prof. Mark Klein is a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, serves as a professor and Senior Scientific Advisor at the UM6P School of Collective Intelligence, and Chief Scientist at HiveWise Inc, a startup in the collective intelligence space. His research draws from such fields as artificial intelligence, social computing, economics, operations research, and complexity science to develop and evaluate computer technologies that enable greater ‘collective intelligence’ in large groups faced with complex decisions. He has over 180 publications in these areas, and has served on the editorial boards of many prominent journals and conferences related to AI and social computing.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.

(Online Only) A Personal History of Protest with Jen Silverman
2024-06-04 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
In There’s Going to Be Trouble, a young teacher seeking new beginnings arrives in Paris as the Gilet Jaune protests are gaining momentum. Drawn into a love affair and the political turmoil simultaneously, she struggles to distinguish between the overlapping passions of her new life. Accompanying this story is the discovery of a hidden family history of protest nearly fifty years prior, in the late 1960s. As secrets of political alignment and engagement come to light, our narrator discovers that the past and its consequences are nearer than she knew.
Jen Silverman presents a portrait that echoes across history, and a searching investigation into the responsibilities we hold to past, the present, and future generations.
About the speaker:
Jen Silverman (they/them) is a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. Their books include the debut novel We Play Ourselves (named one of the best books of the year by Buzzfeed; a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award), interlinked story collection The Island Dwellers (finalist for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize), and novel There’s Going to be Trouble, newly out from Random House. Their plays include Spain, Witch, Collective Rage: A Play In 5 Betties, and The Roommate, and have been produced off-Broadway, across the US, and internationally in countries including Australia, The Czech Republic, Brazil, and the UK. Silverman wrote The Miranda Obsession as a narrative podcast for Audible, starring Rachel Brosnahan; it debuted at #3 in Fiction on Audible’s weekly best-seller list and won four Signal Awards. Silverman has written on Tales of the City (Netflix) and is a writer-producer on Tokyo Vice Season 2 (Max). Silverman is a three-time MacDowell Fellow, a member of New Dramatists, a Scholar of Note at the American Library in Paris, and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim.
The Library’s Scholar of Note program is supported by The de Groot Foundation. Learn more:
Silverman recently appeared on The New Yorker Radio Hour. Listen to the interview.
A New York Times review of There’s Going to Be Trouble praises Silverman’s “exceptional talent for dramatic tension.”
Read a conversation between Silverman and their sibling, Chris Silverman, in Bomb. Important information: The discussion will be available online only via Zoom. Please sign up in advance to be emailed a Zoom link.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

Annual General Meeting
2024-06-11 19:00 - 19:30 | The American Library in Paris
The Library Director, Chairman of the Board, and Board Trustees will report on activities in 2023.
Tuesday 11 June 2024 at 19h00
In person in the Florence Gould Reading Room
Open to Library members; no RSVP required.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.

(Hybrid) Roundtable: Women and Art in Interwar France
2024-06-11 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
The newly published anthology, Impressions from Paris: Women Creatives in Interwar Years France, studies contributions of various women artists and writers who lived in Paris from 1920 through 1940. As scholar Sylvie Blum-Reid writes in her introduction, these women helped to define the cultural and artistic practices of their era, and in doing so, they “left behind traces that still reverberate today.”
The book revisits the subjects’ experiences through various lenses that include art history, gender, fashion, literary analysis, psychology, philosophy, film, and food. The Library welcomes six contributors to this anthology for a roundtable discussion on the enduring legacies of these women.
About the speakers:
Sylvie Blum-Reid is professor of French and film at the University of Florida. Her research interests include women and fashion, travel narratives, photography, cinema, culture and expatriate female artists in the interwar period. She has written Traveling in French Cinema and East-West Encounters: Franco- Asian Cinema and Literature.
Sherry Ann Buckberrough is professor (emerita) of Art History. She was Chair of the department of Art History at University of Hartford. She also chaired the Women’s Studies Program. Her published writing includes New Britain Museum of American Art, Robert Delaunay: The Discovery of Simultaneity, and she has contributed to many exhibition catalogs.
Dantzel Cenatiempo is a researcher and lecturer in French Studies at the University of Washington, with an emphasis in Gender Studies. Her research interests center on clothing and fashion but are interdisciplinary in scope, and include 19th- and 20th-century feminisms, critical race theory, and female biography. Her forthcoming article on Josephine Baker’s use of whiteface will be published in French Historical Studies.
Clara Oropeza is Professor of English Composition and Literature at Santa Barbara City College. Her research brings comparative mythology to literary studies and cultural theory. She is the author of several essays, most recent “The (Mal)Creation of Food the Monsanto Way: Returning a Mythic Sensitivity to Food Production.” She received her PhD in Comparative Mythology and Literature from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her work has been published in Minerva Rising and SageWoman. She published her first book, titledAnais Nin: A Myth of Her Own, in 2018.
Catherine Portuges is founding director of the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies, professor emerita of Comparative Literature and Film Studies, and founding curator of the Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her books include Cinemas in Transition in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989; Gendered Subjects; and Screen Memories: the Hungarian Cinema of Márta Mészáros, and she has written chapters in multiple anthologies.
Samia Spencer is a Professor Emerita of French at Auburn University in Alabama, and the recipient of many professional honors and academic distinctions, Spencer has focused her interdisciplinary research and extensive publications on the French Enlightenment, women and politics in France and Canada, la francophonie, and contemporary women, society and institutions in France and Quebec. In recognition of her work on behalf of the French language and culture, she was appointed Honorary Consul of France in Alabama by the Republic of France, and awarded the titles of Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques and Chevalier dans l’Ordre National du Mérite. She was also inducted in Quebec’s exclusive Ordre des Francophones d’Amérique. Recently, she turned her attention to the Egyptian feminist movement of the early twentieth century. Her latest anthology, Daughters of the Nile: Egyptian Women Changing their World (2016) enjoyed worldwide acclaim and was recently translated into Arabic. Learn more:
You can find a preview of Impressions from Paris on Google Books. Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (the speakers will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

(Hybrid) The Shakespeare Industry with Elizabeth Winkler
2024-06-12 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
Shakespeare’s personal biography has mystified academics, armchair fans, and experts for centuries. So what happens when a scholar, an actor, or any authority, suggests that perhaps those immortal plays weren’t all written by Shakespeare? Was the author an anonymous aristocrat? Or a spy? Perhaps a woman?
Shakespeare Was A Woman and Other Heresies by Elizabeth Winkler is an “extraordinarily brilliant” and “pleasurably naughty” (André Aciman) investigation into the Shakespeare authorship question. Winkler explores with humor, fun, and hell-bent detection, all sorts of possibilities. But that’s only part of it. Winkler does much more than suggest alternatives; she delves into why doubters have been castigated, and thrown to the literary curb. No matter what side you’re on, Shakespeare Was A Woman And Other Heresies is more than a detective book for fans of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets—it’s a fascinating and truly entertaining analysis of literary and cultural history.
“No, Elizabeth Winkler doesn’t reveal the true identity of the writer Ruth Bader Ginsburg termed “the literary genius known by the name William Shakespeare.” But she does explain how we’ve wound up with, among an army of others, a republican Shakespeare and a monarchist Shakespeare, a Shakespeare who hated his wife and one who loved his, a Shakespeare who wrote all the plays and a Shakespeare who could not write at all. Along her intrepid way, Winkler charts, with refreshing clarity, the much-contested ground underfoot, studded with flinty convictions, gnarled fictions, and a surprising number of land mines.”
—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Revolutionary and American Library in Paris Writer-in-Residence
About the speaker:
Elizabeth Winkler is a journalist and critic whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Economist, among other publications. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and her master’s in English literature from Stanford University. She lives in Washington, DC. Learn more:
Read excerpts from Winkler’s book on Martin Droeshout’s portrait of Shakespeare published in the New Statesman and Shakespeare’s reputed birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, published in the New York Times. Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (the speaker will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes. Read along with the Library! If you want to prepare ahead of this event, copies of Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies will be on sale one week in advance, as well as after the event. Stop by Member Services to purchase your copy. Books are generously provided by Smith&Son.
Attendees will have the opportunity to have their copy signed following the conversation.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

Critical Conversations Meeting Eight: Strategies for Fixing a Complex System
2024-06-13 19:00 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
It’s not enough to design a better political system: how do we get there from here? In this final session we will assemble all the lessons of the series— from history, from complex systems science, and from the toolkit of community organizing— to figure out how we could bring the dream of democracy to life.
Readings to prepare:

Donella Meadows, “Leverage Points to Intervene in a System” (article)
David Ehrlichman, “Identifying Leverage Points in a System” (article)
Marshall Ganz, “Fighting for Social Change” (video)

Some details: Whether in France or America, debate is central to healthy democracy. Critical Conversations encourages both disagreement and agreement through thinking, talking, reading, and actively participating in community. Since the series’ inception in 2020, we have tackled race in America, the climate crisis, migration, and technology. Across seasons, participants have challenged themselves, their peers, and the world in which we live.
Please note, this event and all event in the Critical Conversations series require advance registration and payment. Please register here by filling out the form at the bottom of the page.
Please write to programs@americanlibraryinparis.org with any questions or thoughts.
About Critical Conversations: Whether in France or America, debate is central to healthy democracy. Critical Conversations encourages both disagreement and agreement through thinking, talking, reading, and actively participating in community. Since the series’ inception in 2020, we have tackled race in America, the climate crisis, and migration. Across seasons, participants have challenged themselves, their peers, and the world in which we live.
About the Critical Conversations 2023-24 leaders:
Prof. Lex Paulson is Executive Director of the UM6P School of Collective Intelligence (Morocco) and lectures in advocacy at Sciences Po-Paris. Trained in classics and community organizing, he served as mobilization strategist for the campaigns of Barack Obama in 2008 and Emmanuel Macron in 2017. He served as legislative counsel in the 111th U.S. Congress (2009-2011), organized on six U.S. presidential campaigns, and has worked to advance democratic innovation at the European Commission and in India, Tunisia, Egypt, Uganda, Senegal, Czech Republic and Ukraine. He is author of Cicero and the People’s Will: Philosophy and Power at the End of the Roman Republic, from Cambridge University Press, and is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance.
Prof. Mark Klein is a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, serves as a professor and Senior Scientific Advisor at the UM6P School of Collective Intelligence, and Chief Scientist at HiveWise Inc, a startup in the collective intelligence space. His research draws from such fields as artificial intelligence, social computing, economics, operations research, and complexity science to develop and evaluate computer technologies that enable greater ‘collective intelligence’ in large groups faced with complex decisions. He has over 180 publications in these areas, and has served on the editorial boards of many prominent journals and conferences related to AI and social computing.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.

(Hybrid) On Reading with Joanna Biggs and Lauren Oyler
2024-06-18 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
In A Life of One’s Own: None Women Writers Begin Again, author Joanna Biggs’s divorce catalyzes a fascination with women across history whose artistic innovations emerged out of conflict with gender expectations. Considering the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, and Zora Neale Huston, Biggs discovers the strength and resolution that emerge when one is faced with the task of reconfiguring one’s life.
Biggs will appear in conversation with critic and novelist Lauren Oyler, who similarly engages with literary history in her project of shaping and critiquing the literary present. They will discuss the constraints and liberties of writing as women in the contemporary world, creative heritage, and their sense of responsibility toward the future.
About the speakers:
Joanna Biggs is an editor at Harper’s Magazine. A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again was a New York Times spring pick and was shortlisted for the Marfield Prize / National Award for Arts Writing. The book also earned Biggs a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. Her writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. While she now lives in New York, where she is at work on a novel, she lived in the 12ème arrondissement in 2003, when a demi-baguette cost 20 cents.
Lauren Oyler‘s essays on books and culture appear regularly in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper’s, the London Review of Books, and many other publications. She is the author of the novel Fake Accounts and an essay collection, No Judgment, which was published this year. She lives in Berlin. Learn more:
Be sure to check out the New Yorker’s review of Joanna Biggs’s recent book, A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again.
Lauren Oyler was a Scholar of Note at the Library last fall. In case you missed it, you can watch a recording of her program on our YouTube channel. Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (the speakers will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes. Read along with the Library! If you want to prepare ahead of this event, copies of A Life of One’s Own will be on sale one week in advance, as well as after the event. Stop by Member Services to purchase your copy. Books are generously provided by Smith&Son.
Attendees will have the opportunity to have their copy signed following the conversation.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.

(Hybrid) Art and Diaspora: Christian Campbell and Cornelius Tulloch in Conversation
2024-06-19 19:30 - 20:30 | The American Library in Paris
Join us for a multidisciplinary discussion featuring artist Cornelius Tulloch and 2023–24 Visiting Fellow and poet Christian Campbell. Tulloch will present his exhibition “Elements of Being,” which debuted at the 2024 Venice Biennale. This innovative piece blends evocative soundscape compositions, recordings from the Everglades, and dance interpretation to advocate for environmental equality. Many of Tulloch’s projects have been grounded in his upbringing and communities in Miami, as well as inspired by his Jamaican and African- American heritage. His work expresses the ways in which bodies exist between cultures and borders, exploring the importance of cultural identity within built environments and how space shapes culture.
Campbell will pay tribute to the artist John Beadle by taking up questions of form, aesthetics, ecology and elegy, as well as the problem of nation in the Venice Biennale. Born in Nassau to a Jamaican father and Bahamian mother, John Beadle (1964-2024) was a leading Bahamian artist working across multiple forms. Beadle received a BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and an MFA in Painting at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in addition to training in Rome, Italy. His work has been exhibited globally, including the Caribbean, the United States, Europe, Brazil, Japan and New Zealand.
This event is in partnership with The Californien Agency.
About the speakers:
Christian Campbell is the author of the acclaimed poetry collection Running the Dusk (2010), which won the UK’s Aldeburgh Prize, among other awards. Campbell studied at Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and his work has been featured and reviewed in the New York Times, the Guardian, Small Axe, the Financial Times and elsewhere. He has received awards and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, Arvon Foundation, Ford Foundation, Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and elsewhere, and delivered the annual Derek Walcott Lecture for the Nobel Laureate Festival in St. Lucia. He has contributed to books on visual artists for major exhibits on both sides of the Atlantic and won the Art Writing Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries for his work on Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Cornelius Tulloch is a Miami-based interdisciplinary artist and architect. His work transcends the boundaries of photography, fine art, and architecture. Tulloch’s work has been shown in institutions such as the Kennedy Center, Washington D.C.; NYU Center for Black Visual Culture, New York; CUE Art Foundation, New York; Locust Projects, Miami; Faena Art Project Room, Miami; and the MAXXI, Rome. He was a 2016 Presidential Scholar in the Arts, and his work is presented as part of the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Tulloch has won numerous prizes and residencies; he was named an Emerging Visionary Grantee by Instagram and the Brooklyn Museum’s Black Visionaries Program in 2022, is a two-time Oolite Ellies Award recipient, and received the 2023 YoungArts Jorge M. Perez Award.
The Visiting Fellowship is supported by The de Groot Foundation. Learn more:
Discover “Elements of Being” and watch Tulloch speak on the project here.
In an interview for the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics, Campbell states that “I don’t give voice to anyone. In fact, many give voices to me.” Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (the speaker(s) will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.
Evenings with an Author are free and open to the public (with a 10€ suggested donation)
thanks to the generous support of Gregory Annenberg Weingarten of GRoW @ Annenberg.
