Join the Department of American Studies for the 2025 Mergen-Palmer Distinguished Lecture, "On the Promise of Beauty."

The historical present is often perceived through the presence or absence of beauty, such that distinct personal, social and political projects unfold through disputes about the beauty we deserve — which is to say, the life worth living. How might affective and aesthetic responses to scarcity, precarity and uncertainty, drawn from the crises of war and colonial and capital dispossession, help us to understand the promise of beauty as a world-building engagement? This lecture considers how the promise of beauty is so usable across a spectrum of political claims, whether imperial or insurgent, and how these claims delineate what forms of life are valuable, and for whom.

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author The Gift of Freedom and The Promise of Beauty, and co-editor with Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho, Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez, Rani Neutill and Yutian Wong for Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader. Both The Promise of Beauty and Bangtan Remixed were published with Duke University Press in 2024. She has also published in Signs, Camera Obscura, The Funambulist, Women & Performance, positions, Radical History Review and ArtForum. Her papers have been solicited for the Feminist Theory Archive at Brown University. Nguyen has made zines since 1991, including Slander and the compilation zine Race Riot. She is a former Punk Planet columnist and Maximumrocknroll volunteer. Nguyen is working on a collection of her punk writing.

The Promise of Beauty is available via Duke University Press.