Cynthia Haven


Cynthia L. Haven is an American literary scholar, author, critic, Slavicist, and journalist. She is a .

Education

While at the University of Michigan, she was awarded two prestigious Hopwood Awards and studied with Nobel poet Joseph Brodsky.

Publications

Her books include Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, which the named one of the best books of 2018. The biography was also named a 2019 CHOICE Magazine Outstanding Academic Title. Her Czesław Miłosz: A California Life was a . Leading critic and editor Leon Wieseltier wrote, “Her intuition is right: Czesław Miłosz and California are indeed a chapter in each other's history.”
Her books have been reviewed in The New York Review of Books, ''The Times Literary Supplement, World Literature Today, The San Francisco Chronicle, Harper's Magazine and many other publications.
Her Penguin Modern Classics anthology for René Girard, All Desire Is a Desire for Being: Essential Writings'' was published in June 2023 in the U.K., and the following year in the U.S. She was the editor for a short German anthology on Girard, published in 2022 with the Leipzig publisher Reclam, for its popular "Was bedeutet das alles?" series.

Recognition

She was awarded a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellowship with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna and was a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages while researching her book on French theorist René Girard. She was a Voegelin fellow at the Hoover Institution while working on her book on Nobel poet Joseph Brodsky and his translator, George L. Kline. She held the inaugural Milton Cottage Residency in Chalfont St. Giles, United Kingdom, in 2018. She blogs at . She has written for a wide range of publications, including The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times Book Review. She was awarded the in Washington D.C., November 6, 1923. She was a in the summer of 2024, and gave the . She gave the .

Books

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    Selected Interviews and Articles

  14. "," January 6, 2026.
  15. BBC, "Beyond Belief, November 30, 2025.
  16. , The Free Press, June 29, 2025.
  17. ,Times Literary Supplement, February 28, 2025.
  18. ," the endowed McDermott Lecture at the University of Dallas, February 27, 2025.
  19. "," Hoover Digest, Winter 2025.
  20. , Miller's Book Review, November 2, 2024.
  21. "," April 27, 2024.
  22. Milosz and the Captive Mind, course syllabus. In R. Ravaglia, Education and Liberty. The Ricketts Great Books College, 2024.
  23. "Cynthia L. Haven Talks About René Girard,'' ''Chronicle of Higher Education Review, October 9, 2023.
  24. , Meditations with Zohar, Apple Podcasts, February 14, 2023.
  25. "," San Francisco Chronicle, February 5, 2023
  26. Conversations with Tyler Cowen, Aug. 24, 2022
  27. , Los Angeles Review of Books, April 6, 2021.
  28. Robert Pogue Harrison's "Entitled Opinions," July 25, 2022.
  29. , Los Angeles Review of Books, June 8, 2020
  30. "," inaugural McGrath Church Life Journal'' lecture at the University of Notre Dame, December 5, 2019.
  31. The Athenaeum Review, Episode 45, 2019.
  32. , "Full Stop: Reviews, Interviews, Marginalia," May 15, 2019.
  33. , Johns Hopkins University The Hub, August 8, 2018.
  34. , New York Times Book Review, February 23, 2018.
  35. , Hoover Digest, July 7, 2017.
  36. , Los Angeles Review of Books, June 15, 2017.
  37. , Times Literary Supplement, October 11, 2014.
  38. , The Book Haven, February 3, 2014.
Category:Living people
Category:1963 births
Category:21st-century American women writers
Category:American literary critics
Category:21st-century American journalists
Category:American women critics
Category:21st-century American biographers
Category:American women biographers
Category:21st-century American women journalists