Lecture by Rob Kunzig, Journalist and Author

The Rebirth of Notre Dame—and of Her Older Sister

Rob Kunzig has written several articles on the restoration of Notre Dame and one on the Basilica of Saint Denis for National Geographic, where he was the environment editor from 2009 to 2022. A magazine journalist since 1983, Kunzig has won writing awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Geophysical Union, and his work has been selected frequently for the annual Best American Science and Nature Writing. He has written two books: Fixing Climate (with Wallace Broecker) and Mapping the Deep, a book about oceanography, which won the Royal Society prize as science book of the year in 2001. From 1996 through 2008 he was a correspondent in France, based in Dijon. He is a French as well as an American citizen.

The cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris reopened last December, more than five years after a fire nearly destroyed it, and it's now thronged with visitors. In this talk you'll get a look inside the final stages of the restoration from a journalist who wrote several articles on it for National Geographic. You'll also hear about a unique restoration project now underway at the church that pioneered Gothic architecture and inspired Notre Dame but is much less known today: the Basilica of Saint Denis. It's getting back the medieval stone bell tower and spire it lost nearly 180 years ago.