Balzan Colloquium

A generous award from the Balzan Foundation is giving IWL the opportunity to bring a group of participants from five regions not yet well represented among our affiliates: Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and South/Southeast Asia. Each year for the next four fyears, this funding will provide all expenses, plus a stipend, for approximately ten participants to participate in the session overall and to form the year’s Balzan Colloquium. Each year this colloquium will be devoted to a specific topic, which in 2026 will be “World Literature beyond the Anglosphere.” Its members will meet weekly to share and discuss their work on the topic, and they will be invited to submit their essays for consideration for a special issue of the Journal of World Literature, to appear in the fall of the next year.

The foundation’s funding is for people who come from one of the five regions included in the award. Applicants must be current graduate students or have received the PhD within the past dozen years (i.e., in 2014 or later). We do not consider race, ethnicity, national origin, or sex in making selections for this program. Preference will be given to people still in the region, though you can also apply if you have gone abroad for graduate studies. Preference will also be given to applicants whose work actively engages with the year’s topic and who show promise of producing publishable work of high quality.

To apply for the Balzan Colloquium, fill out the full regular IWL application, and rank first the Balzan colloquium when you get to the question about choosing your colloquium. You should also be sure in your personal statement to indicate your scholarly contribution to this year’s Colloquium topic, and the ways in which you’d expect the colloquium to be useful to you in your scholarly work.

Balzan Colloquium 2026: World Literature beyond the Anglosphere

In 1952, the great German philologist Erich Auerbach presciently expressed a fear that in a postwar global monoculture “Goethe’s ideal of Weltliteratur would be at once realized and destroyed.” Since then, English has achieved an unparalleled status as a global lingua franca, and it is often seen as dampening the world’s linguistic and cultural variety. Yet writers in many languages continue to reach a broader public by other means. This colloquium will give its participants an opportunity to explore networks that operate outside the purview of the Anglophone world, whether in languages of global reach such as Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish, or through interactions among smaller literatures in “interliterary communities” (as the Slovakian comparatist Dionýz Ďurišin has called them) in different regions of the world.

 

For any questions related to the Balzan Scholarship, please contact Maria Dabija at: mariadabija@g.harvard.edu

FAQs

  1. What does the Balzan award cover? Full tuition; round-trip economy airfare; lodging in the housing arranged by our host university; US $1,000 for food and incidental expenses; a $1,000 stipend.
  2. Do I need to fill out the statement of financial need? Yes, if you’d be seeking a tuition reduction in the event of not being selected for the Balzan Colloquium.
  3. Can I apply if I am coming from an IWL affiliate? Yes, o long as you came to graduate school from one of the listed regions.
  4. Is the program open to MA students? Yes, if doing publishable work.
  5. Does my writing sample have to be specifically on the colloquium’s topic? No, but your personal statement should make clear how your work has prepared you to contribute actively on the topic.
  6. Do I already need to have published scholarly work? No, but your writing sample needs to be of high quality.
  7. What topics are planned for future years? We expect the following years’ topics to be:

2027 (TBA): Premodernities

2028 (Harvard): Imperial peripheries