Terms of Art: "Defeat" • A Talk by Elisa Tamarkin

The term "defeat" suggests a variety of stakes and ramifications across the fields of military history, gaming studies, and more. In this talk, literary scholar Elisa Tamarkin (University of California, Berkeley) considers "defeat" in the context of her recent book, Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon (University of Chicago Press, 2026).Done in a Day is a reflection on the end of the Vietnam War and the departure of the last helicopter evacuating civilians from the rooftop of the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

In her talk, Tamarkin will discuss her book on the 1970s and its psychologies of defeat, on "limited" wars that are also endless wars, and on the problem of raising consciousness of world events despite having access to all the facts and information we should ever need to know. The book is a social and cultural autopsy of all that ended in a day — and about what it means to recognize and to write about endings even as we live through them.

Following the talk, Tamarkin will be joined in conversation by Samuel Zipp (American Studies, Urban Studies).If you have questions or require accommodations, please contact [email protected] (mailto:[email protected]) or (401) 863-6070. If you're a community member without a Brown ID card who'd like to attend the event, please reach out — we'd love for you to join us!

About the SpeakerElisa Tamarkin is Professor and Katharine Bixby Hotchkis Chair in English at the University of California, Berkeley. A scholar of American literature, art, and intellectual history, she is the author, most recently, of Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon (University of Chicago Press, 2026).

Her previous books include Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance (2022) and Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (2008), both from the University of Chicago Press. She currently serves as Chair of the Berkeley Department of English.

About the Series A "term of art" is a word that carries a precise meaning in a specific context — legal, professional, scholarly — that differs from everyday usage. The series "Terms of Art" brings this concept into the humanities, with talks by scholars about their work and how it bears on a particular keyword or expression, showing how close attention to the terms we think with opens up our awareness to how much a single word can hold.

Installments feature single speakers, conversations, and panels from Brown and beyond.Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities (https://humanities.brown.edu/).