Featured Speakers

Peter Cole

Peter Cole's recent books include The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (a book of nonfiction, with Adina Hoffman), and Things on Which I've Stumbled, a collection of poems. His many other translations from Hebrew and Arabic include The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 and Taha Muhammad Ali's So What: New & Selected Poems. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN Translation Award for Poetry, a TLS Translation Prize, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In 2007 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Joan Breton Connelly

Joan Breton Connelly is professor of classics and art history at New York University. A field archaeologist, she has excavated in Greece, Kuwait, and Cyprus, where she directs the NYU Yeronisos Island Excavations. Her book Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece was named a "Notable Book of the Year" by the New York Times Book Review. Connelly is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship for her work on Athenian myth, cult, and image, topics explored in her forthcoming book Parthenon Revisited. She served on the Cultural Property Advisory Committee of the U.S. Department of State, from 2003-11.

Stuart E. Eizenstat

Stuart E. Eizenstat is a partner at Covington & Burling LLP. During a decade and a half of public service in three U.S. administrations, Ambassador Eizenstat has held a number of key senior positions, including chief White House domestic policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981); U.S. ambassador to the European Union, under secretary of commerce for international trade, under secretary of state for economic, business, and agricultural affairs, and deputy secretary of the treasury in the Clinton administration (1993-2001). Much of the interest in providing belated justice for victims of the Holocaust and other victims of Nazi tyranny during World War II was the result of his leadership in the Clinton administration as special representative of the president and secretary of state on Holocaust-era Issues. He successfully negotiated major agreements with the Swiss, Germans, Austrian and French, and other European countries, covering restitution of property, payment for slave and forced laborers, recovery of looted art, bank accounts, and payment of insurance policies.

Heid Erdrich

A member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibway, Heid Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota. She earned degrees from Dartmouth College and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Erdrich has received fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, as well as awards from the Loft Literary Center, the Archibald Bush Foundation, and elsewhere. She has four times been nominated for the Minnesota Book Award, which she won in 2009 for National Monuments (Michigan State University Press). Her other books include The Mother's Tongue (Earthworks, Salt Publishing UK) and, her most recent collection, Cell Traffic (Arizona).

Nicole Krauss

Nicole Krauss is the author of the international bestsellers Great House, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Orange Prize, and The History of Love, which won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and France's Prix du Meilleur Livre ?tranger, and was short-listed for the Orange, Médicis, and Femina prizes. Her first novel, Man Walks into a Room, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for First Fiction. In 2007, she was selected as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists, and in 2010 the New Yorker named her one of the twenty best writers under forty. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Best American Short Stories, and her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages.

Claire Lyons

Claire Lyons is acting senior curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where she organized the exhibitions "The Chimaera of Arezzo" (2009) and "The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire" (2010). She is visiting assistant professor at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, and an editorial board member of the International Journal of Cultural Property, Journal of the History of Collections, and the American Journal of Archaeology. She is currently preparing the exhibition "Sicily: Art and Invention between Greece and Rome."

Jonathan Petropoulos

Jonathan Petropoulos is the John V. Croul Professor of European History and the chair of the department of history at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California. Previously, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he began working on the subject of Nazi art looting and restitution in 1983. He is the author of Art as Politics in the Third Reich; The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany; and Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany. He has also appeared in more than a dozen documentary films and helped organize art exhibitions, including "Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany," which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991.

Elie Wiesel

Born in Sighet, Romania, in 1927, Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel has published over fifty-seven books, including Night, his seminal work based on his experience as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. In addition to his literary stature, Wiesel is well known for his political activism, his humanitarian work, and his work in academia. He has advocated for victimized Jews across the globe, as well as for those who have suffered under South African apartheid and the military junta in Argentina. Wiesel has also been an active voice advocating on behalf of the victims of genocide in Armenia, Bosnia, Sudan, and elsewhere. In addition to winning the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1986, Wiesel has been awarded a United States Congressional Gold Medal, a Medal of Liberty, and a presidential Medal of Freedom. He is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, a position he has held since 1976.