Author and critic Margo Jefferson makes a rare visit to Dublin to discuss her electrifying new memoir, Constructing a Nervous System. Taking on the systems that have shaped her life and our world, she moves between subjects as diverse as George Eliot and Bing Crosby in her dissection of American cultural life.

Jefferson is fascinated by the ways in which the world shapes who we are. Constructing a Nervous System creates a poetics of thought and identity, examining each piece of her soul to see how she was made. Family, art, culture, society, education, racism – nothing escapes the precision of her language, nor the intimacy of her gaze. 

Margo Jefferson is both an author and a critic, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. She is a Professor of Writing at Columbia University School. 

Margo Jefferson will be in conversation with Emilie Pine, author of the essay collection Notes to Self and the novel Ruth & Pen.

‘If you want to know who we are and where we’ve been, read Margo Jefferson’ Edmund White

Presented in association with the Embassy of the United States of America in Dublin