Rhodri Lewis, senior research scholar and lecturer with the rank of professor in English, was awarded the Guggenheim in the field of literary criticism. Novelist Katie Kitamura ’99, who teaches in NYU’s Creative Writing Program, received a fellowship in the field of fiction.

Chosen from a diverse pool of nearly 3,500 applicants, these two English department associates are among six Princeton faculty members and arts fellows and nine alumni who received Guggenheim Fellowships this year. The Princetonians are among 198 Americans and Canadians selected to receive Guggenheims, which recognize both “prior career achievement and exceptional promise,” according to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation announcement. This year marks the 100th class of fellows.

“At a time when intellectual life is under attack, the Guggenheim Fellowship celebrates a century of support for the lives and work of visionary scientists, scholars, writers, and artists,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and President of the Guggenheim Foundation. “We believe that these creative thinkers can take on the challenges we all face today and guide our society towards a better and more hopeful future.”

About the Faculty Recipient: Rhodri Lewis

“The personal recognition is obviously lovely,” Lewis said, “and it is a real honor to find my name alongside those of the many great literary critics, historians, and theorists who have won Guggenheims over the course of the past 100 years. But the recognition for literary criticism is just as important, especially at a time when even its defenders (like those of the humanities in general) seem more than a little confused about the nature of its merits and enduring value.”

Lewis is a scholar, educator, and critic with interests rooted in the literary, cultural, and intellectual histories of the early modern era. His work explores diverse consequent concerns — including bibliography and textual criticism; the status of drama as an idea and a series of practices; life writing; the history of science, of religion, of language and of political thought; the frequently contested lines of demarcation between human and animal forms of life; the no less frequently contested status of “poetic” (and/or “literary”) language; the history of literary criticism. He is also a regular reviewer of fiction and non-fiction for public audiences — in the United States, but especially in the United Kingdom.

His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from institutions including the Leverhulme Trust, the Mellon Foundation, the British Academy, the Huntington Library, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

His 2017 book Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2018. His most recent book, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, builds on his account of Hamlet to offer a powerfully original reassessment of Shakespearean tragedy in the round — of what drew Shakespeare toward tragic drama, what makes his tragedies distinctive, and why they matter. It was named a New Yorker Book of the Year for 2024.

The Guggenheim Fellowship will directly impact Lewis’s current project, Rage for Order: A Life of Frank Kermode, a monograph under contract with Princeton University Press for delivery in late 2027 (give or take), which carries Lewis’s pursuit of interests rooted in literary, cultural, and intellectual histories through the late 20th century into the present. Lewis writes that “[Kermode’s] life — that is, the life of one who made the profession of literature the keystone of who and what he was — provides a uniquely revealing perspective on the ways in which the institutions of literary study have evolved over the past 75 years.” The Guggenheim Fellowship will enable travel to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, which houses the archive of the London Review of Books and the papers of the CIA agent Michael Josselson, and repeated visits to the New York Public Library to consult the New York Review of Books archive, the diary of David Plante, and much else besides.

But, Lewis writes, his “real need is for the freedom to sit and read and think and write.”
His goal for the academic year 2025-26 is to complete his research, and to proceed as far as possible from the in-progress “Manchester, Bristol, and the Trans-Atlantic Scene: 1958-67” (chapter 6) towards “Man of Letters: 1990-2010” (chapter 13) and “Retrospective: Fiction Supreme” (chapter 14).

About the Alumna Recipient: Katie Kitamura

Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel is Audition. She is also the author of Intimacies, one of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021 and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2021. It was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. In France, it won the Prix Litteraire Lucien Barriere, was a finalist for the Grand Prix de l’Heroine, and was longlisted for the Prix Fragonard. Her third novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. Her two previous novels, Gone to the Forest and The Longshot, were both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. 

Her work has been translated into 22 languages and is being adapted for film and television. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, a Cullman Center Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Lannan, Santa Maddalena, and Jan Michalski foundations. Katie has written for publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and Frieze.