January 19, 2027 @ 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
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Join us for a dialogue with Eric Prieto (French and Italian) about his new book, Urban Informality and Narrative Form.
Urban Informality and Narrative Form brings together literary analysis and spatial planning theory in an interdisciplinary study of urban informality. The book explores the forces that have led to the prevalence of urban informality and critically considers common misconceptions about this phenomenon. It highlights the great diversity of subjective experiences hidden behind the euphemistic “informal settlement” (or the more pejorative “slum”) and identifies promising pathways forward for the urban poor. At a time when more than half of all city dwellers in the Global South live in an informal settlement of some type, the urgency of this topic could not be clearer.
Eric Prieto is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place (2012) and co-editor of Urban Discourses of Crisis, Resilience, and Resistance (with Liam Lanigan and Anni Lappela; 2025).
Refreshments will be served.
Cosponsored by the IHC’s Hester and Cedric Crowell Endowment
