Kai Hopen | The MacArthur Fellowships and the Making of Contemporary American Literature

/in /by

Kai Hopen | The MacArthur Fellowships and the Making of Contemporary American Literature | University of Groningen, ICOG PhD Scholarship | Supervisors: Dr Kathryn Roberts and Dr Tim Jelfs, and Prof. Janet Fuller (promotor ad interim) | 1 September 2022 – 31 August 2026

My research is on “The MacArthur Fellowships and the Making of Contemporary American Literature.” The project aims to sit between institutional and historical materialist literary history and American studies. The quickest description is that it’s a literary history of the MacArthur Fellowships, especially those from 2015-2020, but I’m also super interested in the culture and literature of the contemporary crises of liberalism (in politics, economics, race, climate) in the US more generally, and how those crises and their cultures/literatures are arguably traceable in some ways to, among other places, a place like the 1981 awarding of the first MacArthur Fellowships.