Encountering Primo Levi: Author Talk with Cheryl Chaffin

How Trauma Narratives Shape Memory, History, and Literature

Join us to discuss Cheryl Chaffin's newly published work, Encountering Primo Levi.

Primo Levi’s development as a writer was expressed through multiple literary genres and an increasing awareness of his readers over the course of his forty-year writing career. With a focus on memory and trauma, this book explores how narrative acts as a means of telling a story and engaging others in the transmission of that story, thus developing a literary lineage over time that can transcend geographic and cultural boundaries. As the witness to catastrophic historical events, Levi’s writing offers a space to consider what it means to be a reader of traumatic literature. The process of how books affect and change us is explored through a close reading of Levi’s works alongside related writers and the historical contexts in which they lived.

Cheryl Chaffin teaches English Composition and Literature at Cabrillo College in California. She is a researcher in memory and trauma studies as well as the literature of witness. She is author of After Poland: A Memoir Because of Primo Levi (Common Ground 2018) and Encountering Primo Levi: Reading and Teaching Trauma Narratives (Palgrave 2026). Her creative, academic, and translation work has been published in International Journal of Literary Humanities, Verbeia: Journal of English and Spanish Studies, Catamaran, and La Piccioletta Barca, among others.