Description:

Ayad Akhtar. “Conversation with Playwright, Ayad Akhtar”
Moderated by Professor Rajeev Kinra, Associate Professor, Dept. of History; Director, Asian Studies Program; Co-Director, Northwestern Global Humanities Institute

Join Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and novelist in conversation with Rajeev Kinra. The conversation will range across identity politics, the immigrant experience and what it means to be an American citizen with ancestral and cultural ties to Asia and the Middle East.

Ayad Akhtar was born in New York City and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is a novelist and author of American Dervish, published in over 20 languages worldwide. His play Disgraced won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, ran on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre, and was nominated for the 2015 Tony Award for Best Play. His plays The Who & The What and The Invisible Hand received Off-Broadway runs and are currently being produced around the world. Akhtar was listed as the most produced playwright for the 2015/16 Season by American Theatre magazine. As a screenwriter, he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay for The War Within. He has received fellowships from MacDowell, Djerassi, the Sundance Institute, Ucross, and Yaddo, where he serves as a Board Director. He is also a Board Trustee at PEN/America and New York Theatre Workshop. Akhtar is currently the Resident Playwright with Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater.

Rajeev Kinra specializes in South Asian cultural and intellectual history, especially that of the Mughal Empire and the early modern Indo-Persian world, ca. 16th-19th centuries, including the early phase of European -- especially British -- colonial expansion in the Indian Ocean world. In addition to teaching courses on South, Central, and West Asian cultural and political history, he also teaches Part One of the History Department’s Global History sequence, and a popular seminar on the historical context(s) of the Indiana Jones movie series.

Co-sponsored by: Arts Circle and Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

Lunch provided.