Arundhati Roy: “Fascism, Fiction, and Freedom in the Time of the Virus” Frances Tarlton “Sissy” Farenthold Endowed Lecture Series in Peace, Social Justice and Human Rights Co-Presented by the Rothko Chapel and the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice

Join the Rothko Chapel and the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin for the seventh annual Sissy Farenthold Lecture (2021-2022) featuring renowned political activist and author Arundhati Roy. LBJ School professor Raj Patel will engage Roy in a conversation about “Fascism, Fiction, and Freedom in the Time of the Virus.”

About Arundhati Roy Through both her activism and writing, including Booker-Prize winning novel The God of Small Things (1977), Roy is an outspoken critic of injustice and a decades-long advocate for peace and human rights. She is a trenchant critic of neoliberal economics and politics, a tireless advocate for the dispossessed, and is committed to the imagination and organization of a more just and equitable future for the planet. Since 1998, Roy has published the novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) and twenty nonfiction books, most recently Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014), My Seditious Heart: Collected Non-Fiction (2019), and Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction (2020).

About Raj Patel Raj Patel is a research professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin and a senior research associate at the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University. His latest book, co-authored with Rupa Marya, is Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice (2021).

About the Frances Tarlton “Sissy” Farenthold Endowed Lecture in Peace, Social Justice and Human Rights Named in honor of Sissy Farenthold (1926-2021), who dedicated her life to exposing and responding to injustices as a lawyer, legislator, and global leader in human rights, the lecture series inspires audiences to think and act creatively in response to the greatest human rights challenges of the 21st century. Past lecturers include Charles Blow, New York Times Op-Ed Columnist; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at The Graduate Center, City University of New York; Elizabeth Yeampierre, Executive Director of UPROSE and Co-Chair of the Climate Justice Alliance; Ai-jen Poo, Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance; Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation; and journalist Mark Danner, Professor at the University of California Berkeley and at Bard College. Read more on the lecture series here.

This event is co-sponsored by the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.