Associate Professor Birger Vanwesenbeeck of the Department of English has been named the recipient of a prestigious Scaliger Fellowship from Leiden University in the Netherlands.
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The Scaliger Fellowship will enable Dr. Vanwesenbeeck to spend two weeks this summer at Leiden University’s Scaliger Institute in order to research the archival collection of the Dutch art historian Johan Huizinga.
In a 2009 essay included in the volume, “William Gaddis: The Last of Something,” Vanwesenbeeck first drew attention to the influence of Huizinga’s work on late modernist American writers such as William Gaddis.
The Scaliger Fellowship will allow Vanwesenbeeck to further help chart this influence by investigating how Huizinga’s own interest in lateness was in part shaped by his exposure to literary symbolism of the fin de siècle during his youth. The research findings will be integrated into Vanwesenbeeck’s book-in-progress on American late modernism.
