Balzan Colloquium: 10 fully-funded places at IWL in 2025

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 2025 will be “Literature and environmental crisis.” 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 2018 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 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 2025: Literature and Environmental Crisis

  The growing scholarly field of ecocriticism most often focuses on one or another national context, yet writers have long understood the global nature of environmental problems as they emerge in local settings, while other writers have taken a directly planetary (or even interplanetary) approach. As early as Babylonian literature, the worldwide deluge is sent by the gods in response to earthly overpopulation, and in The Epic of Gilgamesh the hero has to travel far from his deforested homeland to acquire cedar trees for his temples and palaces. Modern writers across the global south have emphasized the lasting effects of colonialism and neocolonialism. In her 2021 novel The Island of Missing Trees, Elif Shafak uses multiple narrators – including a tree – to portray the environmental devastation of war in Cyprus, within the complex social and political dynamics of the island’s Greek, Turkish, and English connections. We invite proposals from doctoral students, holders of postdoctoral appointments, and early-career faculty who are working on literary responses to environmental crisis. The application should include a writing sample (a dissertation chapter, essay, or book chapter, published or in draft) that deals directly with this topic, as explored in one or more works of literature or film.  

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:

2026 (Berlin): World Literature beyond the Anglosphere

2027 (Sichuan U): Premodernities

2028 (Harvard): Imperial peripheries

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