Welcome to Visiting Scholar Anca Cristofovici

The Simpson Center is delighted to welcome Anca Cristofovici as a visiting scholar for the month of May 2018. Cristofovici, an accomplished scholar and novelist, will study the books in the Special Collection of UW Libraries for a project on artists’ books and independent publishers in the Pacific Northwest.

She will also read from her novel Stela (Ninebark Press, 2015) at the Evergreen College in Olympia Series on May 16 and at Hugo House in Seattle on May 19.

Cristofovici was born in Bucharest. In 1985, she defected to France, where she is currently Professor of American Literature and Arts at the University of Caen. She is also Director of the Center for Cultural Memory Studies (ERIBIA) and the author of two books of essays, Touching Surfaces. Photographic Aesthetics, Temporality, Aging (2009) and John Hawkes: L’enfant & Le Cannibale (1997). She is an editor of The Art of Collaboration: Artists, Poets, Books (2015), and has contributed to several collections of original essays including Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers (2009) and Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (edited by Simpson Center Director Kathy Woodward, 1999).

Cristofovici is also a trilingual writer (English, French, and Romanian). Her fiction, poetry, contributions to art catalogues, and her translations have been published in Europe and the United States. She was laureate of Villa Mont Noir, the Marguerite Yourcenar Foundation for European Writers in France, and the Rowohlt Foundation in Switzerland. She has collaborated with American artists and poets and contributes yearly to the international intermedia installation The Venice Vending Machine, for Venice Biennale Collateral Shows. She has received grants from the British Academy, Université Paris-Sorbonne, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. She has a forthcoming talk on collaborative art at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool.

Welcome, Anca!