The Humanities Division and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz invite you to join us for the Hayden V. White Distinguished Annual Lecture, featuring Juan Gabriel Vásquez. Guests who attend in person are invited to join us for a reception with light refreshments and beverages at 5:00 p.m.

In 1935, as Europe witnessed the rise of fascism, Paul Valéry tried to identify in a lecture the origins of the crisis. Things were better, he said, when people were able to understand their present moment as the result of past events, when “continuity reigned in the minds”. In this lecture, Juan Gabriel Vásquez will discuss why that sense of continuity with the past is in fact indispensable, for individuals and societies alike, and he will suggest that fiction –the literary imagination of the historical past– might be uniquely adept at restoring it when it is broken.

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Juan Gabriel Vásquez is the author of numerous novels, including The Shape of the Ruins, which was shortlisted for the 2019 International Man Booker Prize; Reputations, a New York Times Best Book of the Year; and The Sound of Things Falling, a National Bestseller and winner of the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Vásquez’s novels have been published in twenty-five languages worldwide. After sixteen years living in France, Belgium, and Spain, he now resides between Bogotá and New York City.

The Hayden V. White Distinguished Annual Lecture Series is made possible by the support of the Thomas H. and Josephine Baird Memorial Fund, an endowment that supports yearly lectures relevant to historical and cultural theory, and to ensure that Hayden White’s legacy and intellectual spirit is honored and sustained.