Fellows and Their Topics for the Year 2011-2012

 

A Good Creature, a collection of stories
The David S. Ferriero Fellow
 
Chris Adrian is the author of two novels, Gob's Grief and The Children's Hospital, and a collection of stories, A Better Angel.  His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Paris Review, among other publications. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Adrian completed his training in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco, in 2010. At the Cullman Center he will be working on a short story collection that examines American Puritans and their intellectual and spiritual heirs, 1630 to 2008.
 
1945: Life in Ruins
 
Ian Buruma is a writer, journalist, and professor at Bard College. He was educated in Holland and Japan, where he studied history, Chinese literature, and Japanese cinema. His essays, covering a broad range of political and cultural subjects, have appeared in publications including The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Il Corriere della Sera, and NRC Handelsblad. The book he will be working on at the Cullman Center, 1945: Life in Ruins, is about the immediate aftermath of World War II in Europe and Asia.
 
Fifty Newly Translated Stories by Anton Chekhov (Translation)
 
Peter Constantine is a literary translator and editor.  His recent translations include Sophocles’s Theban Trilogy, The Essential Writings of Machiavelli, and works by Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Voltaire.  A 2010 Guggenheim Fellow, Constantine was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann and a National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov. During his year at the Cullman Center, he will be translating some of Chekov’s overlooked early stories.
 
"Private Faces in Public Places": Modern Poetry and the First Person Plural
ACLS/NYPL Fellow
 
Bonnie Costello is Professor of English at Boston University. She is the author of many books and articles on modern and contemporary poetry, including, most recently, Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry, and Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life and the Turning World.  She is General Editor of The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore anda Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Costello will be working at the Cullman Center on a book about modern poetry's use of the first person plural, especially in the context of the 1930s, a decade that fostered new reflections on voice, audience, and address.
 
Robyn Creswell
Two translations of work by Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim
 
Robyn Creswell, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown and the poetry editor of the Paris Review, is a critic, translator, and scholar who specializes in Arabic literature and comparative modernisms.  In 2010 he published his translation, from the French, of a novel by the Moroccan writer Abdelfattah Kilito, The  Clash of Images.   At the Cullman Center he will be working on a translation from the Arabic of Sonallah Ibrahim’s powerful first novel, That Smell, along with Ibrahim's Notes From Prison.  Creswell writes about contemporary poetry and fiction for Harper’s, N + 1, and The Nation, among other publications.  
 
Àlvaro Enrigue
Birds (working title; a novel)
 
Álvaro Enrigue is the author of four novels and two collections of short stories, including La muerte de un instalador (The Death of an Installation Artist), Vidas perpendiculares (Perpendicular Lives), and Hipotermia (Hypothermia – to be published in 2012).  Enrigue has received Mexico’s Joaquín Mortiz Prize for a first novel, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio, and the Whitney J. Oates Fellowship at Princeton. His work has been translated into several languages. Enrigue teaches at the Film School of the National Institute for the Arts in Mexico, and writes a column for El Universal in Mexico City. At the Cullman Center he will work on a novel constructed around a fictional tennis match between Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo in Rome.
 
Life Writing
The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellow
 
James Fenton is a prize-winning poet as well as a journalist, literary and theater critic, and art historian. Penguin published his Selected Poems in 2006. As a journalist, Fenton has reported from Indochina and the Philippines. His essays on art for The New York Review of Books were published in a volume called Leonardo's Nephew. His other books include School of Genius, A History of the Royal Academy of Arts; The Strength of Poetry:  Oxford Lectures; and Out of Danger (poems), which won the Whitbread Prize. While he is at the Cullman Center, he will be working on the history of biographical genres for a study called Life Writing.  
 
Evan Haefeli
Empire of Faiths:  The British Origins of American Religious Freedom
The Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History
 
Evan Haefeli is an Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University. He has written about captivity narratives; the New England frontier; witchcraft; ethnic revolts; colonial book publishing; and religious toleration in New Amsterdam and early New York. Drawing on the diversity of peoples, languages, beliefs, and politics in colonial America, and on the relations – religious and violent, friendly and legendary, personal and imperial – between them, the book he will be working on at the Cullman Center will trace the proud American democratic tradition to its imperial origins.
 
Exceptional: Elite New York and the Story of American Inequality.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow
 
The author of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School, which explores a year in the life of one of America’s most elite boarding schools, Shamus Khan teaches in the sociology department at Columbia University. At the Cullman Center he will be working on Exceptional: Elite New York and the Story of American Inequality, a monograph that will pursue his interest in understanding inequality by studying elites.
 
The League of Nations and the Transformation of the Global Order
The Birkelund Fellow
 
Susan Pedersen is Professor of History and the James P. Shenton Professor of the Core Curriculum at Columbia University.  She is the author of Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914-1945, and of a biography of Eleanor Rathbone, the interwar feminist and social reformer.  She plans to complete a book on the impact of the League of Nations on the imperial order during her Cullman Center year.
 
After Dark: Race Mixing in the Margins, 1931-1971
 
An essayist and novelist, Darryl Pinckney is the author of the novel High Cotton and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (The Alain Locke Lectures). He is a recipient of the Harold Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and LettersHis essays and reviews appear frequently in The New York Review of Books. At the Cullman Center he will work on a book about New York at night in the middle decades of the 20th century, when day-time rules about race dissolved, when the self could be lost and reinvented between the Village and Harlem. 
 
Black Bohemia
 
Adam Shatz is a writer and editor at the London Review of Books. A graduate of Columbia University, he served as literary editor of The Nation magazine from 2003 to 2007, and has contributed reviews and essays on jazz, literature, and the politics of the Middle East and North Africa to The New York Review of Books and The New York Times. The subject of his Cullman Center project is the emergence of black bohemia on New York’s Lower East Side in the Late 50s, when black writers, artists, and musicians were drawn to the neighborhood by its cheap rent and reputation for racial tolerance.  Hanging out in the same bookshops, bars and clubs, sharing a passion for free jazz and free verse, and galvanized by the civil rights movement, these figures formed a circle of friends, co-conspirators, and rivals – and they made distinctive contributions to music, poetry, and painting.
 
A Memory of the Future
 
Elizabeth Spires is the author of six collections of poetry, including Wordling, Now the Green Blade Rises, and The Wave-Maker.  Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, and The New Criterion. A recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is a professor of English at Goucher College in Baltimore. At the Cullman Center she will be working on a new collection of poems, A Memory of the Future, which considers how the visual, meditative, and spiritual worlds of Japanese Ehon (artists’ picture books) can trigger the poetic process.
 
Still Life with Girl (working title; a novel)
The Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow
 
Kate Walbert is the author of Where She Went, The Gardens of Kyoto, Our Kind, and A Short History of Women, which she is currently adapting for the stage. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review, among other publications. At the Cullman Center she will work on Still Life with Girl, a novel loosely based on her uncle’s experience of returning from World War II to find a German POW farming his family’s land in rural Maryland.
 
Untitled graphic novel
 

Jacob Weinstein is a cartoonist, illustrator, and designer. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, GQ, Tin House, and other publications. He is the illustrator and a co-author of FreeDarko’s two books, The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac and The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History. He was the designer and art director of The Philadelphia Independent newspaper. At the Cullman Center he will be working on a graphic novel about the 1952 World Table Tennis Championships in Bombay.