Residential Fellowship Program

Kirk Center Library

A Unique Educational Opportunity

The Kirk Center's Residential Fellows Program affords students and scholars the ideal conditions in which they can conduct important research and writing. Fellows write books, essays, reviews, and theses while staying at Piety Hill for periods ranging from a few months to one year. Frequent in-house seminars formalize an already close and stimulating intellectual environment.

The Residential Fellows Program is organized to accommodate and integrate the varying levels of education and experience, as well as the diverse objectives, of those seeking a Center Fellowship. Those accepted to the Center's program are designated as Senior Fellows, Graduate Fellows, or Junior Fellows. The director of the Fellows program works to help each Fellow secure a professional position or pursue an educational opportunity.

In addition to hosting Fellows from some of America's most distinguished academic institutions, the Kirk Center has also welcomed as Fellows scholars and students from Austria, Britain, France, Holland, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia, Poland, Russia, and the Czech Republic—giving the Center an important international dimension.

Real progress consists in the movement of mankind toward the understanding of norms, and toward conformity to norms. Real decadence consists in the movement of mankind away from the understanding of norms, and away from obedience to norms.

Russell Kirk, Enemies of the Permanent Things, 1969

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News and Events

First Principles of Leadership Lecture

Annette Kirk will be speaking on March 3 on “First Principles of Leadership” for the Leadership Academy of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids. The assigned readings for students are (1) Annette Kirk’s lecture, “Life with Russell Kirk” as well as two readings from Dr. Kirk: (2) “May the Rising Generation Redeem the Time” and (3) “Can Virtue Be Taught?”

Feb 2010

Kirk Center in Italy

Senior Fellow Marco Respinti announces progress on the web site for the Centro Studi Russell Kirk based in Milan, Italy. It is still under development, but you can visit at www.russellkirk.eu. We have also recently posted an updated bio for Marco.

Feb 2010

Permanent Things Newsletter

We are pleased to announce a new number of Permanent Things, the newsletter of the Russell Kirk Center, edited by Ben Lockerd. The Fall 2009 edition features a report on 2009 activities at the Center. You may download it at this link (PDF, 2.6MB).

Jan 2010

Online Support Opportunity

The Kirk Center now has a PayPal account which enables secure donations via credit or debit card. We appreciate any contribution you can make toward our publications and seminars to further the Permanent Things. You can make a gift from this page. Thank you!

Dec 2009

George Nash Interviewed

Senior Fellow George H. Nash has been interviewed for a new documentary on President Herbert Hoover. An edited transcript is available here.

Oct 2009

New Solzhenitsyn Edition

The Kirk Center knows of few better friends or champions of the moral imagination in humane letters than Edward E. Ericson Jr., Emeritus Professor of English at Calvin College. A distinguished authority on the life and works of the Russian man of letters Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and a longtime friend of the Center’s founder, he was distinctly influenced by the writings of Russell Kirk, who favorably reviewed Dr. Ericson’s seminal work, Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision (1980). The Kirk Center is proud to announce that the unexpurgated version of Solzhenitsyn’s first novel, In the First Circle, has been recently published by Harper Perennial, with an insightful foreword by Dr. Ericson. Readers of the foreword and of Solzhenitsyn’s long-anticipated novel of soul-trying spiritual struggle within the Soviet prison system will discover truths articulated by Kirk nearly thirty years ago: “Solzhenitsyn’s moral vision is what Eliot called the ‘high dream’ —the vision of Dante, the Christian extrasensory perception of true reality. Even more than Dante, Solzhenitsyn passed through the Inferno, and was purged of dross.”

Oct 2009