Dorothy Day & Thomas Merton Culture and the Public Good Symposium
Presented by the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good
The Franco Institute hosts the second annual Dorothy Day & Thomas Merton Culture and the Public Good Symposium. Named for two of the foremost socially engaged Catholic thinkers of the 20th century, the signature annual event culminates a year of themed research support at the Institute. It gathers speakers across a range of backgrounds — public figures, artists, and scholars — to consider an urgent yet enduring question and engage in a dialogue that can guide public conversation on the topic.
The theme for the symposium is interdependence, and the featured speakers are Sunil Amrith, Sougwen Chung, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Zadie Smith.
Credits
Sunil Amrith
Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University, with a secondary appointment as Professor at the Yale School of the Environment. He is the Henry R. Luce Director of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale’s hub for international research, and also serves as Yale’s Vice Provost for International Affairs. Amrith’s new book is The Burning Earth, an environmental history of the modern world that foregrounds the experiences of the Global South (W.W. Norton and Penguin UK). It was named a 2024 “essential read” by The New Yorker, a “book we love” 2024 by NPR, and was a finalist for the 2025 PEN/E.O. Wilson prize.
Sougwen Chung
Sougwen Chung is an internationally renowned multi-disciplinary artist and researcher, who uses hand-drawn and technologically-reproduced marks to address the closeness between person-to-person and person-to-machine communication. Sougwen’s multidisciplinary work has been exhibited internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Geneva, The New Museum of Contemporary Art and The Drawing Center in New York, the NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo, and the Espoo Museum of Modern Art. The artist’s work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Designboom, Fast Company, Engadget and USA Today.
Elizabeth Kolbert
Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. For her work at The New Yorker, where she's a staff writer, she has received two National Magazine Awards and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Under a White Sky has been shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation. Kolbert lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.
Zadie Smith
Novelist Zadie Smith was born in North London in 1975 to an English father and a Jamaican mother. She read English at Cambridge, before graduating in 1997. Her acclaimed books include White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, Swing Time, andThe Fraud. Smith has published several collections of essays including Changing My Mind, Feel Free, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; Intimations, which was chosen as one of Oprah's Best Books of 2020; and Dead and Alive (Penguin Random House, October 28, 2025), which Barack Obama named as one of his Favorite Books of 2025. Smith writes regularly for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.
Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good
Founded by Notre Dame's College of Arts & Letters in 1984 as the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts and renamed in 2025, the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good helps advance research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. To accomplish this goal, the institute provides faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students in the College with three main types of support: internal funding, proposal development, and conference support.
Funding & Support
This is a signature program of the Notre Dame Arts Biennial and is organized by the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good.
Image
Image courtesy of the Franco Institute.