Ellen Hinsey

Ellen Hinsey (born 1960 in Boston) is an author, researcher and professor.

Her work is concerned with history, ethics and democracy with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe.

She has taught at the French graduate school the Ecole Polytechnique and Skidmore College's Paris program.

She has most recently been a visiting professor at Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen.

Ellen Hinsey was born in 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts.

She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Tufts University and a graduate degree from Université de Paris VII.

For the last three decades she has lived in Europe.

Hinsey's current work addresses authoritarianism.

Hinsey's first book, Cities of Memory, draws on her experiences at the Berlin Wall on the weekend of November 9, 1989, as well as in Prague during the Velvet Revolution.

The book received the Yale Series Award and was published by Yale University Press in 1996.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Die Welt, The Irish Times, Der Tagesspiegel, Gazeta Wyborcza, The New England Review and The Paris Review, among other publications.

Translations

She has received a number of awards including fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin (2001) and the DAAD Berlin Künstlerprogramm Fellowship (2015), a Lannan Foundation Award, a Union League Civic/Arts Award, a Stover Prize and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award.

She is a senior editor at the New American Studies Journal and is the international correspondent for The New England Review.

She has been an invited speaker at the University of Bonn, the American Academy in Berlin, the Polish Academy of Sciences, the University of Munich, Freie Universität Berlin and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, among others.

She has been an invited author at international festivals and other venues including The New School (New York), Poetry International (Royal Festival Hall), the London Book Fair, the Leipzig Book Fair, the International Literaturfestival Berlin, Cuirt International Festival of Literature, the Dublin Festival of Literature, the Sorbonne, the University of Łódź and The Arsenal Book Festival (Kiev) among others.

Work

Hinsey is the author of six books and has edited and translated three others.

Beginning in February 2002, she traveled to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague to listen to witness sessions.

Her third book, Update on the Descent, addressed this experience, and is an anatomy of political violence.

Her second book, The White Fire of Time (Wesleyan University Press, 2002 / Bloodaxe Books, 2003) was written after a family tragedy, and explores ethics and renewal.

Reviewer Chris Edgoose noted: "The word ‘important’ is over-used (...) but in the case of Ellen Hinsey's The Illegal Age it seems to me the only appropriate adjective (...). It is not a book we can afford to ignore. Like Robert O. Paxton’s 2005 The Anatomy of Fascism, this is a book which approaches its subject with the absolute clarity it requires."

Hinsey is the editor and co-translator of The Junction: Selected Poems of Tomas Venclova (Bloodaxe Books, 2008).

It was published in 2009 by Notre Dame University Press and Bloodaxe Books and has been called "an urgent, probing book."

It includes first-hand accounts and analyses of the impact of the 2012 Russian presidential election and its aftermath, the rise of populism in Poland and the constitutional crisis, Hungarian illiberalism, Václav Havel's ethical legacy and post-1989 German reconstruction.

A selection of these essays first appeared in The New England Review.

Her other translations include The Secret Piano, by Zhu Xiao-Mei, an account of growing up under the Cultural Revolution (Amazon Crossing, 2012) and Wild Harmonies by Hélène Grimaud (Riverhead/Penguin Books, 2005).

Hinsey's collection of essays, Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism (Telos Press, 2017), examines new forms of authoritarianism.

Reviewing the 2017 German translation (Matthes & Seitz), literary critic Gregor Dotzauer called it an "anthropology of violence," and notes that "Er zeigt auch, wozu eine Poesie in der Lage ist, die bereit ist, es mit so ziemlich allen Furien dieser Welt aufzunehmen."

In 2018, The Illegal Age was published (Arc Publications, 2018).

It is a philosophical-poetic investigation into the twentieth-century's legacy of totalitarianism and the rise of political illegality.

The book was the UK Poetry Book Society's 2018 Autumn Choice.

Her memoir collaboration with Lithuanian dissident and poet Tomas Venclova, Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova /Ellen Hinsey, examines postwar Eastern European totalitarianism, dissidence, culture and ethics.

It has been published in German, English, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Polish and Russian editions, and was nominated for Lithuania's 2018 Book of the Year.