Professor Corey Byrnes named as Radcliffe Institute Fellow

Professor Corey Byrnes has been chosen as a 2021-2022 Radcliffe Institute Fellow, joining a class whose work spans the sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts. An associate professor of modern and contemporary Chinese culture, comparative literary studies and environmental humanities in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Byrnes fits all criteria needed to be a successful Radcliffe Institute Fellow.

The Radcliffe Institute Fellowship is extremely competitive and supports the work of 50 leading artists and scholars throughout nine countries. Of its kind in the world, the program has rapidly become one of the most difficult fellowships to be accepted into; the acceptance rate for the class was 2.4%, from 1,383 applications.

In addition to being a professor, Byrnes is the co-founder and co-director of Northwestern’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities’ Environmental Humanities Workshop, the center of a lively and growing community of faculty and graduate students whose work engages in environmental issues.

Byrnes is grateful to be included as part of the fellowship, stating,

“Not only will I gain much needed time and resources to do my research, I’ll be part of a remarkably interdisciplinary group of scholars and artists. This kind of community is hard to come by, and I know it will make my work better. Even more importantly, after the upheaval and isolation of the last year or so, I feel humbled by the opportunity to join others in thinking through some of the most urgent questions of the moment.”

Byrnes’ project, “China as Threat,” explores the relationship between China and a global environmental imaginary in which it is increasingly treated as an existential threat. In discussing the project, Byrnes commented,

“Threat is an especially useful category for writing about a ‘rising’ China, which is often imagined as both a site of localized ecological ruination that prefigures imminent global collapse and also as a source of pollution and contagion that exceed national boundaries. Particularly in the global north, China has become a focal point for ambient eco-anxieties that are inevitably shadowed by longer histories of perceived racial, cultural and economic threat. It’s easy (and essential) to critique the demonization of China; the challenge lies in disentangling imagined threats from very real and present environmental dangers. ‘China as Threat’ confronts this challenge by looking at the material and figural roles of threatened and threatening non-human animals in shaping China’s place in the global environmental imaginary.”

To read more about Professor Byrnes and his project, see the Northwestern Now article Weinberg Professor Corey Byrnes named Radcliffe Institute Fellow.