Congratulations to Dr Will Norman of the Centre for American Studies who has recently received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship grant of £49,710 for his project, Complicity in Post-1945 American Literature.
The project investigates how American writers and thinkers articulated and responded to the experience of complicity in the post-1945 era. As Dr Norman explains in a recent lecture on the subject (see below) complicity describes a state of entanglement in a harmful system over which one has little or no control. In the wake of the Holocaust, and in response to domestic and international racial conflicts of the period 1945-1975, American literary writing took up the challenge of representing complicity with structures of racial domination. Dr Norman’s research analyses how particular writers and thinkers went about meeting this challenge, and explains how that process is related to the political culture of post-war liberalism.
Dr Will Norman is Reader in American Literature and Culture at the University of Kent, and Director of the Centre for American Studies. The Leverhulme Research Fellowship will last for a period of 12-months.