Christopher Isherwood Fellows
2024-2025
Nicole Seymour, Professor of English, California State University, Fullerton: “The Cal States, Christopher Isherwood, and the Campus Novel.” (One Month)
Nicole Seymour specialises in environmental humanities, literature, and queer studies. She is the author of Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination (University of Illinois Press, 2013), and Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Her latest book, Glitter (Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, 2022), offers an environmental-cultural history of that substance.
2023-2024
Jake Poller, Fellow, Queen Mary University of London: "Christopher Isherwood: A Critical Life" (One Month)
Jake Poller is the author of the monograph Aldous Huxley and Alternative Spirituality (Brill, 2019), and the critical biography Aldous Huxley (Reaktion Books, 2021). He also edited the essay collection Altered Consciousness in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2019). His research focuses on the intersection of literature and alternative spirituality in the twentieth century. He is currently writing a biography of Christopher Isherwood for the Reaktion Critical Lives series.
2022-2023
Benjamin Robbins, Assistant Professor, University of Innsbruck: “Revisiting Interwar Berlin, Hamburg, and Vienna in the Fictions of Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and John Lehmann” (One Month)
Ben Robbins is an assistant professor in American literary and cultural studies and principal investigator of the research project “Networked Narratives: Queer Exile Literature from 1900 to 1969,” which is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and affiliated with the University of Innsbruck (Austria). His research on Isherwood places his literature within the context of a wider queer exile literary tradition and traces connections between Berlin, where the author resettled at the end of the 1920s, and other subcultural communities, such as those in Hamburg and Vienna.
2020-2022
James Miller, Associate Professor, Western University: "The Straight Way Lost: Isherwood's Queering of Dante's Inferno, with Gerald Heard, Edward James, and Francis Turville-Petre as the Three Sodomites" (Three Months)
Eleri Watson, Doctoral Candidate, University of Oxford: "Fag Hags: Allies, Breeders and Idols" (One Month)
2019-2020
Graham Foster, Independent Researcher: “The English Isherwood” (One Month)
Marie-Aude Haffen, Associate Professor, University Montpellier 3: “Christopher Isherwood’s Life-Writing” (Two Months)
2018-2019
Kathryn Franklin, Doctoral Candidate, York University: "'Something of the Glamour': Tracing the Geographies of Glamour in the Work of Christopher Isherwood" (One Month)
Sean Richardson, Doctoral Candidate, Nottingham Trent University: "Queer Cartographies: Mapping Modernist Sexuality 1905-1945" (One Month)
Benjamin Serby, Doctoral Candidate, Columbia University: "The Liberation of America: Adventures of a Concept, 1945-1980" (One Month)
2017-2018
Lois Cucullu, Associate Professor, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities: “A Queer Progress: The Naturalization of Christopher Isherwood”
(Four Months)
Reid Echols, Doctoral Candidate, University of Texas, Austin: “Conservatism and Conservation: Ecology and Rural Nostalgia in Interwar Britain” (One Month)
Jaime Harker, Professor, University of Mississippi: “Pacific Rimming: Christopher Isherwood, Queer Expatriatism, and Cold War Orientalism” (One Month)
Jack Sargent, Doctoral Candidate, University of Exeter: “ Time, Aestheticism, and Emotion: An Aesthetic of Enduring Feeling in Illicit Homosexual Literature 1870-1969”
(Two Months)
2016-2017
Rebecca Chenoweth, 2016-2017 Isherwood Fellow, PhD candidate, University of California, Santa Barbara: “Memory on the Edge of World War” (One Month)
Rebecca Chenoweth is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She specializes in 20th century British narratives of war, and theories of trauma and memory from the cognitive sciences and trauma studies. Her dissertation project examines the fictional and semi-fictional journal-form texts of British novelists including Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, and Kazuo Ishiguro, tracing the contributions of their self-interrogating narrators to our understanding of memory and identity.
2015-2016
Umasankar Patra, is a PhD scholar and a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Delhi, New Delhi, India. He holds an MA in English from University of Hyderabad and an MPhil from EFLU, Hyderabad. He is working on the intersection of autobiography and narrative form in Christopher Isherwood for his dissertation. His project focuses on the construction of truth and the formation of self- the authorial self and the narratorial self in the texts of Isherwood. At the Huntington, consulting Isherwood’s manuscripts, correspondence and lectures will help him to map the dialogism of the texts and the inter-textual nature of Isherwood’s corpus.
Katharine Stevenson, is a PhD candidate in English at The University of Texas at Austin where she studies modern British literature. Her dissertation is on the work of Christopher Isherwood and his lifelong friend Edward Upward, focusing on their fictionalized memoirs and collaborative fictions. Her research examines the unique ways in which these authors represent themselves, practice introspection, and interpret their own experiences in public and private writing using strange and complicated genres and narrative voices. Stevenson’s project also takes into account the performative nature of much of Isherwood and Upward’s literary production. She will be teaching a course in Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture at The University of Texas in 2016.
2014-2015
Annette Kern-Stahler, Professor, University of Bern: "Cultural Arbiters: British Writers in Occupied Germany" (One Month)
2013-2014
Andrew Biswell, Principal Lecturer, Manchester Metropolitan University: "In Search of Early Isherwood and Auden" (Two Months)
Jennifer Schnepf, PhD candidate, Brown University: "Humming Queerly to Oneself: The Intimacy of Communicating Otherwise in Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man" (One Month)
2011-2012
Catherine Benton, Associate Professor, Lake Forest College: "Being Hindu in America: Christopher Isherwood and His Teacher Swami Prabhavananda" (Two Months)
2010-2011
Rebecca Gordon, Lecturer, University of Aberdeen: "Constructing Selves: An Investigation of the Development of Selves through the Creative Layers of Selected Works of Christopher Isherwood" (Two Months)
2009-2010
Mario Faraone, Contract Professor, University of Trieste: "The Path to Spiritual and Artistic Unity: Cultural, Religious, and Artistic Influences of Vedanta in Christopher Isherwood’s American Narrative and Autobiographical Production" (Two Months)
2008-2009
Robert Beachy, Associate Professor, Goucher College: "Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity, 1850-1933" (Two Months)
Matthew Vechinski, PhD candidate, University of Washington: "New Writing, Collectible Fiction: Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and Late Modernism" (One Month)
2006-2007
John Whalen-Bridge, Associate Professor, National University of Singapore: "Ginsberg and Isherwood: Orientalism, Vedanta, and Queer Dharma" (Two Months)
2005-2006
Jeff Solomon, Ph.D. candidate, University of Southern California: "Fabulous Potency: Author Photos, Authorial Personae, and Queer Identity" (One Month)
Richard Zeikowitz, Associate Professor, John Jay College, CUNY: "On Writing, Pacifism, and Homosexuality: The Correspondence between E.M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood" (One Month)
2004-2005
Peter Firchow, Professor, University of Minnesota: "Christopher Isherwood’s Life in and Writings about Berlin" (One Month)
2003-2004
Jamie Carr, PhD candidate, University of Rhode Island: "Christopher Isherwood’s Aesthetic and Political Experimentation: Fascism, Pacifism, and Identity Politics" (One Month)
2002-2003
James Berg, Associate Director, Center for Teaching at the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities: "A Writer and His World: Isherwood on Writing" (Two Months)