Fellows and Their Topics for the Year 2010-2011
David Bezmozgis
The Betrayers (novel)
The Betrayers (novel)
David Bezmozgis is an award-winning writer and filmmaker. His first book, Natasha and Other Stories, was translated into more than a dozen languages and won the Commonwealth Writer’s Regional Prize for First Book. Bezmozgis’ stories have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, Harpers, Zoetrope All-Story, andThe Walrus, and his first feature film, Victoria Day, had its premier in competition at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009. At the Cullman Center David will be working onThe Betrayers, a novel about a famous Russian Jewish dissident who, after the fall of the Soviet Union, meets the man who denounced him.
Geoffrey Brock
Voices Bright Flags (poetry)
Voices Bright Flags (poetry)
Geoffrey Brock is the author of the poetry collection Weighing Light. He edited the forthcoming Farrar Straus and Giroux Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, and has translated Cesare Pavese's Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, Brock teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas. At the Cullman Center he will be completing Voices Bright Flags, a collection of poems about or in some way haunted by American historical events.
Maile Chapman
The Pink Church (novel, working title)
The Pink Church (novel, working title)
Maile Chapman is the author of Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto, a novel (April, 2010). She will be working at the Cullman Center on The Pink Church, a novel about Alzheimer’s disease, the challenges of caring for aging parents, and the ways in which fear of illness can outweigh seemingly self-evident scientific fact.
Mary Gaitskill
The End of the Seasons (novel, working title)
The Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow
Mary Gaitskill is the author of three story collections, Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don’t Cry, and two novels, Two Girls Fat and Thin and Veronica. At the Cullman Center she will be doing research for a novel set in ‘90s Manhattan and upstate New York. Her research will focus on New York City history, the underground literary press, political coverage of the Middle East by the American media, and personal oral histories.
The End of the Seasons (novel, working title)
The Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow
Mary Gaitskill is the author of three story collections, Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don’t Cry, and two novels, Two Girls Fat and Thin and Veronica. At the Cullman Center she will be doing research for a novel set in ‘90s Manhattan and upstate New York. Her research will focus on New York City history, the underground literary press, political coverage of the Middle East by the American media, and personal oral histories.
Annette Gordon-Reed
Monticello Legacies
Monticello Legacies
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark. She is author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, the editor of Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History, and co-author with Vernon Jordan of Vernon Can Read! Her bookThe Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for History and the 2008 National Book Award for General Non-Fiction. Professor Gordon-Reed was awarded the 2009 National Humanities Medal at the White House. At the Cullman Center she will work on the second and final volume of her biography of the Hemings family, tracing several lines up to the first decades of the 20th Century.
David Hinton
Elsewhere: Landscape and Consciousness (Essays)
Selected Poems of Mei Yao-ch'en (Translation)
Elsewhere: Landscape and Consciousness (Essays)
Selected Poems of Mei Yao-ch'en (Translation)
David Hinton is an independent writer and literary translator of Chinese poetry. His most recent poetry translation is Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology (2008). Hinton has translated the four seminal masterworks of Chinese philosophy:Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, Analects, Mencius. He has received the Landon Translation Prize (Academy of American Poets), the PEN Translation Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and the NEH. In addition to translating the Sung Dynasty poet Mei Yao-ch’en at the Cullman Center, Hinton will be working on a book of essays about landscape and consciousness from the deep ecological perspective of ancient Chinese thought, with a special focus on how that perspective operates in our own everyday experience.
Sara Lipton
Dark Mirror: Jews, Vision and Witness, 1000 - 1500.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow
Dark Mirror: Jews, Vision and Witness, 1000 - 1500.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow
Sara Lipton teaches medieval history at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. She is the author of Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisee, which was awarded the John Nicholas Brown Prize by the Medieval Academy of America. She has written editorials and commentary on contemporary Israeli society and inter-religious relations for The Los Angeles Times, TomDispatch.com, and Alternet. At the Cullman Center she will be working on a book called Dark Mirror: Jews, Vision and Witness, 1000 – 1500, which will attempt to bring coherence to the dizzying proliferation of medieval Christian images of Jews.
Larissa MacFarquhar is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has written profiles of Barack Obama, John Ashbery, Noam Chomsky, and Paul Krugman, among others. Last year she wrote about several people who had each donated a kidney to a stranger, and the complex, uneasy responses they encountered. At the Cullman Center, she will be working on a book that will expand on that piece, combining portraits of extremely virtuous people with a history of virtue and attitudes towards it.
Michael Meyer
In Manchuria: Life on a Rice Farm in China's Northeast
In Manchuria: Life on a Rice Farm in China's Northeast
Michael Meyer is the author of The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed, which depicts the capital’s oldest neighborhood as the city remade itself for the 2008 Olympics. A Lowell Thomas Award winner for travel writing, Meyer has published pieces in Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Book Review, Time, Smithsonian, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The Los Angeles Times. In 2009 he received the Whiting Writers’ Award. At the Cullman Center he will work on a nonfiction book combining history and reporting about a family’s organic rice farm in China’s far northeast.
James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College, and chair of the Language and Literature Division there. He has published books on Herodotus, ancient geography, and Alexander the Great, and his history of the succession crisis following Alexander's death will be published by Knopf in 2011. Romm’s project at the Cullman Center is a book on the extraordinarily complex and difficult relationship between the moral philosopher Seneca and his pupil Nero, who inherited rule of the Roman Empire at age 16.
David Sandlin
Belfaust (graphic novel)
Belfaust (graphic novel)
David Sandlin teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. His illustrations and comics have been published in The Best American Comics 2009, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications, and his paintings, prints, books, and installations have been exhibited widely in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and Australia. At the Cullman Center, he will work on a graphic novel called Belfaust, , the culmination of his eight-volume artist’s book series, A Sinner’s Progress.
Matthew Stewart
The God of the Green Mountains: On the Heterodox Origins of the American Revolution
The Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History
The God of the Green Mountains: On the Heterodox Origins of the American Revolution
The Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History
Matthew Stewart is the author of The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World and Monturiol’s Dream: The Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the World. His essays have appeared inThe Atlantic,The Independent,The Big Money, and other publications. At the Cullman Center, Stewart will work on a book about the role of Deism in the founding of the United States. He will examine the philosophical and religious views of, among others, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Thomas Young, and Ethan Allen, the leader of the Green Mountain Boys.
Andrew McConnell Stott
A Year Without Summer: Life in the Shadow of Byron and Shelley
The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellow
A Year Without Summer: Life in the Shadow of Byron and Shelley
The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellow
Andrew McConnell Stott teaches English at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He is the author of Comedy (2005), and The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter, Madness and the Story of Britain’s Greatest Comedian (2009), which won the Royal Society of Literature/Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction and was serialized as a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. At the Cullman Center he will be writing about Romantic celebrity from the point of view of two people whose lives were irreversibly altered through their proximity to fame; he will use the rich resources in the Library’s Pfrorzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle.
Wells Tower is the author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, a collection of short fiction. His stories and articles have appeared inThe New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, GQ, and The Washington Post Magazine, among other publications. Tower has received the Plimpton Prize fromThe Paris Review and two Pushcart Prizes; he was named Best Young Writer of 2009 by theVillage Voice and is a finalist for the 2010 Young Lions’ Award at The New York Public Library. At the Cullman Center he will work on Low Estate, a novel that begins in the Great Depression and will end during the contemporary mortgage crisis.