Cynthia L. Haven is a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. She has written regularly for The Times Literary Supplement, and has also contributed to The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The Wall Street Journal, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today. Her work has also appeared in Le Monde, La Repubblica, Die Welt, Zvezda, Colta, Zeszyty Literackie, The Kenyon Review, Quarterly Conversation, The Georgia Review, and Civilization.
Her Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard (2018), the first biography of the French theorist, was praised in the The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among others. It was named one of the top books of 2018 by The San Francisco Chronicle. She is the editor of René Girard’s All Desire is a Desire for Being: Essential Writings, published in 2023 by Penguin Classics.
Her Conversations with René Girard: Prophet of Envy was published in May 2020 with Bloomsbury in London. The Man Who Brought Brodsky into English: Conversations with George L. Kline was published in March 2021 with Academic Studies Press in Boston. Czesław Miłosz: A California Life was published in 2021 with Berkeley’s Heyday Books.
She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, as well as a visiting writer and scholar at Stanford’s Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures and a Voegelin Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven was published in London, 2005. Her Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations was published in 2006; Joseph Brodsky: Conversations in 2003; An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz was published in 2011 with Ohio University Press/Swallow Press.
She is also editor of a short anthology on the French thinker for the popular “Was bedeutet das alles?” series with the German publisher Reclam, published in 2022.
Partial list of articles (to 2008) here.
Contact her at cynthia dot haven at stanford.edu
Editors: You are welcome to use the photo above, but please credit photographer Margo Davis.
Snail mail address:
P.O. Box 18530, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94309
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