Russell Scott Valentino is a professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures and the Department of Comparative Literature at Indiana University Bloomington. His work has been published by the NY Times, Reaktion Books, TheHarvard Review, Yale University Press, and a dozen other literary magazines and book publishers; and supported by the NEH, the NEA, PEN American, and the U.S. Departments of State and Education. Former Editor-in-Chief at The Iowa Review and former President of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), Valentino served on the 2022 jury for the National Book Awards. He is the founder and publisher of Autumn Hill Books and blogs at russellv.com. His translation of Miljenko Jergovic’s family saga Kin (Archipelago Books, 2021) received the 2023 Best Prose Translation award from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. His translation (with Miriam Shrager and Sibelan Forrester) of Vladimir Propp’s Historical Roots of the Wondertale is due out from Indiana University Press in September 2025.
Valentino will use his fellowship year to complete Sea of Intimacy: The Adriatic Real and Imagined, a book for nonspecialists that draws its title and main organizing principle from a line in Predrag Matvejević’s Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape (UC Press, 1999): “The Atlantic and Pacific are seas of distance, the Mediterranean a sea of propinquity, the Adriatic a sea of intimacy” (tr. Michael Henry Heim). The book does not so much take this claim as a given as explore what it might mean if it were true. How might the Adriatic be understood as a sea of intimacy? What does an exploration, a voyage across and around it, with this idea in mind help us to see about the place, its people, ourselves, and our place in the world? The book focuses, on the one hand, on cultural expression—language, literature, the arts—and, on the other, on environmental humanities and contemporary geopolitics, the manner in which the interaction among nations today, and between people and the natural world, unfold in and impact this distinctive place. It employs a personal approach through place-based writing and an extended reflective gaze focused through the many years of its author’s engagement with the cultures of the region.
The book’s aims have grown, now resting on more extensive ecological and historical foundations. This is a new direction for Valentino’s research, meaning that this project will associate his future work more closely with both the history of ideas, especially ideas about how humans interact with the natural world, and the broad field of environmental humanities. The IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship is, therefore, an essential component in the ongoing transformation of his work.