PhD student Liam Plimmer has been awarded a Kennedy Scholarship to fund a Visiting Fellowship at Harvard University in 2024-25, following a competitive UK-wide selection process.
A first-generation student, he graduated with a double first with distinction in English from Downing College, Cambridge in 2020. He then completed an MSt in English Literature, 1900-Present as a Clarendon Scholar at Jesus College, Oxford, graduating with a distinction. In 2021, Liam returned to Cambridge to study for a PhD as a Benefactors’ Scholar at St. John’s College.
Liam’s research concerns the Künstlerroman, or “artist-novel”, a product of German romanticism. If the Bildungsroman is “one of academic criticism’s most overwhelmingly successful inventions” (Marc Redfield), then its long-lost relative the Künstlerroman still awaits invention. Accordingly, Liam’s project will overhaul our understanding of the modern novel by offering a new genealogy, and theory, of the form as an alternative to the current paradigm, which takes the Bildungsroman as its prototype. Examining works by Herman Melville, Henry James, Willa Cather, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and others, his PhD thesis shows how American authors use the Künstlerroman to ‘translate’ the German romantic spirit of critique into new contexts.
