Tuesday, June 10, 2025
10:15 a.m. - 11:15 a.m. CEST
Location: Villa Malta (Rome) La Sala
June 10, 2025
Literature between Technological Dreams and Human Frailty
Event Series: Rome, June 2025
The discoveries of science and technology have elevated the rational individual as master of nature and maker of continuous progress—what Pope Francis called the rise of the "technocratic paradigm." The literature of our time, however, has revealed that same supposedly rational individual as a gushing fountain of contradictions, prone to grandiosity, mania, self-loathing, and the will to power. As we enter the artificial intelligence era, is there actually a greater wisdom in spurning the lofty visions of technological utopias and acknowledging the tragic frailty and precarity of earthly existence?
Participants
Jennifer Szalai
Jennifer Szalai has been the nonfiction critic for the New York Times since 2018. She was previously an editor at the New York Times Book Review, assigning reviews of both fiction and nonfiction. She has written for various publications, including Harper’s Magazine, the Economist, and the London Review of Books. Before joining the New York Times in 2012, she was a senior editor at Harper’s, where she was in charge of the reviews section. She has degrees from the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics.
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, New York Times, and Paris Review.
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, 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.
Accessibility
Please email globaldialogues@georgetown.edu by June 2 with any accessibility requests. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill all requests made after this date.