Fellows and Their Topics for the Year 2009-2010

Esther Allen
Flaubert and the Woman Bitten by a Snake
 
Esther Allen’s translations include the Penguin Classics anthology José Martí: Selected Writings and, most recently, the novel Rex by former Cullman Center Fellow José Manuel Prieto. An Assistant Professor at Baruch College, CUNY, she cofounded the PEN World Voices international literature festival in 2005, and has guided the work of the PEN Translation Fund since its inception in 2004. In 2006, she was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. At the Cullman Center, she will work on two previously unknown texts by Flaubert that were discovered in the back of a desk in 2003:  written for himself alone, then sealed away, they describe the funerals of his two closest friends, in 1848 and 1869, in immediate and minute detail. Allen will trace the threads connecting those texts to other letters, private documents, and works of art across Flaubert's life.
 
Susan Einbinder 
Memory’s Scribes: Jewish Physician-Poets in Late Medieval Europe
The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellow
 
Susan Einbinder teaches Hebrew literature at the Hebrew Union College's Cincinnati campus. She is the author of Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France and No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature, Expulsion, and the Memory of Medieval France. At the Cullman Center, she will be working on a study of medieval Jewish physicians in southern Europe, their medical and nonmedical writings, their passion for learning, and the price they paid for their remarkable careers.
 
Ian Frazier
Travels in Siberia
 
Ian Frazier writes humor pieces, essays, and long nonfiction. His books include Dating Your Mom, Coyote v. Acme,Lamentations of the Father, Great Plains, Family, and On the Rez. At the Cullman Center, he will be doing research for a book to be called Travels in Siberia – about Siberia's history, geography, and place in the popular imagination, combined with accounts of Frazier’s own travels there.
 
François Furstenberg
When the United States Spoke French: Trans-Atlantic Politics, Land, and Diplomacy in the Age of Revolution
The Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History
 
François Furstenberg is assistant professor of history at the Université de Montréal. He is the author of In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation. At the Cullman Center, he will be working on a book that connects American and French history in the age of eighteenth-century revolutions by following a set of transatlantic French émigrés who integrated themselves into the young nation’s political and economic life.
 
Rivka Galchen
The Nature of Theater in Oklahoma (fiction)
 
Rivka Galchen is the author of the novel, Atmospheric Disturbances.  Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker,The Believer, Scientific American, Zoetrope, BOMB, Open City and The New York Times.The recipient of a 2006 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, she currently teaches creative writing at Columbia University. While at the Cullman Center, she will be working on The Nature Theater of Oklahoma, a novel that plays with the common forms found in religious autobiography and pulp fiction.

Michael Golston
Allegory, Surrealism, and Postmodern Poetic Form
 
Michael Golston teaches twentieth-century poetry and poetics at Columbia University. His first book, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science, won the Louis Martz Prize for 2008. At the Cullman Center, he will be working on a book about allegory, surrealism, and postmodern poetic form.
 
Nicole Krauss
From the Desk of Daniel Varsky (fiction)
The Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow
 
Nicole Krauss is the author of the novels Man Walks into a Room and The History of Love. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have received numerous awards, including the Saroyan Prize and France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and Best American Short Stories, and in 2007 she was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. At the Cullman Center, she will be working on a novel about a desk that travels across the world and the lives it draws together.
 
James Livingston
The Perils of Pluralism: The Life and Times of Horace Kallen
 
James Livingston is a professor of history at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and the author of four books, the most recent of which, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century, will be published in November. At the Cullman Center, he will be working on a biography of Horace Kallen, the founding father of cultural pluralism.
 
Andy Martin
What It Feels Like to Be Alive: According to Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus
 
Andy Martin teaches French at the University of Cambridge and writes about a great many subjects, including surfing. He is the author of Stealing the Wave, Walking on Water, Napoleon the Novelist, Waiting for Bardot, and The Knowledge of Ignorance. His latest book, Beware Invisible Cows: My Search for the Soul of the Universe, has just been published in the United Kingdom. At the Cullman Center, he will be working on a book about the philosophy of everyday life and on a project concerned with the art of description in the French novel.
 
 
Richard McGuire is a regular art contributor to The New Yorker. He has written and illustrated both children's books and experimental comics, and he is the author of two books of experiments in graphic narrative, Popeyeandolive and P+O. His comics have appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney's, Le Monde, and Libération. At the Cullman Center, he will be working on an illustrated book entitled Here, an exploration of time in a fixed location.
 
Joseph O'Neill
Dubai: A Novel
 
Joseph O’Neill is the author of three novels, most recently Netherland, which won the PEN/Faulkner Prize in 2009 and was named one of the “10 Best Books of the Year” for 2008 by The New York Times. He has also written a nonfiction book entitled Blood-Dark Track: A Family History, which was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002 and a book of the year for The Economist and The Irish Times.
 
Karen Russell
Shibboleth (working title, fiction)
The von der Heyden Fellow
 
Karen Russell’s collection of stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, was named a Best Book of 2006 by The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, andThe Los Angeles Times; in 2007 Russell was included in Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta,Conjunctions, Zoetrope, and Best American Short Stories (2007 and 2008). At the Cullman Center, she will begin work on a novel set in a mythical town during the Dust Bowl drought.
 
Laura Shapiro
Six Dreadful Dinners: Tales from the Underside of Food
 
Laura Shapiro, a journalist and culinary historian, is the author of Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century; Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America; and Julia Child, which won the International Association of Culinary Professionals award for literary food writing. At the Cullman Center, she will be working on a collection of biographical essays about women and food, looking in particular at iconic dinners where trouble arrived on a platter.
 
John Tresch
Life, Science, and Death: Edgar Allan Poe’s American Experiments
 
John Tresch teaches history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. His current manuscript-in-progress is The Romantic Machine: Metamorphosis and Technology in France, 1820 to 1851. At the Cullman Center, he will be working on a book called Life, Science, and Death: Edgar Allan Poe’s American Experiments, which will show how Poe’s writings exploited the early Republic’s scientific and technological obsessions.