Students, faculty and the wider Middletown community met Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri’s recent visit to campus with a great deal of enthusiasm. The author of “The Namesake” and “Interpreter of Maladies” conducted an afternoon question-and-answer session, ate dinner with students and faculty, and gave a reading of her work to a packed CFA Cinema.

Missed Lahiri’s lecture? Hear what the lucky few have to say about the author’s appearance at the University:

“This event brought together in the audience a remarkably broad group of students, faculty members, alumni and members of the larger community, and we are grateful to the Jakobsons for enabling us to bring Jhumpa Lahiri to campus [The event was sponsored by Wesleyan Writing Program and the Endowment for the Joan Jakobson Visiting Writer].”

—rofessor Anne Greene, director of Writing Programs

“Although I love Lahiri’s work [and] ”Interpreter of Maladies“ is one of my favorite books, I have to wonder why certain work becomes admired and why other work is deemed amateur and culturally specific. Lahiri’s claim to fame is her subject matter, but that’s not why she is great. She could write about a white upper-middle class family’s trip to McDonald’s and make it interesting, timeless, and universal, whatever those terms mean.”
—laire Greenwood ’09

“The way she read her story was very frank and without dramatic flourishes, but I really got into it. I was upset when she stopped reading it—I wanted to know the ending!”
—mily Troll ’10

“I was very sympathetic to her assertion in the question-and-answer after her reading that she’s not writing social criticism into her stories. She said that she writes about problems of assimilation without challenging the idea of assimilation itself. I thought the story she read at the cinema was deeply resonant, exploring issues of expectations, family, position and social alienation.”
—rofessor Charles Baraw, visiting assistant professor of English