The New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Names 2008-2009 Fellows

The New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers announces the selection of its tenth class of Fellows: fifteen exceptional creative writers, independent scholars, and academics, coming to the Library from as near as Brooklyn and as far away as Warsaw. The Fellows, whose appointments were announced today by Library President Dr. Paul LeClerc and Jean Strouse, the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Center, will use the research collections and online resources of The New York Public Library’s landmark Humanities and Social Sciences Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street to pursue a variety of book projects. They will be in residence at the Center from September 2008 through May 2009.

The Cullman Center class of 2008-2009 includes Polish dissident journalist Anna Bikont; award-winning young novelists Andrew Sean Greer and Hari Kunzru; Romare Bearden expert and Columbia University professor Robert G. O’Meally; writer/illustrator and New York Times Op-Art contributor Lauren Redniss; reporter Laura Secor; and distinguished poet Rosanna Warren (complete list below).

“For the tenth consecutive year, we are delighted to welcome an extraordinary class to The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers,” said Dr. LeClerc. “The Center continues to be place for creativity and innovative ideas, offering Fellows a collegial environment in which to nurture ideas.”

Each Fellow receives a stipend, office space in the Center’s quarters on the second floor of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, and the assistance of the Library’s deeply knowledgeable curatorial staff.

“A remarkable group of fellows will be arriving next fall,” said Ms. Strouse. “I greatly look forward to having them at the Library for the Cullman Center’s tenth anniversary year. The range of their projects – on Gandhi, the Curies, modern Iran, intellectual property, Romare Bearden, George Washington’s mother, and Varian Fry, to name just a few – reflects the richness and depth of the Library’s holdings, and indicates the extraordinary kinds of work that fine writers and scholars do here. What none of the incoming Fellows will quite imagine at this point is how much fun they will have in the cross-disciplinary exchanges that go on all year in the small community each Cullman Center class becomes.”

The Center fosters creative and scholarly conversation both within the Library and in the larger cultural context of New York, through informal lunches, public evening programs, and the publications of its alumni. Many Fellows have published critically acclaimed, award-winning books based on their work at the Cullman Center. These include Andrew Delbanco’s Melville: His World and Work (Knopf, 2005); Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases (Knopf, 2007); Hermione Lee’s Edith Wharton (Knopf, 2007); Francine Prose’s Lives of the Muses (HarperCollins, 2002); Colm Tobin’s Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); Melanie Rehak’s Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her (Harcourt, 2005); Philip Lopate’s Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (Crown, 2004); Patrick Radden Keefe’s Chatter: Inside the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping (Random House, 2005); and Thomas Bender’s A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (Hill and Wang, 2006).

This year the Center received 218 applicants from around the globe. A committee comprised of scholars, public intellectuals, and writers from across a spectrum of fields selected the Fellows. For more information, please visit www.nypl.org/csw.

About the 2008-2009 Fellows

Deborah Baker

The Convert

Deborah Baker is the author of the literary biography In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding. In 2008 Penguin will publish her book A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, a non-fiction narrative exploring the idea of India in the American imagination. At the Cullman Center, Baker will be researching and writing about the life of Maryam Jameelah, née Margaret Marcus, who left America for Lahore, Pakistan in 1962 to become the protégée of Abul A’la Maudoodi, the intellectual founder of political Islam.

Anna Bikont, Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellow

Ryszard Kapuściński's "Magic Journalism"

Anna Bikont, a senior writer and co-founder of Gazeta Wyborcza, the largest daily in Central Europe and the first independent newspaper in democratic Poland, is the award-winning author of eight books, including Wieslawa Szymborska’s Dusty Keepsakes, Friends, and Dreams; The Avalanche and the Stones; and We, People from Jedwabne. At the Cullman Center, she will research the Polish journalist, author, and poet Ryszard Kapuściński for a biography.

Akeel Bilgrami

Gandhi’s Integrity

Akeel Bilgrami, the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, directs the University’s Heyman Center for the Humanities and serves on Columbia’s Committee on Global Thought. He is the author of Belief and Meaning and Self-Knowledge and Resentment, and will publish two new books in 2009, Politics and the Moral Psychology of Identity and What is a Muslim? At the Cullman Center, he will work on a short book on Gandhi’s philosophy and a larger project on the nature of practical reason.

Deborah Cohen

Family Secrets: The Rise of Confessional Culture in Britain, 1840-1990

Deborah Cohen teaches modern British and European history at Brown University. Her first book, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Germany and Great Britain, 1914-1939, won the Social Science History Association’s Allan Sharlin Memorial Award, and her second, Household Gods: The British and their Possessions, won the American Historical Association’s Forkosch Prize and the North American Conference on British Studies’ Albion Prize. At the Cullman Center, she will work on a study of family secrets and the rise of confessional culture.

Andrew Sean Greer

Many Worlds, A Novel

Andrew Sean Greer is the author of a collection of stories, How It Was for Me, and three novels: The Path of Minor Planets, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, and The Story of a Marriage. He has received the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, The New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. While at the Cullman Center, he will be working on a novel imagining the effects of different eras on a man's life and character.

Daniel J. Kevles, Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellow

Vital Properties: A History of Innovation and Ownership in the Stuff of Life

Daniel J. Kevles, the Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, teaches and writes about issues in science and society, past and present. His books include In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, The Physicists: the History of a Scientific Community in Modern America, and The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character. He has received numerous honors and prizes, including a Page One Award, the Watson Davis Prize, and the History of Science Society's George Sarton Medal for career achievement. At the Cullman Center, he will be working on a book about the history of intellectual property in living organisms from the late eighteenth century to recent times.

Hari Kunzru

The Book of Birbal

Hari Kunzru, the author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, and My Revolution, has had his work translated into twenty-one languages and won a number of prizes, including the Somerset Maugham Award, the Betty Trask Prize of the Society of Authors, and a British Book Award. In 2003 Granta named him one of Britain’s twenty best young novelists. While at the Cullman Center, Kunzru will be working on a novel set at the court of the Mughal Emperor Akbar.

Robert G. O’Meally

The Literary Romare Bearden

Robert G. O’Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he founded The Center for Jazz Studies. His books include The Craft of Ralph Ellison, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, and The Jazz Singers. He has edited several anthologies, including The Jazz Cadence of American Culture and The Norton Anthology of Afro-American Literature, and has won awards for his liner notes and for his work as writer for the PBS documentary based on his book on Billie Holiday. He will work at the Cullman Center on a project about Bearden's literary sources and collaborations.

Julie Orringer, The Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow

Varian Fry, A Novel

Julie Orringer is the author of the award-winning story collection How to Breathe Underwater and of a novel, The Invisible Bridge. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, The Washington Post, Zoetrope All-Story, and Ploughshares, and have been widely anthologized. She has received fellowships from Stanford University, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the National Endowment for the Arts. At the Cullman Center she will be working on a novel about Varian Fry, the New York journalist who helped nearly two thousand Jewish and anti-Nazi refugees escape Europe during the Holocaust.

Lauren Redniss

Radioactive: An Atomic Love Story

Lauren Redniss regularly contributes Op-Art pieces to the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. Slate Magazine named her first book, Century Girl: 100 Years in the Life of Doris Eaton Travis, Last Living Star of the Ziegfeld Follies, one of the Ten Best Books of 2006. Redniss teaches at the Parsons School of Design. At the Cullman Center, she will be working on an illustrated non-fiction book about Marie and Pierre Curie and the history of radioactivity.

Martha Saxton, The Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History

The Widow Washington

Martha Saxton is a Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College. She has written biographies of Jayne Mansfield and Louisa May Alcott. Her most recent book, Being Good: Women’s Moral Values in Early America, examines women’s ethical lives across three regions, two centuries, and diverse racial cultures. Saxton received a Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe College. At the Cullman Center, she will be working on a biography of Mary Ball Washington, the mother of the founding father.

Laura Secor

Fugitives from Paradise: A Biography of Iran’s Movement for Democracy

Laura Secor, a journalist, has written on Iran for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Republic. She has been a staff editor of The New York Times 0p-Ed page, a reporter for the Boston Globe, acting executive editor of The American Prospect, and a senior editor and writer for Lingua Franca. While at the Cullman Center, she will be working on a book about the movement for democratic reform in Iran.

Lore Segal

A novel, provisionally titled Laputa

Lore Segal’s novels include Other People’s Houses, Her First American, which won an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and Shakespeare’s Kitchen. Segal has also published essays, translations, and books for children. Her Cullman Center project takes its title from the island in Gulliver's Travels where people don’t die, and will offer a satirical look at our over-long modern lives.

Ezra Tawil

Literary Exceptionalism and the European Origins of the “American Style”

Ezra Tawil teaches early American literature in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance. While at the Cullman Center, he will be working on a book about the eighteenth-century origins of American literary exceptionalism and the notion of an "American style" within anglophone writing.

Rosanna Warren

Mistral, A Book of Poems

Rosanna Warren is the author of a chapbook and three books of poems, including, most recently, Departure. Her critical book, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, will be published by Norton in September 2008. With Stephen Scully, Warren translated Euripides' Suppliant Women for the Oxford Tragedy Series, and she has edited anthologies of poems written by prisoners. She is a past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, and teaches English and French literature at Boston University.

About The New York Public Library

The New York Public Library was created in 1895 with the consolidation of the private libraries of John Jacob Astor and James Lenox with the Samuel Jones Tilden Trust. The Library provides free and open access to its physical and electronic collections and information, as well as to its services. It comprises four research centers – The Humanities and Social Sciences Library; The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the Science, Industry and Business Library – and 87 Branch Libraries in Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx. Research and circulating collections combined total more than 50 million items, including materials for the visually impaired. In addition, each year the Library presents thousands of exhibitions and public programs, which include classes in technology, literacy, and English as a second language. The New York Public Library serves over 16 million patrons who come through its doors annually and another 25 million users internationally, who access collections and services through the NYPL website, www.nypl.org

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