In the novel's epilogue, which university hosts the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies?

The Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies is hosted by the University of Denay, Nunavit.

This detail appears in “Historical Notes,” the novel’s epilogue. Presented as a partial transcript of a future academic conference, the section takes place on June 25, 2195, long after the Republic of Gilead has disappeared and become an object of historical research.

The University of Denay, Nunavit is fictional, and its name is easy to confuse with the real universities mentioned in the epilogue. Professor James Darcy Pieixoto, the symposium’s keynote speaker, is associated with Cambridge University in England, but Cambridge does not host the event. The chair, Professor Maryann Crescent Moon, is identified with the University of Denay, Nunavit.

The epilogue changes the novel’s frame: Offred’s experiences are no longer presented only as immediate testimony but as a recovered historical record analyzed by later scholars. The date, setting, and academic format also confirm that the symposium belongs to the novel’s imagined future rather than to the contemporary world.