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What can a tube of lipstick—or a videotape—tell us about the world?
Join authors Eileen G’Sell and Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy for an evening of reading, conversation, and cultural inquiry inspired by two books in Bloomsbury’s acclaimed Object Lessons series: Lipstick and Videotape. Each Object Lessons book begins with an ordinary thing and follows it somewhere unexpected: into history, literature, technology, popular culture, personal memory, and the stories we tell about ourselves.
Eileen G’Sell, author of Lipstick, and Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, author of Videotape, invite us to look again at objects we think we already know—and discover the histories, ideas, and cultural meanings hiding in plain sight.
Come for the objects. Stay for the questions.
Eileen G’Sell is a poet and culture critic whose work focuses on gender, sexuality, and economic class. Her first book of nonfiction, Lipstick, joined Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series in 2026. G’Sell’s poetry has been published in Poetry magazine, Fence, and The Boston Review; her essays have been published in The Baffler, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Current Affairs, and Jacobin. She serves as movie critic for The Hopkins Review and frequently reviews film and art for Hyperallergic and Reverse Shot. In 2023, she won the Rabkin Prize for excellence in arts writing. G’Sell is a Teaching Professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy is a Teaching Professor in the Department of Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University, Ohio, USA. She has published extensively on North American culture and literature and on Eastern European film. She is the author of Between Empire and Republic: America in the Colonial Canadian Imagination (2022).
