Post 9/11 Literary Cultural Exchange and Engagement: PEN World Voices Online Multimedia Collection

Material Description

Founded in 2005 by former PEN America President Salman Rushdie in response to growing American cultural isolationism, PEN World Voices Festival is the U.S.'s first international writer's festival. Over the past decade, PWVF has provided a platform and the intellectual space for American artists, writers, cultural figures, and leaders in journalism, technology, publishing, and policy to openly discuss with the world's foremost writers and thinkers serious issues facing the U.S. and the world in the years following September 11. Since its inception over a decade ago, PWVF has recorded over 523 events that contain historically relevant primary sources capturing the raw and unedited conversations, discussions, and lectures of the World's foremost contemporary writers and thinkers, including, Chimamanda Ngotzi Adichie, Umberto Eco, Walter Mosley, Juan Felipe Herrera, Paul Krugman, and Ludmila Ulitskaya as well as Nobel Laureates Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, Svetlana Alexievitch, Mario Vargas Llosa, Herta Müller, and Orhan Pamuk among many others. These remarkable events, developed in collaboration with dozens of New York City's most reputable and relevant academic and cultural institutions cover universal themes of national historic importance including, but not limited to: Journalism in the Information Age; the affects of new technology and social media on reporting in war time; Effects of government surveillance on artistic intend and intellectual freedom; Religions role in the political life of the US as compared to other regions; the “deforming” pressure of incarceration on the individual, community and nation; Cultural Responsibility of Writers; the enlightenment ideal of tolerance in aggravated environments fueled by religious extremism and political demagoguery; and Translation and Cultural Isolationism in an increasingly polarized nation and global community. The materials will provide scholars, historians, and students of a vast array of humanities disciplines with original source materials unavailable elsewhere.