A University of Cambridge lecturer in the Department of French has been awarded a highly-prized Fellowship with the New York Public Library.

Dr Andy Martin, who specialises in the study of French intellectual history, will form part of the 2009-10 draft of Fellows at the Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Centre for Scholars and Writers.

The Fellowships are highly valued among academics, giving them a year’s residence in which to focus on a research project of their choice.

“One of my colleagues described it as a ‘dream gig’,” Dr Martin said. “The New York Public Library is an inspiring place – I feel very lucky to have been chosen”.

Just 14 exceptional creative writers, scholars and academics are chosen each year by a committee and more than 230 scholars from 19 countries applied in the latest round. Previous Fellows have published a range of critically acclaimed works based on the research and writing they did during their time at the Library.

Dr Martin will be working on a book entitled What It Feels Like To Be Alive, According to Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, as well as a second project concerned with the art of description in the French novel.

His research interests include existentialism, empire, sexual utopias, cinema, Baudelaire, Gauguin and Perec. He is the author of several books, including Stealing The Wave, The Knowledge of Ignorance, Waiting for Bardot and Napoleon The Novelist.

His latest book, Beware Invisible Cows, is described as a “cosmological road trip” which synthesises recent scientific efforts to understand the origins of the universe through the eyes of a researcher working in the humanities. It will be published on June 1.

More information about the book and the New York Library Fellowships can be found by clicking on the links to the right of this page.
 

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