Levander awarded Fulbright Research Fellowship

Caroline Levander, English professor and vice president for strategic initiatives and digital education, has been awarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship. She will spend the summer of 2017 at the University of Exeter, a public research university in England.

Fulbright awards are considered one of the world’s most competitive merit-based international scholarships. For the 2016-17 year, 42 Fulbright scholars and fellows from the United States will travel to the U.K. Amy Moore, director of the Fulbright Awards Programme, said the recipients were “carefully selected for their impressive accomplishments, academic excellence and a genuine desire to delve into U.K culture and collaborate with new people and experience new ideas.”

Caroline Levander has been awarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship. (Photo by Paul Hester)

During her three months at Exeter, Levander will serve as a resident expert scholar on transnationalism and American studies and present keynote lectures.

“One of the important questions for my field and the field of humanities generally in this global era is whether it still makes intellectual sense to continue to define our disciplines within national frameworks,” Levander said. “Whether it’s climate change or human displacement because of war, the biggest quandaries and challenges confronting humanity and therefore humanities now have a global scope.”

Levander has already touched on such topics in some of her scholarly endeavors, such as her book “Where Is American Literature?”

“Developing a distinctive literary tradition was crucial to creating an American national identity through the early 20th century, and so when we refer to American literature we tend to think of an identifiable (if ever-changing) body of work by authors within the United States,” she said. “But how do we categorize, analyze and conceptualize American literature once we pry it loose from the geographic assumptions that have so long defined it and that reinforce the notion of a uniform, ‘united’ nation/state?”

The Carlson Chair in the School of Humanities, Levander has authored four monographs and co-edited five books on topics of American literature and transnational methodologies, including “Hemispheric American Studies and Teaching and Studying the Americas: Cultural Influences from Colonialism to the Present.” She has advised a number of Ph.D. students who are writing dissertations about transnational American studies.

Levander’s scholarly research inspired a committee from the University of Exeter to invite her to apply for the school’s Fulbright Research Fellowship. Exeter is a top 10 U.K. university and a member of the Russell Group of leading research universities, so Levander has high expectations of the intellectual life of the university community there.

She plans to continue to serve in her administrative role overseeing strategic initiatives with other universities while she is abroad. “One of the opportunities that this fellowship creates for Rice is more recognition and awareness of the university in an international context,” she said. International engagement and cultural understanding is one of Rice’s strategic initiatives for the second century.

The U.S.-U.K. Fulbright Commission offers awards for study or research at accredited U.S. or U.K. universities. The commission is part of the Fulbright program conceived by Sen. William Fulbright in the aftermath of World War II to promote leadership, learning and empathy between nations through educational exchange.