Ben Fried

Biography

I am a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the Institute of English Studies in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. A scholar of twentieth-century literatures in English, and of the ways in which they have been shaped by editors and migration, I am currently bringing my first book project—The Empire of English Literature: Editing the Global Anglophone, 1947-1993—to publication.

I received my doctorate from Cornell University in 2022, having previously earned an MPhil at the University of Cambridge (as a Gates Cambridge Scholar) and a BA Hons at McGill University (where I received the Shakespeare Gold Medal). My essays on editors and the editorial function have been published in African American Review and are forthcoming in such venues as Post45, as well as in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Modernist Archives (Bloomsbury Academic) and Mapping World Anglophone Studies (Routledge). In addition to winning the Guilford Dissertation Prize, I have also been awarded Mention of Honor for African American Review’s Darwin T. Turner Award (“best essay overall” in 2022) and Cornell’s Moses Coit Tyler Essay Prize for best essay in the fields of American literature and history. I am the principal investigator on a project to digitize Cornell’s Bombay Poets Archive—the most important existing archive for the study of twentieth-century Anglophone Indian poetry—and the recipient of an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship at the British Library to conduct research in their publishers’ archives.