This month we highlight the research of Fellows from the class of 2024–25 whose projects explore writing as an embodied process in the lives and practices of writers, and as means through which we shape and come to understand lived experience—both our own and that of others.
Nicholas Boggs
Independent Scholar
Frank Shovlin
University of Liverpool
John Wood Sweet
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Shengqing Wu
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Nicholas Boggs
Project: Baldwin: A Love Story
Nicholas Boggs is a writer and independent scholar who received his BA from Yale University and his PhD in English from Columbia University. He is the coeditor, with Jennifer DeVere Brody, of a new edition of James Baldwin’s collaboration with French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (Duke, 2018). His scholarly work has appeared in Callaloo, The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, James Baldwin Now (NYU), and is forthcoming in The James Baldwin Review and Speculative Light: The Arts of James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney (Duke). His literary biography, Baldwin: A Love Story, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US, Bloomsbury UK, and Editions Seuil in France.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
Way back in 1996, as an undergraduate, I discovered James Baldwin’s out-of-print “children’s book for adults,” Little Man, Little Man, at the Beinecke Library at Yale. Before he died in 2005, I tracked down the book’s illustrator, French artist Yoran Cazac, a mysterious but as it turns out major figure from Baldwin’s life in the 1970s. Over the long process of bringing the book back into print (which happened in 2018, thanks to Duke University Press), I became interested in the people, places, and communities that inspired and sustained Baldwin during his life as a self-proclaimed “transatlantic commuter.” In the process, two guiding questions for me became, what significant stories and aspects of his life have remained untold, and how has this impacted the way we understand his writing and his legacy?
In the course of your research, have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
It’s widely understood how important Paris and the south of France were to Baldwin’s development. And I knew that he spent a significant amount of time in Turkey, too, during the 1960s, thanks to the pioneering work of David Leeming and Magdalena Zaborowska. But there’s nothing quite like combing through the archives to come to a new understanding of just how much Baldwin really considered Istanbul his home during this period. Even less understood has been the importance of shorter but still significant stays in Corsica, Switzerland, and Italy, all of which I look at closely in my book.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
I hope this book will contribute to research developments in black internationalism, LGBTQ+ literary history, and to a growing body of new and innovative approaches to biography, such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ recent biography of Audre Lorde. Since my book focuses on geographical and interpersonal networks of collaboration and exchange, rather than the idea of the singular author, I am particularly fond of Che Gossett’s formulation about the importance of asking questions “about the genre of biography itself,” as they put it, and “what possibilities might exist beyond the individuated self as the object of biography.”
Frank Shovlin
Project: John McGahern: A Writing Life
Frank Shovlin is from the west of Ireland and was educated at the universities of Galway and Oxford before taking up a lectureship at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool where he is now a professor. He has published widely on a range of Irish writers, primarily from the twentieth century. In 2018–19 he was holder of a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship to work on his critically acclaimed edition of John McGahern’s letters.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
I have been intrigued by John McGahern and his work since my first encounter at the University of Galway in 1990. By a stroke of luck McGahern came to teach at the university in the Spring of 1993; as a man he was quietly authoritative and charismatic, and the class changed how I thought about writing. Many years later I published a couple of short articles about his work that led to my monograph, Touchstones: John McGahern’s Classical Style (2016). This work attracted the attention of John’s widow, Madeline, who contacted me with a view to editing her late husband’s letters which were published in 2021. Our work together on this project led organically to thinking about writing the biography which will try to get to the root of his fiction’s startling power and grace. Where does great writing come from, is my question.
In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
I have been continually surprised by the range and types of influence on McGahern’s work. One might have guessed Proust or Yeats easily enough, but I had no idea that Rilke, for instance, was such an important early exemplar. As a writer and as a man, McGahern is still often misinterpreted as an elegist of rural Ireland, a kind of pastoral poet. My work will seek to locate him in a wider international context and to debunk what he called “the myth of farmer John.”
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
It is possible for even great writers to become forgotten; my ambition is for that not to happen to John McGahern. I hope that my research will both copper-fasten his reputation with already established readers and bring him to new, appreciative audiences. His work will endure—to read him is to learn and to grow, and I hope that by writing his life I can allow readers in the years to come insights that will help them on their journey into the work.
John Wood Sweet
Project: The Captive’s Tale: Venture Smith and the African Roots of the American Republic
John Wood Sweet is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and specializes in Early American history—a field that encompasses the intertwined histories of European settlers, Native peoples, and Africans in North America from the earliest colonial encounters through the Age of Revolution. He has explored ways to use life stories of marginalized people who didn’t leave much of a trace in the documentary record to reframe our understanding of Early America and the Atlantic world. His most recent book, The Sewing Girl’s Tale, was an experiment in writing character-driven narrative history. At the National Humanities Center, Sweet will be working on a contextual biography of Venture Smith, a West African who was taken captive as a child, survived the Middle Passage, was enslaved for decades in colonial North America, and published a searing account of his experiences in the era of the American Revolution.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
When I first read Venture Smith’s autobiographical Narrative (New London, Conn., 1798), it struck me as a revelation. Little more than a thin pamphlet bound in blue paper, the original edition was largely ignored at the time—and in the centuries since. Arguably the first American slave narrative, it stands the dominant self-gratulatory narrative of the Revolutionary era on its head. His is not a soothing story of freedom triumphing over slavery. He does not lionize the so-called Founding Fathers, though his son served in Washington’s army. His is a story of an African childhood and the warfare that forced him into the world of American slavery; a story of brutal conflicts and injustice that long thwarted his efforts to free himself and his family; a story of continuing struggles, after the Revolution, for equality, justice, and dignity.
In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
Venture Smith’s Narrative is, itself, an astonishing document: a vivid eyewitness account of events that historians can usually glimpse only through fragmentary traces in documents created by others. My journey to explore his life and lost worlds has taken me from New England farms, to archives on three continents, to the West African savannah—and has been full of surprises. I’ve stood in the men’s dungeon in the slave castle at Anomabo (Ghana) where he was held captive. I’ve tried (and failed) to heft a 442-pound stone he is said to have lifted. Once, while visiting a slave castle on the coast of Ghana, I ran into someone I had come to know at Venture Smith gatherings back home: one of his descendants, who also happened to be there, looking to make a connection with the world her ancestor had passed through almost three centuries ago.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
In telling his life story, Venture Smith challenged an emerging mythology that cast the United States as a newborn nation, a clean break from history. In this book, I tell a story that is intimate and personal, but also vast and momentous. How does the Revolutionary era look when viewed not through the eyes of the so-called Founding Fathers but through the eyes of a boy captured in his homeland and forced to fight for his freedom and for his family? How do we reckon with our nation’s long colonial past, the brutal negotiations at the heart of Atlantic slavery, the struggles that made the northern state free, and enduring conflicts over citizenship and belonging? The story of Venture Smith is a story about our nation’s African, as well as European, roots—a story about the legacy of the Revolution, about what it means to be American.
Shengqing Wu
Project: The Chinese Poetics of Tactility and Modern Love
Shengqing Wu holds a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is currently a professor of Chinese literature at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Prior to teaching in Hong Kong, she was an associate professor at Wesleyan University. Wu’s research interests encompass the literary and intellectual history of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century China, image-text relations, the history of Chinese photography, and sensory studies. She has received fellowships from the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Harvard-Yenching Institute.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
Many years ago, while writing my dissertation at UCLA, I researched Chinese translations of Western poems at the turn of the twentieth century. I was confounded as well as amused at those untranslatable moments when Chinese poets encountered scenes of kissing and intimate touch. I soon recognized the paucity of descriptions of kisses in traditional literature and a lack of poetic vocabulary for the kiss. Browsing magazines in the Republican era, I also discovered many textual and visual examples of teaching Chinese how to kiss. With my curiosity thus piqued, I explored over the years how intimacy and sensory experience are mediated by the transnational flows of texts and images, and how they are negotiated within their respective historical situations, ideologies, and forms.
In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
A range of romantic intimacy, forms of tactility, and bodily gestures that were assumed natural or commonly taken for granted in our time were, as a matter of fact, radically reconfigured or reinvented in modern times, through various cultural practices, especially those of translation. Kissing and the sensuous touch were endowed with symbolic meanings relating to “romantic love” in modern emotional life. In this process, language, literature, and mass media played a pivotal role for “sentimental education.”
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
Many scholars in the field of modern Chinese literature have profoundly illuminated the moments of rupture or the paradigmatic shift of emotions in terms of the rise of China’s romantic generation, the transformation of the “structure of feeling,” and the intense conflicts between love and revolutionary ideologies. This book project continues to explore romantic love’s connection to and rupture from the traditional emotional discourse of love but with a distinctive focus on the role of the tactile and carnal. I hope this project will address a range of contemporary critical issues concerning the entangled relations between tactility and embodied feeling, affect and literature, and more broadly, embodied experience and cultural modernity.