Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Westchester: December 4 - VIRTUAL - “Empathy and its Opposites in Today's World” with Prof. Irene Kacandes

Irene Kacandes is the Dartmouth Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and German Studies, at Dartmouth College, USA. Author or editor of ten volumes, she has published on subjects as far ranging as narrative and life writing theory, the Holocaust, feminist linguistics, mortality, and Eastern Europe.  Her study of her paternal family’s experience in Fascist-Occupied Greece, Daddy’s War (2009), inaugurated the genre “paramemoir.” Kacandes’s most recent publication is Humanities for Humans: Clear Thinking on Challenging Topics (2025). On the Run in Occupied Poland, the memoirs of Grazyna Gross, that Kacandes edited will appear next spring with University of Rochester Press in its East and Central European Studies series. Kacandes edits the book series “Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies” at De Gruyter Brill. Other roles have included the presidencies of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and of the German Studies Association. Kacandes was born and raised in White Plains and is once again living there when she’s not on the shores of Lake Geneva with her husband, Professor Emeritus Philippe Carrard. She enjoys gardening, cooking, playing tennis, swimming, and watching professional soccer, baseball and basketball.