Book Talk | Wendy Lesser | Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times

Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Wednesday, September 30 (5:30-7:00 PM) for an event with Wendy Lesser. She will discuss her new book, Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times, with Noah Isenberg and Rosanna Warren.

Wendy Lesser is the founding and current editor of The Threepenny Review, and the author of twelve nonfiction books and one novel. Her last book, entitled Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery, came out from Farrar Straus & Giroux in May 2020. She has received awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and many other institutions, and she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences as well as of the New York Institute for the Humanities. Her journalistic writing about literature, dance, film, and music has appeared in a number of periodicals in America and abroad. Born in California and educated at Harvard, Cambridge, and UC Berkeley, Lesser now divides her time between Berkeley and New York.

Noah Isenberg is a film historian and holds the Charles Sapp Centennial Professorship at the University of Texas at Austin, where from 2019 to 2023 he was Chair of Radio-Television-Film. Currently, he serves as Executive Director of the University of Texas’s two study-away programs in Los Angeles (UTLA) and in New York City (UTNY). He’s the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller We’ll Always Have ‘Casablanca’: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie (W. W. Norton, 2017; paperback 2018), which was named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times and was selected as a Best Summer Book of 2017 by the Financial Times and a Best Film Book of 2017 by the Scotland Herald. The British edition appeared from Faber & Faber in 2017, and a Faber paperback followed in 2020 (listed among the Times of London’s “Best Paperbacks”). More recently, he edited and introduced the anthology Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna (translated by Shelley Frisch), which appeared from Princeton University Press in 2021, and a paperback edition followed in 2022. It was selected by playwright Tom Stoppard as a 2021 Book of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement and was long-listed for the 2022 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. His new book, a cultural history of Some Like It Hot, is due out next year from W. W. Norton and, in the UK, from Faber & Faber. He’s currently completing a short interpretive biography of Wilder for Yale University Press. He is a regular fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and, in 2015-2016, he received an inaugural NEH Public Scholar research award. In spring 2022, with the support of the Warren Skaaren Film Research Endowment, he served as a faculty fellow at the Harry Ransom Center.

Rosanna Warren is an American poet and scholar. She studied painting and comparative literature at Yale University, graduating in 1976. After several years of writing, painting, and odd jobs in Paris, Venice, and New York, she attended the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, receiving her M.A. degree in 1980. She taught for one year in the Department of English at Vanderbilt University and then joined the faculty of Boston University, where she taught in the departments of English and Modern Foreign Languages until her departure in 2011. She also taught for several years in several medium security prisons in Massachusetts and published pamphlets of poems by prisoners. Since 2012, she has been the Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her book of criticism, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, came out in 2008. Her most recent books of poems are Departure (2003), Ghost in a Red Hat (2011), So Forth (2020), and Hindsight (2025). In 1995, Oxford University Press published the verse translation of Euripides’ The Suppliant Women she composed with Stephen Scully, and her anthology of essays on translation, The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field, appeared in 1989. She is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the New England Poetry Club, among others. She was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.