Susan Suleiman PhD ’69 is C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her research and teaching, for which she has received numerous awards and fellowships, focuses on the literature of France. Among her books are The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (1983), Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (1990), Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (1994), the memoir Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (1996), and Crises of Memory and the Second World War (2006). Her most recent book, The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France (Yale, 2017), considers Irène Némirovsky, a French novelist of the 1930s who languished in obscurity after World War II until her posthumous novel Suite française appeared in 2004 and was widely acclaimed, and published in more than thirty languages. Prof. Suleiman will engage in a conversation on time, memory, identity, and other topics with Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of Harvard GSD and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design, whose initiative “Sharing One Harvard,” brings faculty from diverse schools into the GSD.
