Peter Filkins, Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature, delivered his paper "H.G. Adler: The Displaced Modernist" at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University College London, in May. Filkins, whose authorized biography of H.G. Adler will be published by Oxford University in 2018, joined 14 other scholars from London, Oxford, Paris, Germany, and the U.S. for the two-day conference entitled “A Modernist in Exile: The International Reception of H.G. Adler” about the life and work of Adler.
The conference was preceded by a round table discussion of Adler's work moderated by Professor Ritchie Robertson at The Taylorian Library of Queens College, Oxford. Filkins joined Jeremy Adler, Katrin Kohl, Kirstin Gwyer, and Lynn Wolff in presenting key aspects of Adler's body of work as a Holocaust survivor, scholar, and literary artist. Proceedings from the conference will be published in a volume edited by Professors Kirstin Gwyer of St. Hugh's College, Oxford, and Lyn Wolff of Michigan State University.
H.G. Adler (1910-1988) was born in Prague and later studied in the city’s German University. A survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and two other concentration camps, he emigrated to London in 1947, and went on to publish 26 books of history, novels, short stories, poetry, philosophy, and religion.
Filkins translated three Adler novels, Panorama, The Journey, and The Wall, for Random House. He also edited two volumes of his essays published by Konstanz
University Press. For his upcoming biography on the scholar, he received fellowships
and grants from the National Endowment for
the Humanities, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the DAAD Faculty Research Fund,
and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv of Marbach, Germany.
Filkins’s poems, "Credo" and "Little Problem," appear in the summer 2016 issue of The Yale Review. Two of his four collections of poetry earned awards: Augustine's Vision won the New American Press Chapbook Award, and The View We're Granted won a Sheila Motton Best Book Award.