Ellen Hinsey


Ellen Hinsey is an author, poet, 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 École Polytechnique, and in Skidmore College's Paris program. She has most recently been a visiting professor at Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen.

Early life and education

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.

Career

Hinsey's current work addresses authoritarianism. She has received a number of awards including fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin and the DAAD Berlin Künstlerprogramm Fellowship, 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 École Normale Supérieure, among others. She has been an invited author at international festivals and other venues including The New School, Poetry International, 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 among others.
Work
Hinsey is the author of six books and has edited and translated three others.
Hinsey's collection of essays, Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism, examines new forms of authoritarianism. 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.
In 2018, The Illegal Age was published. It is a philosophical-poetic investigation into the twentieth-century's legacy of totalitarianism and the rise of political illegality. 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." 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.
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 collection of poems, Update on the Descent, addressed this experience, and is an anatomy of political violence. It was published in 2009 by Notre Dame University Press and Bloodaxe Books and has been called "an urgent, probing book." Reviewing the 2017 German translation, 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."
Her second collection of poems, The White Fire of Time was written after a family tragedy, and explores ethics and renewal.
Hinsey's first collection of poems, 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 was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by James Dickey 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
Hinsey is the editor and co-translator of The Junction: Selected Poems of Tomas Venclova. Her other translations include The Secret Piano, by Zhu Xiao-Mei, an account of growing up under the Cultural Revolution and Wild Harmonies by Hélène Grimaud.

Honors and awards

Books

The Invisible Fugue The Illegal Age, Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism, Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova, Update on the Descent, The White Fire of Time, Cities of Memory, The Junction: Selected Poems of Tomas Venclova, editor and co-translator,, The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations, by Zhu Xiao-Mei, translation by Ellen Hinsey Wild Harmonies, by Hélène Grimaud, translation by Ellen Hinsey,

Selected articles

  • , Der Tagesspiegel, 10 November 2020
  • , Der Tagesspiegel, 9 July 2020
  • , Der Tagesspiegel, 9 June 2020
  • , The New England Review, 16 June 2020
  • , IQ, 7 June 2020
  • , Gazeta Wyborcza, 4 January 2018
  • , The New England Review, 2018
  • , TELOSscope, July 3, 2017
  • , Der Tagesspiegel, January 31, 2017The Irish Times, November 23, 2016
  • , The New England Review, 2016
  • , The New England Review, 2013
  • , The New England Review, 2011
  • , The New England Review, 2012
  • , The New England Review, 2010

Critical studies of Hinsey

  • 2011: Poetic Memory: The Forgotten Self in Plath, Howe, Hinsey, and Glück by Uta Gosmann,
  • 2012: concealing the Hedgehog by Paulina Ambrozy,
  • 2008: Another Language: Poetic Experiments in Britain and North America by Kornelia Freitag,