Alan Riding Gives a Guest Lecture on Cultural Life in Paris

On May 12th, AGS hosted author and journalist Alan Riding for an exceptional guest lecture on the Arts and Literature Scene in Paris during the 1920s. This event was organized for a group of undergraduate students visiting from AGS's partner Arcadia University, on a week-long global field study course on "Americans Expat Writers in Paris".

Alan Riding gave a vivid description of the daily life and political context that surrounded arts and literature in Paris during the period that directly followed World War I. Riding says "Americans had arrived in Paris as a result of America's eventual participation in World War I. Paris has had a dominent cultural position in Europe for a very long time and continues to this day to have appeal for writers and artists around the world."

Born in Brazil to British parents and educated in England, Alan Riding had a fourty-year career in journalism, working with Reuters, the Financial Times, The Economist, and, most recently, The New York Times where he was the cultural correspondant in Europe for well over a decade. He authored several notable books on culture and social history, including Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans (Knopf/Vintage), which has sold over 450,000 copies worldwide and is now considered a classic about modern Mexico, and two reference handbooks published by Dorling Kindersley: Essential Shakespeare Handbook and Opera. His most recent book is And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (New York: Knopf, 2010), "an impressively comprehensive survey of the occupation years" (The Economist) which was translated and published in eight countries and received the Spear's Book Award for Social History and the Palau i Fabre International non-fiction Prize in Spain. This book was declared "one of the finest works of serious popular history" by the Washington Post and "a fascinating book" by the New York Review of Books - among many other raving reviews. See Alan Riding's bio.