Join us for our final entry in this multi-part series considering the global perception of the United States.  In collaboration with the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), international educators, authors, and journalists will offer perspectives on American identity in the 21st century.

For our final discussion, we welcome perspectives from Pakistan and Nigeria.

Amy Wilentz, journalist and co-founder of The Forum for the Academy and the Public, will moderate a conversation with author and reporter Fatima Bhutto and Olufunmilayo Arewa, Murray H. Shusterman Professor of Transactional and Business Law at Temple University.

Amy Wilentz teaches in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California at Irvine. She is the author of Farewell Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti (2013), The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier (1990), Martyrs’ Crossing (2000), and many more. She is the winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award. More recently, Wilentz was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in general nonfiction in 2020. Wilentz is MacDowell fellow, the former Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker and a long-time contributing editor at The Nation. She is also a contributing editor at The Markaz Review, an online publication about Middle Eastern culture, politics, diaspora, and art. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, The London Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other publications.

Fatima Bhutto was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and grew up between Syria and Pakistan. She is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction. Her debut novel, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, was long listed for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction and the memoir about her father’s life and assassination, Songs of Blood and Sword, was published to acclaim. Her most recent books are The Runaways, a novel, and New Kings of the World, a reportage on popular culture and globalization.

Olufunmilayo B. Arewa is the Shusterman Professor of Business and Transactional Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law. She received an M.A. and Ph.D. (Anthropology) from the University of California, Berkeley, an A.M. (Applied Economics) from the University of Michigan, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and an A.B. from Harvard College.  Her research focuses on technology, music, film, business, and Africana studies. Prior to becoming a law professor, she practiced law for nearly a decade, working in legal and business positions in the entrepreneurial and technology startup arena, including law firms and companies in Silicon Valley, New York and Boston. Before becoming a lawyer, she was a Visiting Lecturer at the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies (CAAS) at the University of Michigan and served as a Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C. and Montevideo, Uruguay. She has served as Vice Chair of the Nigeria Copyright Expert Working Group, worked on projects relating to education and scientific and technological capacity in Africa, and served as a lead consultant for a project examining the feasibility of establishing a venture capital fund in the Eastern Caribbean. Her book Disrupting Africa: Technology, Law and Development will be published later this year by Cambridge University Press.