Isabel Allende, in Conversation

Literary legend, feminist icon, and social activist Isabel Allende will be joined by Dean Sara Guyer of the Division of Arts & Humanities for a conversation that spans Allende’s lifetime of work, from her new novel My Name is Emilia del Valle to creating art in authoritarian times. This event is presented by the Arts Research Center in celebration of 25 years as an incubator, nexus, & advocate of the arts on & off campus.

A native of Chile, Allende was forced into exile following the assassination of her uncle, President Salvador Allende. Since then, she has written over 27 books, including The House of the Spirits, Eva Luna, Daughter of Fortune, Ines of My Soul, Island Beneath the Sea, Maya’s Notebook, The Japanese Lover, Ripper, and In the Midst of Winter. Allende’s non-fiction books include the memoirs Paula and The Sum of Our Days, as well as The Soul of a Woman, a meditation on Allende’s feminist roots. Chosen as one of Amazon’s best non-fiction books of the year, The Soul of a Woman is a work that Allende hopes will “light the torches of our daughters and granddaughters with mine.” Her book, The Wind Knows My Name was named to NPR‘s Books We Love.

Allende is the founder of the Isabel Allende Foundation, which promotes and preserves the fundamental rights of women and children to be empowered and protected. She has received fifteen honorary doctorates, and has received the PEN Center Lifetime Achievement Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama awarded Allende the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, and in 2018 she received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.

Sara Guyer is the Irving and Jean Stone Dean of Arts & Humanities and Professor of English at UC Berkeley. Her term as Dean began in September 2021 following a career devoted to advancing the humanities, with special focus on public-private coalitions, innovative faculty research programs, the public humanities, and inclusive collaborations across the globe. During her term as dean, Arts & Humanities undergraduate enrollments at Berkeley have reached their highest level in fifteen years, and she has established new clusters of excellence in the Interdisciplinary Arts, African Humanities, and Latinx Cultural Expression. Guyer is director of the World Humanities Report, a large-scale research project with over a dozen teams on six continents and former president of the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes.

Guyer’s scholarship focuses on the legacies of romanticism, holocaust studies, critical theory, and the humanities itself. She is the author of Romanticism after Auschwitz and Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism, and is coeditor of the book series Lit Z. Guyer holds a PhD in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley, an MA in Philosophy & Literature from the University of Warwick (UK), and a BA in English and American Literature and European Cultural Studies from Brandeis University.