Fritz Bommas was awarded the 2024 Post-Graduate Research Fellowship at Duke University. The American Studies scholar from the University of Augsburg will use the fellowship to conduct research for his dissertation project on realist modes of writing in the context of a contemporary confluence of planetary crises. We extend our warmest congratulations to Fritz Bommas and wish him an exciting and insightful time in Durham, North Carolina!
Foto: Duke University ©Pattern / unsplash.com
About the Dissertation Project
In his dissertation project, Fritz Bommas turns to realist modes of writing in the context of a contemporary confluence of planetary crises. Drawing on an analysis of the realist strategies employed in various novels to face the representational challenges of crisis, he posits a realist paradigm for the 21st century that is based on multiple dimensions of consensus. At Duke University, his research will focus on the intersection of imaginaries of capitalism in U.S. American society, contemporary arrays of crises, and the literary and cultural productions that integrate the two.
About the Fellowship Holder
Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg / Fotostelle / Anatoli Oskin
Fritz Bommas is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University of Augsburg, where he previously earned both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in English and American Studies. Since April 2024, he is a doctoral researcher at the chair of American Literary History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. His dissertation, titled “What’s Real in the Capitalocene: Realist Form, Crisis, and Consensus in Contemporary North American Novels” examines the ways that realistically inflected novels in the United States and Canada respond to the complex ecological, economic, and representational crises of the 21st century by way of strategies of consensus. Beyond the Environmental Humanities and contemporary realism(s), Fritz Bommas is interested in questions of literary historicity, narratives of resource extraction, and representations of (dis)placement; an article that traces the representation of history and colonialism in Annie Proulx’s Barkskins before the background of the ‘Capitalocene’ has been published in COPAS in August 2023.
The Duke University Post-Graduate Research Fellowship is part of the Fellowship Program of the Bavarian American Academy (BAA) and is announced annually. Applications are open to doctoral and postdoctoral candidates at Bavarian universities whose research projects are thematically fitting and whose work benefits from a stay at the renowned American university.
