CANR
WORK TITLE: COLD WARRIORS
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CITY: Boston
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COUNTRY: United States
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RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Cambridge University, B.A.; University College London, M.A.; University of Oxford, D.Phil., 2011.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Sunday Telegraph, London, England, sports reporter; Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, research fellow at Newhouse Center for the Humanities, 2012-15; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, instructor, 2015—, assistant director of Studies in History & Literature, assistant director of Studies for the Modern World; Daily Telegraph, London, England, literary critic.
AWARDS:Jerwood Award for Nonfiction, 2015, for Cold Warriors.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Duncan White is a writer and educator. He holds degrees from Cambridge University, University College London, and the University of Oxford. After a brief stint as a sports reporter at the London Sunday Telegraph, White moved to the U.S., where he became a research fellow at Wellesley College. He went on to join Harvard University in 2015, eventually serving as assistant director of the school’s Studies for the Modern World and Studies in History & Literature programs. White has also worked as a literary critic for the London Daily Telegraph.
In 2009, White released his first book, a volume he co-edited with Will Norman called Transitional Nabokov. The volume includes essays on Vladimir Nabokov’s life and works from scholars, including Maurice Couturier, Brian Boyd, Stephen Blackwell, Lara Delage-Toriel, Leland de la Durantaye, and Michael Woods. D.B. Johnson, reviewer in Choice, suggested that the volume offered “an accessible approach to Nabokov’s often-arcane universe.” Johnson also categorized the book as “recommended.”
White’s 2019 volume, Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War, is the recipient of the Jerwood Award for Nonfiction. In it, White argues writers during the Cold War took on bold political stances and were forced to answer for their opinions. Among the writers he profiles in the book are Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Mary McCarthy, and John le Carre. A critic in Kirkus Reviews described Cold Warriors as “a massive, thoroughly researched history of the roles of writers and literature during the Cold War.” The critic also called it “both profound and profoundly important and as engaging as a gripping Cold War thriller.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, September, 2010, D.B. Johnson, review of Transitional Nabokov, p. 93.
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2019, review of Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War.
ONLINE
A.M. Heath, https://amheath.com/ (August 15, 2019), author profile.
Harvard University, https://scholar.harvard.edu/ (August 15, 2019), author faculty profile.
Duncan White
Assistant Director of Studies in History & Literature
Barker Center 040, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
I teach 19th and 20th century American, British, and Russian literature in the History & Literature program at Harvard University, with a particular focus on transnational modernism, empire, and the Cold War. I am also the Assistant Director of Studies for the Modern World field and am more than happy to answer any questions you might have about the concentration.
I research and write about American and European literature of the twentieth century with an especial focus on the Cold War. I am currently working on Cold Warriors, a book about writers on both sides of the Iron Curtain that will be published in the summer of 2019 by HarperCollins in the United States and Little, Brown in the United Kingdom. Cold Warriors, which follows writers including Graham Greene, John Le Carré, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Andrei Sinyavsky, Stephen Spender and Richard Wright through the conflicts and crises of the ideological struggle between the Soviet Union and the West, won a 2015 Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction. The project ranges from the Spanish Civil War to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and traces writers' involvement with dissidence, espionage and propaganda.
My first book, Nabokov and his Books: Between Late Modernism and the Literary Marketplace, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. I have also co-edited Transitional Nabokov (2009), a collection of essays on Nabokov.
As an undergraduate I studied English at Cambridge University before taking a Master's in Russian and East European Literature at University College London. I completed my D.Phil in English at the University of Oxford in 2011, writing a thesis on the life and work of Vladimir Nabokov. After four years working as a sports reporter for The Sunday Telegraph in London, I moved to the United States, where I took a position as a Research Fellow at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College. I joined the History & Literature program at Harvard in 2015 and have taught the sophomore, junior, and senior tutorials as well as my HL90 "England After Empire".
Outside of my teaching and research, I am a literary critic for The Daily Telegraph, reviewing contemporary fiction, literary biographies and anything to do with the Cold War. Some of my reviews are available to read in the publications section.
Duncan White
Agent : Euan Thorneycroft
Duncan White is a journalist and academic who combines his position as Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University with his role as a book reviewer for The Daily Telegraph. Before switching to the books section, Duncan was the football correspondent of The Sunday Telegraph. He moved to the United States in 2012 to join Wellesley College as a Newhouse Research Fellow and Visiting Lecturer, and in April 2015 was appointed as a lecturer at Harvard, where he will be teaching courses in twentieth century history and literature.
Duncan has a D.Phil from the University of Oxford, a BA in English from the University of Cambridge, and an MA in Russian Literature from University College London. He has established himself as a scholarly authority on mid-century American and Russian literature, with an especial focus on the Cold War. His publications include a collection of essays on the life and work of Vladimir Nabokov (as editor, Peter Lang 2009), and Nabokov and his Books: Between Late Modernism and the Literary Marketplace, which is to be published by Oxford University Press this year. His book, Cold Warriors: Waging Literary War Across the Iron Curtain, for which he is the recipient of a 2015 RSL Jerwood Award for Non Fiction, will be published by Little, Brown (UK) and Morrow (US) in 2017.
Duncan White is an award-winning journalist and academic. He is Assistant Director of the History and Literature department at Harvard University and a lead book reviewer for the Daily Telegraph. He is the author of Vladimir Nabokov: Late Modernism, the Cold War and the Literary Marketplace. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
QUOTED: "a massive, thoroughly researched history of the roles of writers and literature during the Cold War."
"both profound and profoundly important and as engaging as a gripping Cold War thriller."
White, Duncan COLD WARRIORS Custom House/Morrow (Adult Nonfiction) $29.99 8, 27 ISBN: 978-0-06-244981-8
During the Cold War, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, writers were warriors, literature a weapon.
Daily Telegraph book reviewer White (History and Literature/Harvard Univ.; Nabokov and His Books, 2017, etc.) returns with a massive, thoroughly researched history of the roles of writers and literature during the Cold War. His focus is not just on the United States and the Soviet Union; he also tells stories about Western Europe and Latin America (there is a chapter on Nicaragua, the Contras, and Ronald Reagan). Many celebrated writers glimmer in these pages, including George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender, Isaac Babel, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, John le Carre, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Ernest Hemingway. Names probably less familiar to general readers are the Soviet writers Anna Akhmatova and Andrei Sinyavsky. The narrative is mostly chronological, and White shifts focus, chapter by chapter, to various writers and the political realities that they had to face--and endure. He also shows how governments tried to influence (or silence) their own writers and how they tried to use literature both as a weapon and a shield. "The issue of complicity is at the center of this book," he writes. "Every writer in these pages had to grapple with it in one form or another--such was the price to be paid for writing at a time when, to paraphrase historian Giles Scott-Smith, to be apolitical was itself a form of politics." White delivers tales of astonishing courage--e.g., the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel emerging from persecution and prosecution to become his country's president, Solzhenitsyn sticking firmly to his determination to tell his stories--and of duplicity and betrayal: The story of Kim Philby, the English traitor, is prominent. Many readers will be surprised by the connections among these writers, which White ably highlights: Orwell and Hemingway, Koestler and McCarthy, and so many others. The author also occasionally summarizes now-classic literary works (Animal Farm).
Both profound and profoundly important and as engaging as a gripping Cold War thriller.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"White, Duncan: COLD WARRIORS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2019. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A591279152/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=553652cf. Accessed 10 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A591279152
QUOTED: "an accessible approach to Nabokov's often-arcane universe."
"recommended."
48-0149
PG3476
2088-39677 CIP
Transitional Nabokov, ed. by Will Norman and Duncan White. P. Lang, 2009. 311p bibl index afp ISBN 9783039115259 pbk, $58.9
First presented at a 2007 conference at Oxford University, these 16 essays are the work of Nabokov specialists, most of them from English-speaking countries (six from the UK; six from the US, and three from France). The contributors range from eminences such as Brian Boyd, Michael Wood, Stephen Blackwell, and Maurice Couturier to the new generation of Nabokovians, which includes, for example, Leland de la Durantaye and Lara Delage-Toriel. The volume's unifying theme--"transitional Nabokov"--reflects an attempt to assess the writer's career within the framework of flux rather than the stasis of fixed periods, whether biographical, geographical, or thematic. The essays appear under four headings: "Nabokov and Science," "Transnational Nabokov," "Nabokov beyond Language," and "Nabokov and Ethics." The collection differs from others on Nabokov in that most of the contributors tend toward discussion of broad issues rather than detailed analyses of particular works. Norman (Univ. of Kent, UK) and White (Oxford Univ.) observe that this is a deliberate effort to refocus Nabokov studies from earlier critical frameworks, which did focus on detailed analyses of individual works and/or metaphysical interpretations. All in all, an accessible approach to Nabokov's often-arcane universe. Summing Up: Recommended. ** Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.--D. B. Johnson, emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara
Johnson, D.B.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Johnson, D.B. "Transitional Nabokov." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Sept. 2010, p. 93. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A249057474/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7241b262. Accessed 10 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A249057474