Frank is NMU's Peter White Scholar

Northern Michigan University English professor and author Matthew Gavin Frank is the recipient of the 2026-2027 NMU Peter White Scholar Award, which will fund archival research and international travel related to what he considers the most ambitious literary venture of his career. The project will examine persecuted artists, the preservation of works created under oppression and endangered cultural histories.

"I'm thrilled to receive this award because it will allow me to engage in dedicated research for a significant section of content related to a significant pocket of time," Frank said. "This has been a project that I've been working on for a while, in dribs and drabs. It was always kind of on the back burner while I was working on other things. Because of that, I have so many moving pieces for it, I feel like what I thought was going to be a single book is probably going to be three books instead."

Frank initiated the project after becoming aware of the Italian anti-fascist resistance movement known as the Partigiani, or La Resistenza Italiana, a network of writers, artists and scholars who resisted fascism before and during World War II. They often convened at the historic Café Calissano in Alba, Italy, which he visited for previous research.

"One of their primary goals was to make innovative art that would quietly resist a lot of the edicts of fascism," Frank said. "When their art started getting banned, they realized there was a wealth of works that had disappeared due to previous political movements and edicts. Their goal became rescuing not only the art their group was making, but art created by other oppressed communities during that time."

As Frank researched the movement, he became increasingly interested in the broader historical context of censored and endangered art across Europe. That led him to the expulsion of Jewish communities from Spain during the 14th and 15th centuries and the loss of literature, music and visual art created in Ladino, also known as Judeo-Spanish. This endangered language is rooted in Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic and several other linguistic traditions.

"My research will specifically focus on French and Spanish Basque Country, looking at not only lost literature and artwork from when the Jews were expelled, but also other elements of persecuted populations' lives in that region," Frank explained. "That includes architecture, cultural spaces connected to displaced communities, and even cemeteries. There was a once-protected Jewish cemetery in Vitoria, Spain. It no longer exists, but there's some writing related to it, so I definitely plan to visit the site."

Beyond the immediate and specific Basque Country focus, Frank's project stretches across continents and generations. Future sections may involve work in Thailand and Vietnam connected to a Jewish Vietnam War veteran and avant-garde sculptor he knew from childhood. At its core, he added, the project seeks to understand how personal narratives intersect with larger socio-cultural and historical forces.

Stylistically, Frank describes the project as a "mish-mash" of lyric essay, poetry, oral history interviews and memoir. Family stories, particularly those related to his grandfather, a Jewish jazz musician whose saxophone Frank inherited and later taught himself to play, will be featured alongside broader historical narratives. He said the unconventional structure reflects his writing process, which typically is not a predetermined approach, but one that evolves organically as he becomes more immersed in it.

"I feel like no book that I've ever written has taught me how to write the next one," he said. "Every time I start a new project, I feel just like a baby, lost in the woods and figuring things out. Each project puts its own fresh demands on me, and I learn the obligations and parameters of the project only through that exploratory period."

Frank's most recent nonfiction book, published in June 2025, is SUBMERSED: Wonder, Obsession, and Murder in the World of Amateur Submarines. His previous title, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, addresses the ways carrier pigeons were used by South African diamond-smuggling rings and was one of NPR's Best Books of 2021.

He is also the author of the nonfiction books, The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America's Food; Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer; Pot Farm; and Barolo. His poetry books are: The Morrow Plots; Warranty in Zulu; and Sagittarius Agitprop. Learn more about the author here.

NMU's Peter White Scholar Award, worth up to $17,500, supports faculty and department heads with a proven scholarly record who are undertaking a project that would significantly advance their work.