Ellen Hinsey
Ellen Hinsey (born 1960, Boston) is an American writer, poet, researcher and professor who has lived in Europe for decades. She earned a BFA from Tufts University and completed graduate studies at Université de Paris VII.
Her work centers on history, ethics and democracy, with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe and on contemporary authoritarianism. She has taught at the École Polytechnique in France and Skidmore College’s Paris program, and she has been a visiting professor at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Hinsey is a senior editor at the New American Studies Journal and the international correspondent for The New England Review.
She has published six books and edited or translated three others. Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism (Telos Press, 2017) collects essays on illiberalism and post-1989 politics in the region. The Illegal Age (Arc Publications, 2018) is a philosophical-poetic examination of totalitarian legacies. Her memoir with Tomas Venclova, Magnetic North, looks at postwar Eastern Europe’s dissidence and culture and has been published in several languages. Other poetry collections include Update on the Descent (2009), The White Fire of Time (2002/2003) and Cities of Memory (1996). Cities of Memory drew on her experiences at the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution.
Hinsey has also translated and edited works such as The Junction: Selected Poems of Tomas Venclova (2008) and The Secret Piano by Zhu Xiao-Mei (2012). Her poetry has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review and other outlets.
She has received multiple honors, including the Berlin Prize Fellowship (American Academy in Berlin, 2001), a DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm Fellowship (2015), the Lannan Foundation Award and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, among others.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 11:21 (CET).