91¾«Æ·

Ben Fried

Assistant Professor

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• Curriculum Vitae

BIO

I teach and study the wide world of Global Anglophone literatures. My courses range across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, drawing in fiction, poetry, and drama from Australia to Zimbabwe. My research concentrates on the role of the editor in shaping English-language writing. I explore intersections between power and creativity, focusing on the editorial ability to determine what is printed and read, as well as on the ways in which migration has remade major publishing institutions—and literary capital cities more broadly. As a teacher and scholar, I work within, and sometimes against, the frameworks of modernist, postcolonial, and world literature.

I am currently bringing three book projects to publication. The Empire of English Literature: Editing the Global Anglophone, 1947-1993 is a study of working relationships between editors in London and New York and authors from the wider English-writing world (including Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, Nigeria, and Trinidad). It argues that these editorial networks were instrumental in fashioning a truly global field of literary production over the second half of the twentieth century. Migrant Editors: Postwar Migration and the Making of Anglophone Literatures recounts the transformation of London’s publishing houses and magazines by postcolonial immigrants to the literary capital. Finally, I am co-editing The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary Editing with Tim Groenland, a definitive account of how editors have influenced the writing and reading of literature across centuries, continents, and languages. My work has been published in such venues as African American Review and Post45.

Before coming to 91¾«Æ·, I was a joint SSHRC-Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at Dalhousie University, a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, and a visiting lecturer at Cornell University. I earned my doctorate from Cornell, where I remain the principal investigator behind the Bombay Poets Digital Archive, an online home for one of the most significant archival collections for the study of Anglophone Indian poetry.

EDUCATION

Ph.D. and M.A., Cornell University
MPhil, University of Cambridge
B.A., McGill University

AREA OF SPECIALTY

Global Anglophone literatures; postcolonial studies; modern and contemporary British literature; history of the book, publishing, and editing; migration and diaspora studies; sociology of literature.

PROSPECTIVE UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

At 91¾«Æ·, I teach undergraduate courses on postcolonial and British literatures, as well as on migration and diaspora. These classes feature such writers as Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Helen Garner, V. S. Naipaul, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Virginia Woolf, and W. B. Yeats. I aim to design courses that reflect the diversity of English literatures and engage people from all backgrounds, emphasizing the affinity between students’ reading and writing. Above all, I want students to feel the value of their original work: to see how the interpretations they formulate, the skills they develop, and the essays they compose will long outlast the class itself.

PROSPECTIVE GRADUATE STUDENTS

My graduate courses combine postcolonial and Global Anglophone literatures with book history and the sociology of culture. I am eager to help students delve into the theories and methods they need to work across national canons and conduct archival research. I would be delighted to meet with you if you are interested in developing a project that involves one or more of my areas of expertise: modern and contemporary literatures in English; the history of the book, reading, and literary institutions; the impact of migration and globalization on writing; or the intellectual frameworks of postcolonialism, transnationalism, and world literature.