About this Event
PSA Public Lecture — "Thinking the city from the river" by Nina Léger
Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026 at 6 pm, 52 rue Bichat 75010 Paris
Free and open to the public, followed by drinks
This lecture is hosted in partnership with Theatrum Mundi
Nina Leger is a writer. Trained in art history at the Ecole normale supérieure, she completed her PhD in 2017 at University Paris 8 and has been teaching at the Ecole des Beaux-arts de Marseille ever since. She is the author of four novels and winner of multiple literary awards (Prix Anais Nin 2017, Prix Ecrire la Ville 2023, Prix du roman historique 2024). As a resident of the Villa Albertine in California in 2023, she worked on her latest novel Mémoires sauvées de l’eau (Gallimard, 2024). From the Gold rush to today’s megafires, the novel narrates California through the story of the Feather River, uncovering violences committed over the land and the people in the name of wealth and progress.
“In 2023, I set out to write a novel about a city which ended up being a novel about a river. The Feather River, running through Northern California, is one of the waterways where gold was found in 1848. I studied how this discovery led to an intense engineering of the river and how the first small-scale wooden infrastructures paved the way for larger concrete works. Eventually the mastering of California’s water became central to the birth, modernisation, and mythification of the state. But behind this process lay violence over the land and over people. And today, at the time of draughts and megafires, the fragility and delusiveness of this command of the environment finally shows. Writing a novel about a river also led me to question my own form of engineering: writing. I tried to let the river influence the structure of the book. To this end, I became interested in hydrological studies, and how rivers can help us rethink our conceptions of time and space."
Welcome Nina!
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Paris School of Architecture (PSA), 52 Rue Bichat, Paris, France
USD 0.00
