Overview
Ben Fried studies the role of the editor in the rise of Anglophone literatures across the twentieth century, tracking the transnational networks of literary production and circulation which give a material and imaginative purchase to the burgeoning discipline of the Global Anglophone. His dissertation, "The Empire of English Literature: Editing the Global Anglophone, 1947-1993," examines how relationships between editors and writers, and between editors and institutions, set the terms of creation and reception. Areas of research include the Irish and Canadian writers orbiting William Maxwell, fiction editor at The New Yorker; the twin BBC radio programs Caribbean Voices and West African Voices; and the expansion of Penguin Books into India and Australia.
His work is forthcoming in Post45 and African American Review, as well as in the edited volumes Modernist Archives: A Handbook and Mapping World Anglophone Studies. His undergraduate teaching ranges across modern and contemporary Anglophone, American, and British literatures. He is leading a project to digitize Cornell's Bombay Poets Archive and has been featured in the Graduate School's "Student Spotlight."
Research Focus
- Twentieth-Century Fiction and Poetry
- Global Anglophone
- Book History
- Postcolonialism
- World Literature
- Editorial Studies
- Literary Institutions