Viet Thanh Nguyen: “On Undefeated Despair: Writing Inside Empire” — 10th Annual 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

The tenth annual lecture was delivered by Pulitzer 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 took place in the Avaya Auditorium at the University of Texas at Austin on the evening of March 26, 2026. The event was co-presented by the Rothko Chapel and co-sponsored by the Joynes Reading Room (Plan II Honors Program), the Michener Center for Writers. and the New Writers Project. Following the lecture, Nguyen was in conversation with Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Iris Howard Regents Professor of English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, who also moderated the audience Q&A.