Meritocracy and Literature: Transcultural Approaches to Hegemonic Forms

Project Information

MERLIT

Grant agreement ID: 101088378

DOI

10.3030/101088378

EC signature date 20 June 2023

Start date 1 January 2024

End date 31 December 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 961 451,00

EU contribution

€ 1 961 451,00

Coordinated by

VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT BRUSSEL
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MERLIT (Meritocracy and Literature: Transcultural Approaches to Hegemonic Forms)

Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2026-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Investigating meritocratic narratives in and through literature

MERLIT explores how meritocratic narratives shape literary and artistic forms as well as how they are shaped by literary and artistic forms in turn. Social narratives of meritocracy are reflected in abundance across the spectrum of literary and artistic forms. They feature in plays, novels, travelogues, films, and artistic manifestos. Through colonisation and globalisation, such narratives have travelled widely. This is especially noticeable in Anglophone contexts. The project investigates how meritocratic narratives are written and culturally circulated, arguing that their adoption in literary forms allows insights into the 'spirit' of a particular age and context. Eventually, the research project contributes to understanding shifts in the articulation of value, merit, and success over time, from the 16th to the 21st century.

Interview with the PI, Eva Ulrike Pirker:
https://www.vub.be/en/news/earned-success-research-into-meritocracy-in-literature

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The MERLIT project at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) consists of a core team of six researchers. In five exemplary yet representative subprojects, they study the reciprocity between literary forms and hegemonic narratives of valorization across five centuries of literary-artistic production in Anglophone contexts. A sixth work package offers tangential and embedding reflections in a literary-historical overview. The project has grown to accommodate several associated research projects which testify to the urgency of the questions it raises in, from and for the Humanities and beyond. All six core researchers as well as associated researchers have presented their work at international symposia and conferences in 2024 and 2025 and will continue to do so in the upcoming phase. As the individual work packages cover a range of genres, periods and contexts, the individual researchers have built networks for their respective subprojects.

At VUB, the MERLIT team has initiated an ongoing series of Theory and Methodology Workshops that engage with the different theoretical strands informing the research in the six work packages: Concepts of meritocratic thought, the history of literature and ideas and their transfer as well as intelligent approaches to form. These workshops, some of which feature international experts, regularly attract participants beyond the project team. In September 2025, the MERLIT team organised the international conference "Writing Meritocracy: Figurations of a Concept Across Literary History and Contexts of Literary Production" (18-20 Sept 2025), at which meritocratic concepts were explored in literary traditions and examples from several continents, linguistic contexts and centuries. An edited volume emerging from "Writing Meritocracy" is currently in production. This conference has been an important milestone in the team's efforts to mainstream reflections on variations of meritocratic narratives as subjects of, as well as determining factors in, literary cultures across the globe.

Beyond organising their own formats at VUB, MERLIT members individually teamed up with colleagues to organise literary conventions and symposia and panels (BAAHE Conference 2024, VAL Conference 2025, Global Modernist Studies Network Symposium 2025, ACLALS), in the context of which the MERLIT research could be mainstreamed: The 2024 edition of the BAAHE conference explored the hegemonic role of English as a (trans)portable container or vehicle for cultral concepts in the world. assumed a prominent space. The VAL-Day offered explorations of gender anxieties in literature and culture and featured a number of contributions on social mobility, conceptualisations of valorization and merit through the prism of changing approaches to gender. All these engagements lead to publications in which the MERLIT project will leave an impression.

While data collection is still underway, first publications are under contract and can be expected to appear in 2026.

Conference presentations, publications, and other milestones can be found on the regularly updated project website merlit.vub.be.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The MERLIT project receives attention both nationally and internationally. Visting researchers from Brazil, Ghana, South Africa, the US and the UK have participated in our Theory and Methodology workshops; We are asked to host projects that address related research questions temporarily or over a longer period of time. Several project applications for individual fundamental and applied research linked to MERLIT or one of its work packages are underway. This testifies to the need to engage with the social relevance of forms and narratives, a field in which the MERLIT researchers' expertise is being sought.

MERLIT researchers have contributed to the organisation of a number of public events, e.g. in the context of the public-facing series "Ties That Bind Us: Transcultural Perspectives on Social Forms" (vub.be/en/ties-that-bind-us-transcultural-perspectives-social-forms) which picks up MERLIT's explorations of forms in the social world for a general audience.

The impact of meritocratic narratives in a transcultural field of investigation will not yield meaningful results if it is studied in isolation and through a narrow, Western lens. International engagements, and particularly the exchange with scholars from the Southern Hemisphere, are of key importance for all phases of the research, ranging from the access to rare or fragile archives, data collection and interpretation to the dissemination of results. Partnerships, co-supervision agreements (UK, Ghana), the invitation of guest lecturers (various) as well as the participation in international missions (South Africa, Kenya) are of high relevance for the explorations of the concerns the project addresses.