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New York University Abu Dhabi Home

Carmen Bugan

Visiting Assistant Professor, Literature and Creative Writing Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BA University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; MA Lancaster University, UK; MSt Balliol College, Oxford University, UK; PhD Balliol College, Oxford University, UK

Research Areas: Poetry and politics; poetry of witness; Cold War surveillance; Seamus Heaney; postwar East European poetry in translation; ethics and literature; literature and medicine; life writing, autobiography, and memoir

Carmen Bugan is a poet and writer whose work explores the expressions of historical and political upheaval in literature. She is the author of nine books including poetry, memoir, and criticism. Bugan's monograph, Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2013/ Routledge, 2020), has received international praise. Some of her work has been translated into Swedish, Polish, Italian, and Chinese. Her most recent book of essays on politics and poetics, Poetry and the Language of Oppression (Oxford University Press, 2021), dealt with Cold War surveillance and considered the wider perspectives on writing in turbulent times; it was named an "essential book for writers" by Poets and Writers. Time Being, (Shearsman, 2022), her most recent collection of poems, reflected on the pandemic and the changed sense of time. Her memoir, Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police (Picador/ Graywolf, 2012), was the Winner of the Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction, was a Finalist in the George Orwell Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was serialized as the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Bugan's new and selected poems, Lilies from America (Shearsman, 2019) received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She is currently writing a memoir entitled Life Without a Country.

Bugan was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan; an Adjunct Professor at Stony Brook University, NY; a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland; and was a Creative Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford University. Other grants and fellowships include a Hawthornden Fellowship and a large individual grant from the Arts Council England. Bugan was made a George Orwell Prize Fellow in 2017.

Courses Taught