January 2003

Professor of American Studies and English, Donald Weber has received a fellowship to the Bellagio Center for his project “The Anxiety of Belonging: Multiculturalism and Identity Politics in U.S. and U.K. Literary and Popular Culture.” He will compare how the idea of belonging and the constructions of ethnic identity are explored in the literary and popular cultures of the U.S. and U.K. On a theoretical level, he wants to explore the charge of French sociologists, such as Bourdieu, that multiculturalism is another example of American academic imperialism, together with the notion that, due to America sociologists, the term “identity” has become overburdened and lost all explanatory power. Fellowships to the Bellagio Center, a historic estate on the shores of Lake Como run by the Rockefeller Foundation, are highly prestigious and go to established scholars judged by their peers to be doing cutting-edge work.