Bard Professor Peter Filkins Receives $50,000 NEH Public Scholar Award in Support of His Book Project Sibyl and Siren: A Life of Ingeborg Bachmann

(September 3, 2024)

Bard College News

Peter Filkins, Bard College visiting professor of literature and the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, has been awarded $50,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to fund the writing of his upcoming book, Sibyl and Siren: A Life of Ingeborg Bachmann, which is a biography of Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973). Filkins previously received a 2022–23 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2023 Fulbright Fellowship, and a 2024 Translator Fellowship, given by the Austrian Society for Literature, as well as a travel grant from Austria’s Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service, and Sport, in support of his travel and stay in Vienna, Austria, where he researched his book project, translating letters and manuscripts while working directly within Bachmann’s archive.

Poet and author Ingeborg Bachmann remains an iconic figure in postwar German literature. With the blessing of her heirs to write her biography, Filkins has completed much of the necessary research for his book—including translating excerpts from personal correspondence, manuscripts, acceptance speeches, essays, poems, stories, librettos, novels, and critical commentary from scholars—as well as studying historical documents, reviews, and memoirs from family members. During his NEH grant period, Filkins will focus on writing this biography. This book will expand the understanding of an important writer outside of her native language and culture, and place biography in the service of literary studies, cultural studies, translation studies, and the humanities.