The conclusion of the semester-long UHC Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Undergraduate Research Fellowships, this event will feature presentations from Eric Shiner (director, Warhol Museum) and Irina Reyn (assistant professor of writing, Pitt) about the role their experiences as undergraduates played in their lives and careers. To read more about the fellowship program, click here.

Irina Reyn's novel, What Happened to Anna K. (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2008), was an Indiebound Indie Next selection, one of Amazon.com’s best books of the month, and a San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick. Reyn is also the editor of the nonfiction anthology Living on the Edge of the World: New Jersey Writers Take on the Garden State (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2007). Her short stories, essays, and criticism have appeared in publications such as One Story, Post Road, Tin House, Town & Country Travel, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Moscow Times, Nextbook, and many others. Reyn’s work has been anthologized in Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women (Hyperion, 1999), A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross-Cultural Collision and Connection (OV Books, 2008)and Believer, Beware: First Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith (Beacon Press, 2009). Her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and a story, “The Wolf Story,” was short-listed for The O. Henry Prize Stories. Her second novel, The Imperial Wife, will be released in the summer of 2016.

Eric Shiner was named director of the Andy Warhol museum in 2011. He joined the museum as the Milton Fine Curator of Art in 2008. Shiner studied Medieval Japanese Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. A visit to Japan during a Semester at Sea program in the spring of 1992 inspired him to return to Japan in 1994 to attend graduate school at Osaka University, immersing himself in the history of art as well as in Osaka’s nightlife and fashion scene. He also served as assistant curator at the Yokohama Triennale 2001, but returned to the US in 2002 to enroll in Yale’s PhD program in the history of art focusing on Japanese contemporary art. Beckoned by entreaties from New York to curate shows and write articles for exhibitions, Shiner dropped out early leaving with an additional master’s degree to work as an independent curator in New York, mounting shows like “Making a Home: Japanese Contemporary Artists” (2007) at Japan Society and “Snake Alley” (2008) at the Taipei Cultural Center.

For more information on this event, click here or contact Dan Kubis at dankubis@pitt.edu.