BAK John S.

In 2022, John and his colleague Lesley Cowling from Wits University in Johannesburg were awarded a two-year PHC PROTEA grant to conduct research on literary journalism's ties between France and South Africa. The first year will be dedicated to the Boer Wars and the second year to post-Apartheid literary nonfiction. 

In 2019, John was awarded a three-year Ecos SUD grant for his research project with colleagues from France and Chile, CRONICA: “Comparative Reportages: An Ontology of French Narrative Journalistic Influences and Dialogue in Chile and Argentina”. In 2017 and 2018, John was  nominated to the post “Chaire Franco-Brésilienne” for Journalism Studies at São Paulo State University, where he worked for two months, delivering a series of lectures and tutoring doctoral students. He just submitted an ANR project between France and Brazil, entitled JorLit: “From fait divers to Jornalismo Literário: Towards a Historiography of Transatlantic Literary Journalism.”

In addition to directing the Literary Journalism and War project, ReportAGES, he is co-writing a monograph (with Sophie Maruéjouls-Koch) on Tennessee Williams’s paintings.

Thanks to visiting scholar grants from Oxford (2014-16), where he is permanent Research Member of the Common Room at Wolfson College, Texas ( 2014), Columbia (2013), and Harvard (2011) universitites,  John is continuing his research into the late, non-fiction prose writings of Tennessee Williams, with the aim of producing a book on the twenty years that went into the writing of his memoirs.