Nicole Krauss + Daphna Shohamy

“Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.” —Dante Alighieri

Understanding one’s identity can take a lifetime. With reference to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Nicole Krauss’s latest novel, Forest Dark, takes readers through the thicket of human emotion and sometimes out the other side. Together with neuroscientist Daphna Shohamy, Krauss will investigate what roles memory, experience, and even trauma have on the development of the future self.

A book signing will follow the program.

Brainwave is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

About the Speakers

Nicole Krauss is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Great House, a finalist for the National Book Award and Orange Prize, and The History of Love, which won the Saroyan Prize for International Literature and France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, and was short-listed for the Orange, Medicis, and Femina Prizes. Her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. She was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2007, and named to the New Yorker‘s Twenty Under Forty list in 2010. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories, and her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Daphna Shohamy is an associate professor at Columbia University’s Mind, Brain Behavior Institute and Department of Psychology and a member of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science. Dr. Shohamy’s research combines brain imaging in healthy humans with studies of patients with brain disorders to understand the mysteries of the human mind. Her research focuses on how the brain transforms our experiences into memories and how, in turn, our memories continuously shape our decisions and actions in the future. She is the recipient of Young Investigator Awards from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the Society for Neuroeconomics, and the Association for Psychology Science.