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 five years, 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 2024 will be “Multilingualisms.” Its members will meet weekly to share and discuss their work on the topic, and they will be invited to submit their essays 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 seven years (i.e., in 2017 or later). Preference will be given to people still in their home 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 choose the Balzan Colloquium as your top preference by dragging and dropping the listed topics on the form in the desired order. You should also be sure in your personal statement to indicate the basis of your interest in the year’s Colloquium topic, and the ways in which you’d expect the colloquium to be useful to you in further developing your interests.
Here is a description of this year’s topic, Multilingualisms:
National literatures have often been understood in terms of a single national language, but no nation has ever been purely monolingual. Four millennia ago, the Sumerian poet-king Shulgi of Ur prided himself on his fluency in the five languages spoken at his court. Writers since then have regularly taken account of the variety of languages and dialects around them, and they themselves have often written in more than one language. To take only a few possibilities, this colloquium will offer its participants the opportunity to explore the interactions of Arabic and French in Morocco, Ukrainian and Russian in Ukraine, Spanish and Nahuatl in Mexico, or Hindi, English, and Tamil in South India. Meeting in divided bilingual Cyprus, the colloquium will build a comparative perspective into the variety of the world’s multilingual cultures.
FAQs
- 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.
- 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.
- Can I apply if I am coming from an IWL affiliate? Yes, so long as you came to graduate school from one of the listed regions.
- Is the program open to MA students? Yes, if doing publishable work.
- 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.
- Do I already need to have published scholarly work? No, but your writing sample needs to be of high quality.
- What topics are planned for future years? We expect the following years’ topics to be:
2025 (Reykjavik): Literature and environmental crisis
2026 (Berlin): World Literature beyond the Anglosphere
2027 (Harvard): Premodernities
2028 (tentatively in Seoul): Imperial peripheries