Viet Thanh Nguyen: “On Undefeated Despair: Writing Inside Empire” — 10th Sissy Farenthold Endowed Lecture

Frances Tarlton “Sissy” Farenthold Endowed Lecture Series in Peace, Social Justice and Human Rights | Presented in partnership with the Rothko Chapel

Please join us for the tenth annual Sissy Farenthold Endowed Lecutre in Peace, Social Justice and Human Rights, which will be presented by Pulitizer Prize–winning author Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen. Nguyen is University Professor and the Aerol Arnold Chair of English at the University of Southern California. His celebrated work includes To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other (Harvard University Press, 2025), A Man of Two Faces (Grove Press, 2023), The Refugees (Grove Press, 2017), and The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015), which received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The lecture will take place at the University of Texas at Austin on the evening of March 26, 2026. The event is co-sponsored by the Plan II Honors Program, the Joynes Reading Room, the New Writers Project, and the Michener Center for Writers.

Additional details will be available soon. Please check back for updates.