David Damrosch

Prof. David Damrosch

Prof. David Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature. His nine books include What Is World Literature? (Princeton, 2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (Holt, 2007), How to Read World Literature (Blackwell, 2d. ed. 2017), Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (Princeton, 2020), and Around the World in 80 Books (forthcoming from Penguin). He is the general editor of the six-volume Longman anthologies of British Literature and of World Literature, and editor or co-editor of fifteen other books. He has given several hundred lectures in fifty countries around the world, and his work had been translated into an eclectic variety of languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Danish, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

At ELS 2020, Prof. Damrosch will deliver a keynote on World Literature in and through English.