This season's Conversations from the Cullman Center talk about Radioactivity, Broken America, and Black Gotham

Each year, The New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers appoints up to 15 Fellows for a nine-month term at the Library.  Conversations from the Cullman Center presents new work by current and former Cullman Center Fellows and illuminates the ways in which scholars and writers use the Library's collections. A list of former Fellows and their topics can be found here.

Friday, January 21, 7:30 pm

Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout

Celeste Bartos Forum, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street

SOLD OUT; press tickets available

Nobel Laureate and current National Cancer Institute Director Harold Varmus talks with artist and author Lauren Redniss (2008-2009 Cullman Fellow) about science, art, process, discovery, and the current New York Public Library exhibition of Redniss' work, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout. The exhibition will be installed at the Library until April 17. A website connected to the exhibition, designed by Redniss and her students at Parsons The New School for Design, is at http://exhibitions/nypl.org/radioactive.

This program is co-presented with Science & the Arts, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Wednesday, January 26, 7 pm

Does Philosophy Still Matter?

Tishman Auditorium, The New School, 66 West 12th Street

Free; reservation required; e-mail molok819@newschool.edu

A distinguished panel that includes documentary filmmaker Astra Taylor (Zizek!, Examined Life); former Executive Editor of The Economist and author Anthony Gottlieb (A Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance); author Simon Critchley (The Book of Dead Philosophers); philosopher and civil rights activist Cornel West (Race Matters); and  intellectual historian James Miller (The Passion of Michel Foucault) – moderated by Harper's editor Lewis Lapham - discuss the present state of philosophy in light of Miller’s new book Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche. Miller worked on the book while he was a Fellow at the Cullman Center in 2006-2007.

This program is co-sponsored with The New School University.

Thursday, February 3, 7 pm

The Empty Family: A Conversation with Colm Tóibín

South Court Auditorium, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street

$25; $15 students/seniors/Friends of The NYPL/Donors; purchase tickets here.

Colm Tóibín (Cullman Center Fellow 2000-2001), the author most recently of the novel Brooklyn, talks about his collection of short stories, The Empty Family.

Tuesday, March 1, 7 pm

Maya Jasanoff and Jill Lepore

South Court Auditorium, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street

Free; reservations required; make reservations here.

Maya Jasanoff  (Cullman Center Fellow 2006-2007) discusses her new book, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, with Jill Lepore, a New Yorker writer and the author most recently of The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History.

Tuesday, March 15, 7 pm

Karen Russell and Wells Tower

Celeste Bartos Forum, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street

Free; reservations required; make reservations here.

Karen Russell (Cullman Center Fellow 2009-2010) named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists in 2007, talks about her novel Swamplandia! with Wells Tower (Cullman Center Fellow 2009-2010), the author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned and winner of The New York Public Library’s 2010 Young Lions’ Fiction Award.  

Wednesday, March 30, 7 pm

Carla Peterson and Annette Gordon-Reed

South Court Auditorium, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street

Free; reservations required; make reservations here.

Carla Peterson discusses her book Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth Century New York City with the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed (Cullman Center Fellow 2010-2011), author of The Hemingses of Monticello.

Wednesday, April 6 and Wednesday, April 13 and Wednesday, April 13, 7 pm (a two-part lecture series)

The Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Lectures in American Civilization and Government

Broken America with George Packer   

South Court Auditorium, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street

Free; reservations required; make reservations here.

Two lectures by the author and New Yorker writer George Packer on the decline of American institutions, from government and business to the media.

Monday, May 9, 7 pm

David Bezmozgis and FrancineProse

South Court Auditorium, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street

Free; reservations required; make reservations here.

David Bezmozgis (Cullman Center Fellow 2010-2011), author of the story collection Natasha, and Francine Prose (Cullman Center Fellow 1999-2000), whose most recent book is Anne Frank, talk about their new novels The Free World and My New American Life, respectively.

The Cullman Center is made possible by a generous endowment from Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman in honor of Brooke Russell Astor, with major support provided by Mrs. John L., Weinberg, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Estate of Charles J. Liebman, John and Constance Birkelund, The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, and additional gifts from The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Mel and Lois Tukman, Helen and Roger Alcaly, The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, William W. Karatz, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, Mary Ellen von der Heyden, Merilee and Roy Bostock, Lybess Sweezy and Ken Miller, and Cullman Center Fellows.

About the New York Public Library

The New York Public Library was created in 1895 with the consolidation of the private libraries of John Jacob Astor and James Lenox with the Samuel Jones Tilden Trust. The Library provides free and open access to its physical and electronic collections and information, as well as to its services. Its renowned research collections are located in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street; The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem; and the Science, Industry and Business Library at 34th Street and Madison Avenue. Eighty-seven branch libraries provide access to circulating collections and a wide range of other services in neighborhoods throughout the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island. Research and circulating collections combined total more than 50 million items. In addition, each year the Library presents thousands of exhibitions and public programs, which include classes in technology, literacy, and English for speakers of other languages. All in all The New York Public Library serves more than 17 million patrons who come through its doors annually and millions more around the globe who use its resources at www.nypl.org.

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Contact: Gayle Snible | 212.592.7008 | gsnible@nypl.org