Visiting Fellowship: Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture

The main purpose of my postdoctoral fellowship was to research a book I was writing on the politics of 1950s and 60s literary school The Beat Generation (published by Palgrave McMillan in 2020, and titled Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture). I aimed to look particularly at the impact of Beat ideas in Britain, drawing on records of the 1962 International Edinburgh Writers’ Conference – a major transatlantic literary event – to consider the relationship between British and American philosophical and political approaches among experimental authors. Through this, the plan was to challenge conventional assumptions about literary progressivism in the post-war period, highlighting politically and philosophically reactionary aspects of the Beats’ work to reassess the influence of a historically significant movement on the larger culture, in their time and ours.