We are very pleased to announce that Michael Boyden (Radboud University Nijmegen) will join the Department of English as our new Professor of American Literature, starting 01 August 2025.

Here is his portrait:

I started my academic career at the University of Leuven, in my native Belgium, where I obtained my PhD in 2006 (almost twenty years ago!) with a dissertation on the rise of American literary studies in the academy. What interested me then was not just the historical emergence of this scholarly field but also the concomitant resistance – prevalent to this day – to the idea that literary criticism has anything to do with what we do in universities. In contrast to similar studies on “the state of the discipline,” I tried to steer free from a declensionist or alarmist narrative by approaching this topic from the dispassionate vantage point of literary sociology, arguing that jeremiads about the ruination of the humanities should be understood, at least partly, in relation to the internal legitimation strategies of the literary institution. After the completion of my Ph.D. and a one-year postdoc at Harvard, I worked as an assistant professor of American culture at Ghent University for five years, after which I assumed a position as associate professor of American literature at Uppsala University in Sweden. In 2021, I was hired as a full professor of English at Radboud University Nijmegen. I have learned a lot from working in these varied institutional contexts, each with their own traditions, formalities, and modi operandi. Having grown up on a language frontier, I was drawn to Fribourg for its international and multilingual vibe in an environment that is at the same time highly collegial and human-sized. My current research specializes mostly in the environmental and health humanities. I am interested in the ways literature shapes and transforms the relations between bodies and environments. Other specialties include, among other things, literary multilingualism, humor in literature, transmedia storytelling, and methods such as digital concept history and scalable reading. In my teaching, I like to confront students with texts and cultural expressions that allow them to interrogate the ideological rigidity of governing worldviews, thus hopefully strengthening their resilience and ability to de- or prebunk misinformation in a quickly changing world society.