‍Workshop with Editors of the European Review of Books

This workshop brings together doctoral students and two editors of the European Review of Books (ERB), a magazine of culture and ideas published in print and online, in English and in writers’ own tongues. Since the publication of its first issue in June 2022, the ERB has championed essayistic writing in many forms—fiction, travelogue, provocation, parody, poetry, and hybrid texts that resist the narrowness of opinion and the flattening of ideas.

The workshop is conceived as a space for doctoral researchers to reflect on writing beyond the conventions of academic prose. It explores how research can circulate in essayistic, narrative, and experimental forms without sacrificing intellectual rigor. Drawing on examples from the ERB, the editors will discuss editorial practices, questions of form, and the transformation of scholarly work for wider, non-specialist publics.

A central concern of the ERB—thickening the European intellectual atmosphere—also frames the workshop. “Europe” here is understood neither as nostalgia nor as a fixed horizon, but as a contingent space of thought, language, and encounter. Participants will be invited to consider how writing can move beyond national, metropolitan, and disciplinary boundaries, and how productive forms of dissonance, disagreement, and “good disharmony” can be cultivated. Particular attention will be given to the ERB’s trans-linguistic editorial model. Publishing texts both in English and in a writer’s mother tongue, the magazine treats English as an ironic lingua franca: pervasive, enabling, and problematic. The workshop will address questions of language, translation, and untranslatability, asking what it means to write research in English today and how multilingualism might be activated rather than smoothed over.

The workshop with Fernanda Eberstadt and Sander Pleij will combine discussion, close reading, and collective reflection on participants’ own writing projects, whether published, unpublished, or in progress.

Fernanda Eberstadt was born in New York City in 1960. She graduated from Oxford University with a First Class Degree in English Language and Literature. She has published five novels and one non-fiction book about her friendship with a family of Rom musicians in Southern France. She writes cultural criticism for publications including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Vogue, Frieze, Salon, Granta, and Literary Hub, and is an editor at large for the European Review of Books. Her books have been translated into fourteen languages. She lives in France

Sander Pleij is a literary writer and author who worked for ten years at De Groene Amsterdammer and ten years at Vrij Nederland. He has won several journalism awards. He is one of the three founders of The European Review of Books.