Ethan Hemmati, a second-year British-Iranian doctoral candidate in American Literature at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, was named as the recipient of the 2025 Robert M. Luscher Scholarship for travel to research collections for a project involving John Updike. Hemmati will receive $1000 from The John Updike Society to help defray the costs of travel to the U.S.

Hemmati, who previously engaged in masculinity studies at the universities of Durham and Cambridge, is working on a doctoral project titled “Adultery and Postwar American Fiction.”

“My project takes an intertextual approach to the fiction, life-writing, and biographies of three postwar American writers: John Updike, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver,” Hemmati wrote in his proposal. “My specific focus is on textual representations of infidelity across the writers’ fictional and nonfictional writings. As writers who wrote about adultery but were also adulterous themselves, the textual mediations of the subject throughout their art proves a compelling juxtaposition to its other representations within the writers’ (auto)biographical texts.”

One judge wrote, of Hemmati’s proposal, “It is detailed and nuanced, and it articulates a line of inquiry that I think is urgently important for Updike scholarship going forward. The recent revelations about Alice Munro’s daughter as well as such books as Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma suggest we might be at an inflection point around the very questions Ethan’s projects seeks at addressing—namely, how to engage with ‘art of a perceivably problematic nature, typically as a result of information about its creator or production.”

Hemmati previously made the short list for The Literary Encyclopedia Travel Award 2024.