Susan Sontag, the celebrated novelist, essayist and critic who has been a major force in American intellectual life for four decades, will be discussing her work with students and faculty in a series of events today.

Her latest book, “Regarding the Pain of Others,” which also serves as the title of her lecture in Graham Chapel, explores the emotions-sympathy, rage, indifference-elicited by images of violence and suffering.

Sontag’s writings on the topic have been informed by her own first-hand experiences with war. In 1968 she traveled to North Vietnam as a young war correspondent, giving Americans one of their first reports of life there with her essay “Trip to Hanoi” (1969).

She later filmed a documentary on the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, and in 1993 she staged a rustic production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” amidst the rubble of war-torn Sarajevo, where she eventually spent three years teaching at a drama school.

“I guess I go to war because I think it’s my duty to be in as much contact with reality as I can be,” Sontag said in a recent interview on PBS. “And war is a tremendous reality in our world.”

Indeed, Sontag’s commitment to social and political activism has been a constant in her life and work. After her battle with breast cancer she wrote about her experiences in a memoir, “Illness as Metaphor” (1978), in which she hoped to “break the taboo” on talking openly about disease and death. In her influential essay “Why Are We in Kosovo?” (1999), she made a powerful moral case for American and European intervention in the Serbian campaign against ethnic Albanians.

Whether writing about war, pornography, cancer or vaudeville, Sontag has consistently sparked new discussions about values and ethics in areas as diverse as medicine, art criticism, journalism, and law.

“[Sontag has had] an enormous impact on art history, and on the interpretation of images,” said William Wallace, the Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor of Art History. “She’s one of the great intellectuals of our time, and she’s made us realize that images in modern culture need interpretation just as much as music, painting or film.”

At 2 p.m. today, Sontag will be joining Wallace and four other professors-including Leila Sadat of the School of Law, Jonathan Gitlin, Ph.D., of the School of Medicine, and Dennis Des Chene and Marilyn Friedman of the philosophy department-in the Women’s Building formal lounge to discuss issues that Sontag’s work has raised in their respective fields.

Sadat, whose research focuses on international criminal law and human rights, says she would like to discuss issues with an international slant.

“[I am interested in] the disconnect between the images we see and our ability to connect emotionally with people from other countries-how instantaneous global transmission of images doesn’t necessarily build understanding,” said Sadat.

Wallace hopes to engage Sontag’s notions about photography.

“[She believes that people] take photographs as evident truth when they’re not: they depend enormously on frame and context for meaning,” he said.

The interdisciplinary format of the discussion-mixing perspectives from art history, medicine, philosophy and law-reflects the mission of the Center for the Study of Human Values (CSHV), the new research center that is co-sponsoring Sontag’s visit.

“The problems that we face in the real world don’t appear in pockets,” said Stuart Yoak, executive officer of the CSHV. “The great issues of the day are inherently interdisciplinary, and the Center tries to address that by providing a venue where the different disciplines can work together.”

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