Victoria N. Alexander's Blog, page 16
April 23, 2016
VN Alexander on WAMC Roundtable with Joe Donahue
In our Ideas Matter segment we take time just about every week to check in with the state humanities councils in our 7-state region. Today we’ll be speaking with New York Council for the Humanities Public Scholar Victoria Alexander about the relation between art and science – and the novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov. In […]
April 7, 2016
Locus Amoenus nominated for Dayton Literary Peace Prize
Locus Amoenus, 9/11 novel by Victoria N. Alexander, has been nominated for the 2016 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Since 2007, the DLPP has awarded $10,000 each year. Previous recipients include, Bob Shacochis for The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, Junot Díaz for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Francine Prose for A Changed […]
April 6, 2016
New Republic Reviews Fine Lines
“One of the most revealing essays in the volume is Victoria N. Alexander’s examination of the way Nabokov’s views on butterfly evolution enlivened his imagination.”
March 31, 2016
Locus Amoenus nominated for Dayton Literary Peace Prize
Locus Amoenus, 9/11 novel by Victoria N. Alexander, has been nominated for the 2016 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Since 2007, the DLPP has awarded $10,000 each year. Previous recipients include, Bob Shacochis for The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, Junot Díaz for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Francine Prose for A Changed […]
March 30, 2016
VN Alexander Interviewed on Yale Radio with Brainard Carey
WYBCX The Art World Demystified, Hosted by Brainard Carey In this 45 min interview, VN Alexander’s talks with Brainard about why art is so important to learning, about the little-known “artistic” evolutionary mechanisms (other than mutation/gradual selection) that help create new species, about what the term “intelligence” in “artificial intelligence” means, about the difference between computer […]
March 23, 2016
Fine Lines reviewed in Nature, The New Yorker and Washington Post
My favorite novelist, Vladimir Nabokov, is also my favorite evolutionary theorist. There is a fine line between art and science. In this beautiful coffee-table book, edited by Stephen Blackwell and Kurt Johnson, I have an essay called, “Chance, Nature’s Practical Jokes and the ‘Non-utilitarian Delights’ of Insect Mimicry.” Fine Lines: Vladimir Nabokov’s Scientific Art hit […]
March 8, 2016
Locus Amoenus Audiobook Coming Soon
Read by Ben Jorgensen.
February 27, 2016
“All right then, I’ll go to hell.” -Huck Finn
Next month, I will be talking to a group of anti-war activists about the role of literary fiction in undermining the bad narratives that prevent critical thinking. I look to my favorite political satirist, Mark Twain, as an example. When Huck Finn ponders whether or not he should turn in his friend Jim, a runaway slave, […]
January 25, 2016
PopMatters: Sean Miller interviews VN Alexander
Artificial intelligence is all the rage these days. Case in point: while I was watching football this past weekend, there were two television commercials in heavy circulation during the games that featured AI avatars—Siri and Watson—having life-like conversations with actors. As you may know, I have a few opinions about the prospects and limitations of […]
