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Fiction as History, History as Fiction: a Novel about Nazi Looted Art

April 15 @ 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm

Fiction as History, History as Fiction: a Novel about Nazi Looted Art

Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor 2023-2024

Brett Ashley Kaplan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

 

What happens when different displaced people come into convergence with each other? This talk will present a novel grounded in history that tackles this and other questions around loss, looting, and trauma.

Vandervelde Downs (a novel) uses a multivocal, braided structure to explore what happens when a famous painting by Velázquez is looted from a Jewish family in Vienna and may (or may not) have been hidden in a Vietnamese Refugee Center in England.  Loss, displacement, and trauma arising from the Holocaust, the Kindertransports, and the Vietnamese Refugee crisis are put into fantastical conjunction through a fictionalized version of the portrait as Poppy Solomon, Art Crime Agent Maxwell Johnson, and painter Mai Le Duong try to recover the invaluable canvas stolen from Poppy’s family. Poppy has inherited survivor guilt, Max has a lot to live up to in his aunt (a hero who helped save looted art), Mai struggles with the loss of her homeland, and the Nazi-sympathizing Bertrand Vandervelde turns out to be one of the most mixed-up art looters you can possibly imagine.

 

Please note event date has changed to April 15th.

A light reception will follow the lecture.

In-person event.
UNC Sonja Haynes Stone Center, Hitchcock Room
Directions & Parking in Bell Tower Deck ($1 after 5pm)
Free and open to the public
UNC Heel LIfe CLE credit will be available

Details

Date:
April 15
Time:
5:30 pm - 7:00 pm

Venue

Sonja Haynes Stone Center, Hitchcock Multipurpose Room
150 South Road
Chapel Hill, NC 27514 United States
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Phone
9199629001
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