WMU professor awarded prestigious Bellagio Residency: continues work on grief

KALAMAZOO, Mich.—Dr. Ashley Atkins would like to extend an early apology to her mother-in-law for missing Thanksgiving next year. Instead of celebrating the holiday at home, Atkins, associate professor of philosophy, will be in Lake Como, Italy, participating in the prestigious Bellagio Residency Program. 

Awarded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bellagio Residency Program is an exclusive retreat offered to the nation's best scholars, artists and practitioners, with only 15 selected per cohort. Notable alumni of the program include Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Maya Angelou, putting Atkins among legendary scholars. The residency provides recipients a space to unlock their creativity, collaborate with other scholars and advance their groundbreaking work.  

Atkins was awarded the residency to continue work on her monograph, which seeks to explore the complex, oftentimes isolating experience of grief, drawing upon contemporary grief memoirs.  

She began her study of grief from an unexpected place. While teaching a race and gender class, she was deeply moved by Claudia Rankine’s opinion piece in the New York Times, “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning,” which introduced the concept of grief beyond the individual experience  of losing a loved one, but rather as a kind of atmosphere that people find themselves living within. 

“I was interested in these social and political contexts but thinking I should understand something about the grief that many people experience in their personal life,” she said.  

Atkins continued: “And when I tried to come to an understanding of that, I found that there weren’t really accounts or theories of grief that were close to the experience. They seemed to be intellectualized substitutes, quite removed from what people are grappling with when they lose someone they love.”   

Motivated by this gap, Atkins began to study grief in a novel way, one with deep empathy at the heart of her exploration. In early 2024, she received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to begin work on her scholarly monograph. And instead of conducting purely academic research, she began with the medium that inspired her to understand grief: literature.  

After reading Rankine’s piece, she came across C.S. Lewis’s “A Grief Observed.” This book, a raw and introspective account of Lewis’s emotional turmoil following the death of his wife, was the most illuminating source for understanding grief, Atkins said.  

Her book will include ten chapters, each exploring two or more pieces that shed light on a specific aspect of grief. In addition to "A Grief Observed”, other works Atkins examines include Joan Didion’s “A Year of Magical Thinking”, John Bayley’s “Widower’s House” and Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Widow’s Story.”  

“The book project is a way of engaging with books like Lewis’s. These are firsthand eyewitnesses that are really close to the experience.”   

Now fully immersed in writing her book, Atkins is also exploring ways to disseminate her work to the general public. To help achieve this, Atkins applied for and received the Marc Sanders Philosophy in Media Fellowship in summer 2024.  

The fellowship bridges the gap between academic philosophers and the mainstream media, offering guidance on writing for general audiences, pitching ideas, and crafting longform content for magazines and newspapers. It brings together editors, staff and writers from some of the most esteemed outlets in the nation, including the New Yorker and the New York Times, to provide guidance and instruction to leading academics.

“It was a boot camp for people who want to reach a broader audience and want to write in a less dry, more vivid and engaging way,” Atkins said.   

Atkins also believes that her temperament and attitudes toward death, aging and grief make her well-suited for this study, which drives her dedication to grief exploration. 

 “I think that there are people who find it anxiety producing to talk about certain kinds of topics, like death, grief, aging,” Atkins said. 

She continued: “I am the exact opposite—I almost feel relief when I am able to talk about these things. I feel anxious when I am not able to talk openly and freely about grief, death, aging.”  

For more WMU news, arts and events, visit WMU News online.