Peter Mallios Selected for Arcan Semester Research Award for Spring 2019

This semester leave from teaching and administrative responsibilities supports faculy as they complete the major project required for promotion to full professor.

Mallios posits Wilson as a signifying presence and object of engagement and meditation in diverse canonical, multicultural, and international U.S. literatures of the 1910’s, 20’s and 30’s.  The book takes the occasion of Woodrow Wilson--as a person, a figure (in the representational sense), and a discourse--to make a case for a reconsideration of American modernism as grounded in the myriad political debates and possibilities available in the early part of the nineteenth century.  A central term and idea that runs throughout the political, personal, historical, educational, moral, religious, and cultural writings that stand behind Wilson’s presidency is the "literary."  Wilson self-identified as a “literary politician,” however the “literary” remained a highly ambivalent trope. The ambiguous nature of language in Wilson, himself already a modernist, makes Wilson a site of unusually plural engagement by modern writers.