John Watkins, Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English, loves to read deep in the night. "I wake up, read for a half hour, and go back to sleep," he says in a phone interview. "I've read tons of Russian novels in the middle of the night. War and Peace, I probably read the entire novel in moments in the middle of the night." Tolstoy's topic is a perfect one for the decorated scholar of medieval and early modern diplomacy. Watkins will spend the next year completing a book on interdynastic marriage in European peacemaking--a project for which he's won three awards this spring: the Guggenheim (a very competitive annual fellowship given to about 180 out of 3000 applicants), a American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, and 12 weeks as senior research visitor at Keble College, Oxford University. (More Q & A with Watkins.)What are you reading, Professor Watkins?
I'm starting to read a lot of things about disease. I've always had a real interest in medicine: One of my hobbies is reading through medical journals. I'm actually thinking I may turn this into a course on medicine and literature, disease and literature, which would be geared toward medical students. I've done directed readings with pre-med students before that have been fantastic. Anyway, I'm reading things like Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. Great novel. Actually, fantastic novel. It's less morbid than you would think because a lot of it's political allegory. You suddenly realize when you're reading it that one of his great literary models was Gogol. So there's that kind of dark humor running through it. On the other hand, Solzhenitsyn was treated for cancer, and you get this wonderful sense of the horrors of the old Soviet medical system--the fact that patients were almost treated like prisoners. They didn't exactly know what drugs they were being given; they didn't know what the diagnosis was or the extent of the condition.So I've been reading that and . . . a great book on the 1918 Spanish flu. The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John Barry. The flu probably wasn't of Spanish origin at all; the latest thing is that it probably started in Kansas.
Then, I'm reading an incredible book, War Without Mercy, by John Dower. First of all the title is amazing, right? It's specifically about the development of anti-Asian prejudice in the U.S. during the Second World War. So things like Frank Capra's documentaries about the Pacific War. And the way that then becomes a real problem in the way Americans think about Asia. He looks both at that and also at the Japanese equivalent. So effectively it's to read the Pacific War as a war about race. It is hard to put the thing down. And it is coming to me simulcast with Cancer Ward, which is such a goodie.So, wars, cancer: you see where my mind is at these days.
