Congratulations to the 2024-25 Visiting Fellows & Scholars of Note!
The AMERICAN LIBRARY IN PARIS Visiting Fellowship Program is sponsored by The de Groot Foundation, and provides writers with the ability to pursue a creative project in Paris for a month or longer while participating actively in the life of the American Library.
The 2024-25 Visiting Fellows are C Pam Zhang and David Bell.
C Pam Zhang is the author of two bestselling novels, How Much of These Hills Is Gold and Land of Milk and Honey. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, a Booker Prize nominee, and the winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature, and the California Book Award. She has been a finalist for awards from PEN America, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Center for Fiction. Zhang’s writing appears in Best American Short Stories, The Cut, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.
David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Department of History at Princeton where he recently served as director of Princeton’s Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. Born in New York in 1961, he was educated at Harvard and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris before completing his doctorate at Princeton in 1991. Before returning to Princeton in 2010 he taught at Yale and Johns Hopkins, where he also served as Dean of Faculty. A specialist in the history of France, he is the author of seven books, including The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800 (Harvard University Press, 2001), The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), and most recently Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Wilson Center, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Science, and, as a Corresponding Fellow, to the British Academy. A former Contributing Editor of The New Republic, he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Nation.
The 2024-25 Scholars of Note are A. Kendra Greene, Kirstin Chen, and Melissa Febos.
A. Kendra Greene is a writer and book artist based in Dallas. She is the author and illustrator of The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, first published by Penguin and Granta, and now translated into German and French. With publications from Atlas Obscura to Zyzzyva, her work has been presented at the Smithsonian, exhibited at The Reading Room, collected as far away as Qatar, and supported by fellowships from Fulbright, MacDowell, and the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard. Tin House will unleash a collection of her essays in curiosity, No Less Strange or Wonderful, in Winter 2025.
Kirstin Chen is the New York Times best-selling author of three novels. Her latest, Counterfeit, is a Reese Witherspoon book club pick, a Roxane Gay book club pick, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. It has been translated into eight languages and is being adapted for the screen by Sony Pictures. Her previous novels are Bury What We Cannot Take and Soy Sauce for Beginners. Her next novel, Tech Wives, an exploration of the myth of genius tech founders—and the women who support them, is forthcoming. Born and raised in Singapore, she currently lives in New York City.
Melissa Febos is the nationally bestselling author of four books, most recently, Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. Her fifth book, The Dry Season, is forthcoming in 2025. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, LAMBDA Literary, The Black Mountain Institute, The British Library, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. She is a full professor at the University of Iowa.
To learn more, please visit the American Library in Paris website.