Fellowship / Fellows

Rebecca L. Walkowitz

  • 2012–2013
  • Humanities
  • Walter Jackson Bate Fellow
  • Rutgers University
Headshot of Rebecca L. Walkowitz
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

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

Rebecca L. Walkowitz is an associate professor of English at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Her research focuses on modernism, the contemporary novel, and transnational approaches to literary history. Walkowitz has published Immigrant Fictions: Contemporary Literature in an Age of Globalization (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation (Columbia University Press, 2006), Bad Modernisms, edited with Douglas Mao (Duke University Press, 2006), and The Turn to Ethics, edited with Marjorie Garber and Beatrice Hanssen (Routledge, 2000).

At Radcliffe, she will work on “Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature.” “Born Translated” will identify and trace the emergence of a new genre of world literature: novels that do not simply appear in translation but have been written for translation from the start. Born-translated fiction includes novels such as J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the digital narratives of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. “Born Translated” asks what it might mean to read an original translation or to read a work that has no original at all.

Walkowitz earned an AB from Harvard-Radcliffe, an MPhil from the University of Sussex, and a PhD from Harvard University. She is the recipient of a Marshall Scholarship, a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, an ACLS Fellowship, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, and three teaching prizes from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. 

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

01 / 09

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