Fulbright and Sea of Intimacy

I’ve been selected as a Fulbright Scholar to continue — to finish! — my book on the Adriatic. Watching the welcome videos from Donna Brazile and a senior official in the Department of State this morning, I couldn’t help feeling relieved that I did not receive this award during the presidency of the previous person in that office. He clearly did not think much, if at all, of the Fulbright mission, the principles and the idealism of it.

The award is for Croatia. I suppose I could have applied for Italy or Slovenia, given the geographical placement, but I’m better prepared for Croatia, and I can justify it more soundly. I’ll be hosted by the University of Zadar, which town also happens to hold the archives to the Habsburg archives for Dalmatia, which I had the opportunity to consult in summer 2022. Plenty to explore there, and my future colleagues at the University of Zadar have already asked if I’d be willing to give a couple of presentations while I’m there. Of course.

This is all next spring, which feels close and far at the same time. Meanwhile, I keep writing, finding new avenues to stroll down (or race, as the case may be).

For instance, earlier this week I made the connection between Claudio Magris’ 2006 novel Alla cieca, which appeared in an English edition translated as Blindly by Anne Milano Appel in 2008, and Martin Muma, a novel by Ligio Zanini published in 1990 that is basically a fictionalized account of his imprisonment on Goli otok, Tito’s Adriatic gulag (if “Adriatic gulag” sounds a bit like an oxymoron, you will like the book, I think), following the split between Yugoslavia and the USSR in 1948. Magris mentioned this remarkable book to me when we first met in the spring of 1993. He clearly admired it, which explains why Zanini and his idea made it into Alla cieca, part of the long, shameful legacy of that devastating island.

I had a chance to visit it for the first time in May of this year. Still figuring out how to write about it.

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