Saturday, October 17, 2026
9:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. (GMT+07:00) Yogyakarta
Location: Sanata Dharma University Yogyakarta
Illiberal regimes are increasingly turning to historical memory and heroic national narratives as a source of legitimacy. The political manipulation of memory complicates the work of writers who seek in memory a source of hope, creativity and social and political emancipation. How can both modes of memory, collective and individual, be fruitfully combined? What patterns can we discern across national experiences that span the global North/South divide? Suzy Hansen, Ayu Utami, and Paulus Sarwoto will address these questions in conversation with Samanth Subramanian.
Participants
Suzy Hansen
Suzy Hansen is an American writer and journalist who has spent more than a decade based in Istanbul, reporting for The New York Times Magazine and other publications. Her first book, Notes on a Foreign Country (2018), was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and received the Overseas Press Club of America’s Cornelius Ryan Award. Her second book, From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan, was published in April 2026. She has taught writing at Princeton University, New York University, and Bard College.
Ayu Utami
Ayu Utami is an Indonesian novelist whose work explores social and political questions in contemporary Indonesia, including gender, religion, democracy, and individual freedom. She gained international recognition with her 1998 novel Saman, which examines tensions between tradition and modernity through a feminist lens. Her other works include Larung (2003) and Bilangan Fu (2008). Utami also writes as a cultural commentator and activist, and her work has been translated into multiple languages.
Paulus Sarwoto
Paulus Sarwoto is a professor of comparative literature and the director of the graduate program at Universitas Sanata Dharma, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. His research engages postcolonial comparative literature, with a particular focus on Indonesian/Javanese and English literary traditions. He is currently developing a framework for comparative literature that intersects with cultural studies in the archipelagic context. He holds a Ph.D. from Monash University (2013) and an M.A. from Louisiana State University (2004), both in comparative literature.
Samanth Subramanian
Samanth Subramanian (moderator) is a journalist whose work has appeared in the Guardian, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. His last book, A Dominant Character (2019), was one of the New York Times' Top 100 Books of 2020 and one of the Wall Street Journal's Top 10 Books the same year. His previous books include Following Fish (2010) and This Divided Island (2014), which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. His latest book, The Web Beneath the Waves (2025), describes the subsea cable network that brings us the internet, the people who lay these cables, and the people who wish to control them. He lives in London and is the managing editor of Equator.
Accessibility
Please email globaldialogues@georgetown.edu by October 9 with any accessibility requests. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill all requests made after this date.