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 Elisa Tamarkin (UC Berkeley) and Jesse Alemán (University of New Mexico), hosted by Sarah Mesle (USC). Organized in partnership with the Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture. Registration is required. REGISTER

Description: Sometimes, the world gives us clear endings: the time runs out on the game clock, a political term concludes, victory or defeat is declared. But in writing, endings are often blurry and complicated. When are you done writing? What should your conclusion say? What last line can drive home your point — and how can you let go of everything that a piece of writing might say but didn’t?  In their recent books, the two writers featured in this conversation describe political events — such as the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the Vietnam War — which ended at a specific time but continue to shape our lives today. These events show us that even in the world, endings are often less clear than they seem. Together, we’ll discuss strategies for reaching the end of a piece of writing, even as the world we’re describing continues to evolve. 

Jesse Alemán is a professor of English and Presidential Teaching Fellow at the University of New Mexico, where he teaches nineteenth-century American and US Latinx literary and cultural histories. He is the author of Latinx Civil Wars: The Formation of Latinidad in an Age of Revolution and Rebellion (NYU Press 2026). He has also published two co-edited collections, Empire and the Literature of Sensation and The Latino Nineteenth Century, and he reprinted The Woman in Battle: The Civil War Narrative of Loreta Janeta Velazquez. He has over two dozen articles and essays in venues such as Aztlán, American Literary History, and the PMLA, and his co-edited special issue on "Trans Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century Americas" is slated for the upcoming 13.1 release of Trans Studies Quarterly.

Elisa Tamarkin is Professor and Katharine Bixby Hotchkis Chair in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon (University of Chicago Press, 2026) on the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of the end of both foreign correspondence and the nation's city newspapers. Her previous books, Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance and Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America, were also published by University of Chicago Press.

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/.