This event is part of the Levan Institute for the Humanities' “On Writing” series, conversations aiming to answer questions about how writing matters, now. This conversation will feature Daniel Immerwahr (Northwestern University) and Antonio Coronel Elefano (USC), hosted by Sarah Mesle (USC). Organized in partnership with the Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture. Registration is required. REGISTER

Description: We’re writing in a moment when clear standards of evidence are more important than ever. But knowing that evidence matters doesn’t mean it’s easy for writers to understand how to use it — especially when political and technological changes pit different kinds of arguments and evidence against each other. So, it’s more important than ever to ask: how do you know that a claim is true? How do you prove it? This event brings together writers with training in different fields — legal studies, history, creative writing, journalism, and literary studies — to ask: for you, what kinds of evidence count as proof? How do you make your case in a courtroom, in literary criticism, in history scholarship, in a book review, in a novel? We’ll talk about our own experiences of finding, arranging, and evaluating evidence — and we’ll share our ideas about explaining different forms of evidence to students.

Antonio Elefano joined USC’s Writing faculty in the fall of 2014. Before coming to USC, he was a corporate litigator in New York City and a writing fellow/visiting assistant professor at the University of Houston. A graduate of Yale Law School and the author of Legal Writing for the Undergraduate from Wolters Kluwer/Aspen, he is the Writing Program’s legal writing specialist, teaching WRIT 340: Moot Court, WRIT 320: Competitive Moot Court (focused on oral argumentation), WRIT 340: Legal Writing and WRIT 440: Advanced Legal Writing. He is the faculty advisor for Southern California Moot Court (which in 2024 was named the top school in the country in appellate brief writing and in 2025 won the national championship in brief writing), Phi Alpha Delta (USC’s pre-law fraternity), and the Survivor Support Community at USC. In 2024, he was awarded the USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching, the highest honor for teaching given at USC. That same year, he received his second USC Mentoring Award for Mentoring Undergraduates (his first was in 2019). Elefano is also a fiction writer whose stories have been published in The Los Angeles Review, 236 and The Journal. In August 2014, his story “Italy” was one of Buzzfeed’s “29 Short Stories You Need to Read in Your Twenties.”  

Daniel Immerwahr (Ph.D., Berkeley, 2011) is Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities and Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence. He is the author of Thinking Small (Harvard, 2015) and How to Hide an Empire (FSG, 2019), both of which have won scholarly awards. Immerwahr is a contributing writer for The New Yorker and his essays have also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Harper's, The New Republic, and the New York Review of Books, among other places. He is writing a fire history of the United States.

Open to attendants outside of USC. Registration before the event is required. To see more events in this series, including recordings of past events, visit https://dornsife.usc.edu/levan-institute/programs/on-writing/.