On September 10, Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts presents the first event in the 2024-25 Atelier@Large conversation series that brings guest artists and intellectuals to campus for public discussions on the challenges they face in making art in the modern world. Princeton’s Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Princeton Atelier Paul Muldoon will be joined by Princeton scholar, translator and biographer David Bellos; songwriter Bridget Kearney, a multi-instrumentalist, producer, and founding member of the band Lake Street Dive; and novelist and journalist Dinaw Mengestu. The event begins at 4:30 p.m. in Richardson Auditorium on Princeton’s campus and is free and open to the public; no tickets are required. Richardson Auditorium is an accessible venue with assistive listening devices available. Guests in need of other access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.
The Princeton Atelier, currently directed by Muldoon, was founded in 1994 by Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, at the University. The Atelier, celebrating is 30th year this season, brings together professional artists from different disciplines and Princeton students to create new work in the context of a semester-long course that culminates in the public presentation of that new work. Recent artists have included Stew, Laurie Anderson, the improv group Baby Wants Candy, and the Wakka Wakka Puppet Theatre. The Atelier@Large series, established in 2021, is an extension of the Princeton Atelier that brings guest artists and intellectuals to campus to speak on art’s role in the modern world. Guests in the series have included Hernan Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Joy Harjo, Sarah Hart, Jennifer Homans, Andrey Kurkov, Alan Lightman, Michael J. Love, Jonathan Majors, Kyle Marshall, Lorrie Moore, Darryl (Run DMC) McDaniels, Anais Mitchell, Suzanne Nossel, Lynn Nottage, Claudia Rankine, Cara Reichel, and Tom Stoppard. This year’s series is cosponsored by Labyrinth Books, and recent books by some of the guests will be available for purchase.
“Being an artist is tough enough at the best of times,” says Muldoon, “but it’s particularly difficult just now. Artists are coming under pressure from numerous orthodoxies to both left and right, as to what they must or must not do. Most insidious, perhaps, is the form of self-censorship that has artists second guessing themselves. In addition to honoring some of our finest minds, The Atelier@Large series provides a rare enough forum in which some of these ideas may be aired.”
David Bellos. Photo courtesy of David Bellos
David Bellos is a professor of French and Italian and comparative literature and director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton. He earned his doctorate in French literature from Oxford University (U.K.) and taught subsequently at Edinburgh, Southampton and Manchester before coming to Princeton in 1997. He worked first in 19th-century studies, particularly on the novel and the history of literary ideas and then developed interests in post-war French writing and film. He is the translator and biographer of Georges Perec and has also written major studies of Jacques Tati and Romain Gary. A well-known translator, he is the author of an irreverent introduction to translation studies, Is That A Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (2011). In 2017, The Novel of the Century. The Amazing Adventure of Les Misérables, marked a return to 19th-century studies in a trans-national perspective. His latest book, Who owns this sentence? A history of copyrights and wrongs, co-authored with Alexandre Montagu, was published by Mountain Lion Press in London and W.W. Norton in New York in January 2024. He has won the French-American Foundation’s translation prize (1988), the Prix Goncourt de la Biographie (1994), the Man Booker International translator’s award (2005), and the Book Award of the American Library in Paris, and he holds the rank of officier in the Orde national des Arts et des Lettres. He was the recipient of Princeton’s 2019 Howard T. Berhman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities. He is currently translating Victor Hugo’s last novel, Quatrevingt-treize, and is working on a popular history of the French language.
Bridget Kearney. photo credit: Rodneri
Bridget Kearney is an Iowa-born, Brooklyn-based songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer. A founding member of the band Lake Street Dive, she has performed at venues including Radio City Music Hall, The Hollywood Bowl, Red Rocks Amphitheater, and The White House South Lawn, and has appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, and Conan. Her third solo album, Comeback Kid, will come out later this year on Keeled Scales. In 2020 she released the album Still Flying on Verve Forecast, written and recorded in Accra, Ghana, a collaboration with Ghanaian artists Aaron Bebe Sukura and Stevo Atambire, as well as Los Angeles-based producer Benjamin Lazar Davis. She also performs as a side person with various artists, having recently played bass with pop singer Ed Sheeran and folk singer Aoife O’Donovan. Kearney holds a B.M. from the New England Conservatory in Jazz Studies (bass) and a B.A. from Tufts University in English.
Dinaw Mengestu. Photo credit: Anne-Emmanuelle Robicquet
Dinaw Mengestu is the author of three novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: All Our Names (Knopf, 2014), How To Read the Air (Riverhead, 2010), and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead, 2007). A native of Ethiopia who came with his family to the United States at the age of two, Mengestu is also a freelance journalist who has reported about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo. His articles and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Jane, and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, Guardian First Book Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He was also included in The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010. He is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program at Bard College.
Paul Muldoon is the Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities at Princeton, as well as the founding chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. As an internationally renowned Irish poet, Muldoon has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War.” Muldoon won the Pulitzer Prize for his ninth collection of poems, Moy Sand and Gravel (2002). His 15th volume of poems, Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, will be published in September 2024 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
The series will continue with the following events:
- October 8 with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker and opera composer Kamala Sankaram
- November 12 with writer Jennifer Finney Boylan, composer/director/choreographer Meredith Monk, and Russian poet Maria Stepanova with translator Sasha Dugdale
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Princeton Atelier, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.
