Thursday 4/24 @ 6:00PM

Labyrinth Books

122 Nassau Street

In an era of rapid change, the role of museums and art has never been more vital in connecting the past to the present. Laurence des Cars, the first woman president of the Louvre, has described the museum as “an echo chamber of society, not just a repository of art, but a place that engages with the world and its issues.”

The Louvre itself embodies this evolution. Once a fortress protecting and housing French kings, it became the people’s museum during the French Revolution in 1793 and has shaped culture for centuries. But what does it mean to fall in love with a museum today?  

Sciolino will take us behind the scenes of the Louvre, introducing us to her favorite artworks, both legendary and overlooked, and to the people who are the museum’s lifeblood: the curators, the artisans producing frames and engravings, the builders overseeing restorations, the firefighters protecting the aging structure. 

In conversation with Christy Wampole, she’ll examine how the Louvre not only reflects but actively shapes cultural identity, challenging and transforming the way we see the world.

Elaine Sciolino is a contributing writer and former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times. She is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller The Only Street in Paris along with La Seduction, The Seine, Persian Mirrors, and her new book, Adventures in the Louvre. Sciolino was decorated chevalier of the Legion of Honor for her “special contribution” to the friendship between France and the United States. Sciolino began her journalism career at Newsweek, joining The New York Times in 1984, where she held several posts, including United Nations’ bureau chief, and chief diplomatic correspondent.

Christy Wampole is an essayist and a professor of French and Italian at Princeton University. She is the author of Degenerative Realism: Novel and Nation in 21st-Century France (winner of the Modern Language Association Scaglione Prize), Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor (winner of the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book), and The Other Serious: Essays for the New American Generation. She is co-editor of the Cambridge History of the American Essay. In addition to her scholarly publications, her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Aeon Magazine, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

This event is cosponsored by Princeton University's Department of French and Italian and Labyrinth Books.