Tuesday, April 22, 2025
9:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m. EDT
Location: Online Zoom Webinar
April 22, 2025
Has Individualism Led Us Astray?
Pankaj Mishra in Conversation with Mohsin Hamid and Ece Temelkuran
Event Series: Global Dialogues Webinars
This is the second of three webinars in advance of the Georgetown Global Dialogues (GGD) in Rome, Italy.
A celebration of the individual characterizes much of contemporary global culture and politics. Has the modern world's emphasis on individual rights helped us lose sight of our ethical duties to others? Which historical turning points have contributed to our present—and where do we go from here? Pankaj Mishra will explore these questions in conversation with Mohsin Hamid and Ece Temelkuran.
Participants
Ece Temelkuran
Ece Temelkuran is a Turkish novelist, a political thinker, and a leading analyst of the erosion of democracy and the challenge of populism on a global scale. She is the author of Together: 10 Choices for a Better Now (2021) as well as the acclaimed How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship (2019). Her novels are published in several languages. A frequent contributor to The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, and other leading outlets, she is the recipient of the PEN Translates Award and the Freedom of Thought Award from the Human Rights Association of Turkey. In 2023 she received the El Mundo Award for her body of work.
Mohsin Hamid
Mohsin Hamid is an acclaimed British Pakistani author known for creative fiction and commentary that address contemporary global issues. His recent novels include The Last White Man (2022) and Exit West (2017), which received the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. His book The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and later adapted into a successful film. Hamid’s engagement with themes of political turmoil, cultural displacement, and shifting individual and collective identities informs his influential essays on contemporary affairs in leading outlets including The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Paris Review.
Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishra (moderator) is a renowned Indian author, essayist, and literary critic with a global readership. Two of his prize-winning books, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals who Remade Asia (2012) and Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017), explore the history of colonialism and its enduring legacies in our contemporary global era. Mishra is also the author of two critically acclaimed novels: The Romantics (1999) and Run and Hide (2022). His columns and essays have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, among other outlets. Mishra is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.