Fellowship / Fellows

Christopher Taylor

  • 2015–2016
  • Humanities
  • The University of Chicago
[Photo by Tony Rinaldo]

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Christopher Taylor is a professor at the University of Chicago. His research explores connections among Caribbean literary history, the history of economic thought, and political theory.

At the Radcliffe Institute, Taylor is completing his first book, titled “Empire of Neglect: Imagining the Americas in a Liberal Age,” which explores how British West Indians responded to the discursive and institutional rise of liberal political economy within the British Empire. Taylor is interested in how black and white West Indians understood the liberalization of the empire as inducing a crisis in imperial citizenship—a crisis they glossed over as “neglect”—and in exploring how West Indian authors drew on hemispheric American texts, spaces, and histories to imagine anti-liberal modalities of political community. He is currently beginning research on a second book, “I’m a Slave for You: Atlantic Modernity’s Impossible Subject.”

Taylor’s work has appeared in the journals American Literature, History of the Present, Small Axe, and Social Text. He has also published in various online venues, including Africa is a Country and The New Inquiry. Taylor earned his PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania.

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