EVENT DETAILS

Conversations on Writing and Public Life presents "Commentaries and Controversies: The Art of the Hot Topic Op-Ed" with Saree Makdisi and Erwin Chemerinsky

Join the Department of History and the Literary Journalism Program for a conversation on writing in the public sphere. Saree Makdisi (UCLA Comparative Literature) and Erwin Chemerinsky (Dean, UCI School of Law) in conversation with Nick Goldberg (Editor of the LA Times' editorial page). Introductory remarks by Howard Gillman (UCI Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor). For more information or for disability accommodations, contact Patricia Pierson at piersonp@uci.edu or (949) 824-6876. Free and open to the public. Parking is available at the UCI Student Center or on Mesa Drive. Presented with support from the Office of the Provost.

Twitter: @UCILitJ.

Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Humanities Gateway 1010
UC Irvine School of Humanities

Is there an art to the writing of the hot topic op-ed? How should writers, editors, and
the reading public negotiate difficult conversations on politics, the Middle East, the
Supreme Court, or controversial elections? Join the Department of History and the
Literary Journalism Program for a conversation on writing in the public sphere with
Saree Makdisi (UCLA Comparative Literature) and Erwin Chemerinsky (Dean, UCI
School of Law), moderated by Nicholas Goldberg (Editor of the LA Times's editorial
page).

About the Speakers:

ERWIN CHEMERINSKY:
Erwin Chemerinsky is the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and
Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at the University of California,
Irvine School of Law, with a joint appointment in Political Science. His areas of
expertise are constitutional law, federal practice, civil rights and civil liberties, and
appellate litigation. He is the author of seven books, most recently, The
Conservative Assault on the Constitution (October 2010, Simon & Schuster), and
nearly 200 articles in top law reviews. He frequently argues cases before the
nation’s highest courts, and also serves as a commentator on legal issues for
national and local media.

SAREE MAKDISI:
Saree Makdisi received his PhD from the Program in Literature at Duke University
in 1993. He is the author of Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the
Culture of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 1998), William Blake and the
Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Palestine
Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (WW Norton, 2008, updated and with a new
foreword by Alice Walker, 2010), and the co-editor, with Felicity Nussbaum, of The
Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West (Oxford University
Press, 2008). He is also the Editor of Nineteenth-Century Literature. His primary
area of research is the culture of modernity, especially as it was consolidated in
Britain during the Romantic period, and as it developed in relation to the changing
dynamics of British imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In addition to his work on British literature and imperial culture, Professor Makdisi
has also written extensively on the twentieth and twenty-first century consequences
of eighteenth and nineteenth century imperialism. He has been especially
interested in the cultural politics of the contemporary Arab world, about which he
has written a number of articles for such scholarly journals as boundary 2 and
Critical Inquiry, as well as edited volumes. In the spirit of speaking not only to a
relatively narrow circle of scholars sharing a common expertise but to a broader
public as well, he has written a number of articles on contemporary events which
have appeared in such venues as The Los Angeles Times, The Nation and the
London Review of Books, and have been widely translated into other languages.

NICHOLAS GOLDBERG:
Editor of the Editorial Pages, Los Angeles Times. Nicholas Goldberg joined the
Los Angeles Times in 2002 as editor of the op-ed page and the Sunday Opinion
section. He became deputy editor of the editorial pages in 2008 and a year later
was named editor of the editorial pages, a position that gives him overall
responsibility for The Times' daily report.

He is a former reporter and editor at Newsday in New York, where he worked as
Middle East bureau chief from 1995 to 1998. In that job, he covered the Israeli-
Palestinian peace process; presidential elections in Iran; arms monitoring in Iraq;
famine in Sudan; civil war in Algeria; war in Lebanon and the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism in Saudi Arabia.

Goldberg also covered the 1992 presidential campaign of Bill Clinton, and as
statehouse bureau chief in New York, the administrations of Governors Mario
Cuomo and George Pataki. He also served as Sunday business editor for
Newsday, which he joined in 1983.

Goldberg's writing has been widely published including in the Los Angeles Times,
New Republic, New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Nation, Sunday Times of London,
Washington Monthly, American Lawyer and Conde Nast Traveler, among others.