Kai Bird, the Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, announced today the award of seven resident fellowships at the Graduate Center, including the third Leon Levy/Alfred P. Sloan fellow for a biography on a figure from science and a Dissertation Fellowship. Mr. Bird, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, is most recently the author of The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, which will be published on June 15 by Crown. The Leon Levy Center for Biography is hosted by the Graduate Center at the City University of New York—and generously funded by the Leon Levy Foundation. Each resident fellow receives a $72,000 grant, research assistance, writing space and full access to research facilities. The six Leon Levy Biography fellows and Dissertation Fellow for 2020-21 are:
Sloan/Leon Levy Fellow Patchen Barss is the author of the illustrated children’s book Flow Spin Grow: Looking for Patterns in Nature (OwlKids 2018), the editor of Conquering Space (Scientific American Classics, 2015), and the author of The Erotic Engine: How Pornography has Powered Mass Communication, from Gutenberg to Google (Random House, 2010). He has written for BBC Future, Scientific American, Nautilus, and The Walrus. He is working on a literary biography of mathematician and cosmologist Roger Penrose.
Glenn Frankel worked for many years at The Washington Post, winning a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. He taught journalism at Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin, where he directed the School of Journalism. He has written five books, including three that have explored the creation of an iconic American movie and the historical era it reflects. His new project is a biography of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who played a crucial role in the rise of the band that revolutionized popular culture.
Helen Koh is a writer and researcher specializing in East Asian culture and history. She has been on the faculty of Columbia University and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She is currently Director of Creative GC Art Science Connect, an initiative that advances interdisciplinary research at The Graduate Center. Helen has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Japanese Ministry of Education. She is writing a biography of video artist and Fluxus founder Nam June Paik.
Dan Nadel is curator-at-large for the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis. His recent books include Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence 1945-1976 (Bad Dimension Press, 2020) and the upcoming It’s Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940-1980 (New York Review Comics, 2021), which accompanies his forthcoming exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago Comics, 1960 to Now. Nadel is writing the biography of the celebrated and controversial cartoonist Robert Crumb.
Adam Shatz is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. A former literary editor of The Nation magazine, he has been a visiting professor at Bard College and New York University and a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars. At the Leon Levy Center for Biography, Shatz will be writing a book about the Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial revolutionary Frantz Fanon.
Rachel L. Swarns is a journalist, author and professor who writes about race and race relations as a contributing writer for The New York Times. Her articles about Georgetown University and its roots in slavery touched off a national conversation about American institutions and their ties to this painful period of history. She is the author of American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama (2012) and a co-author of Unseen: Unpublished Black History from The New York Times Photo Archives [bit.ly] (2017). Her forthcoming book, which will be published by Random House, is a multigenerational biography of an enslaved family torn apart by the 1838 slave sale that saved Georgetown from financial ruin.
Leon Levy Dissertation Fellow Blair Asbury Brooks is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center. Her dissertation, Heinz Berggruen: Dealing and Collecting Modern Art in the Shadow of World War II, is an art historical study of the life and career of the German-born dealer-collector. Her dissertation research has been supported by the Frick Art Reference Library’s Center for the History of Collecting and the Getty Research Institute. Previously, Brooks was Director of Exhibitions at Pace Gallery, then a Director at Peter Freeman, Inc. and Lisson Gallery. She holds a B.A. from Wellesley College and an M.A. from Columbia University.