As the specialist in science fiction in “Anglo Genres for Atlantic Futures,” Michael is writing a book about science fiction’s relevance for the contemporary political moment of the United States. His monograph, titled Horizon Collapse: The Anxieties of Aspiration in Contemporary American Science Fiction, examines how failures of imagination characterize the American left’s inability to respond effectively to the rising authoritarian right. Building upon Michael’s expertise on how science fictional visions of the future have contained multiple strands of political thought in China, both liberal and authoritarian, he argues that science fiction’s longstanding association with utopian leftist politics in the United States is coming to an end. Instead, it is now the authoritarian right whose politics are tied to affirmative notions of the future, while the left surrenders its historical position by defining itself negatively, around what it does not want. Horizon Collapse argues that developments in the literary genre of science fiction and its criticism are inextricable from their counterparts in the science fictional arena of utopian politics, as the view of science fiction as imaginations of the future have given way to an instrumentalization of science fiction in the present in order to remedy historical injustice. A revival of leftist politics capable of remedying democratic backsliding in the United States will require a new flourishing of science fiction. To this end, Horizon Collapse will re-read the past fifteen years of American science fiction to recover its futurist imaginations that have been neglected amid the trend toward presentist instrumentalization.

The 21^st century campus novel presents a transformation of the genre in a literary sense, but it also takes part of the ongoing conversations surrounding academics and the university campus.

Subproject II thus aims to analyze the transition from the 20^th to the 21st century campus novel, with the critical lenses of race, class, and power. The in-depth analysis of a few of the most celebrated contemporary campus novels will also open new avenues of the study for contemporary global issues surrounding higher education reflected in this genre of fiction. Subproject II includes three main areas of interest. The first one consists of a literature review of the main campus novels of the 20^th century to understand the literary conventions of the genre and the literary criticism surrounding these novels. The second one composed by three main chapters on race, class, and power places special attention to novels like Elif Batuman’s The Idiot (2017), Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018), Mona Awad’s Bunny (2019) R. F. Kuang’s Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translator’s Revolution (2022) and Katabasis (2025), Brando Taylor’s Real Life (2020), Antonia Angress’ Sirens and Muses (2022), and Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind (2021). Lastly, part three focuses on the future of the campus novel and its online presence through the rise of ‘dark academia’ as a multiplatform aesthetic. Subproject II concludes with reflections on how the contemporary campus novel envisions the university under the rise of anti-intellectualism.

Framed by the general question of a possible subjectivity of the Anthropocene this subproject focuses on a particularly prominent genre of contemporary literature: eco-fiction. Building on the question of the current relevance and development of this literary genre, given the emergence of the genre of climate fiction (cli-fi), Ambrosetti’s project seeks to investigate the role of the novel in narrating one of the major threats to humanity in the twenty-first century: climate change. Through the analysis of three distinct layers of eco-fiction (the environment, the body, and the mind) and through the critical assessment of the concept of the Anthropocene, the aim is to address the possible nexus between fiction and reader’s political engagement. The project will draw on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that includes close reading, historical contextualization, literary-historical contextualization, and ecocriticism. Special attention will be given to the affective dynamics within texts: how emotional experiences are represented, mediated, and transmitted through narrative. In this context, the project engages with recent critical discourses on affective environments, considering whether and how literary texts can stage emotional ecologies that reflect and shape readers’ responses to ecological crisis.