Debjani Ganguly, the New Director of the Harvard Institute for World Literature

We are delighted to announce that as of June 21, 2025 the IWL directorship passed on to Professor Debjani Ganguly of the University of Virginia. Harvard remains the home base of the IWL, and Debjani Ganguly has become an affiliate of the Department of Comparative Literature, as is our Executive Director Delia Ungureanu. Debjani Ganguly brings an exceptional combination of scholarly and administrative strengths to this role. She is the author of the wonderful book This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Duke UP, 2016), and more recently she edited a magisterial two-volume collection, The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021), with a who’s who of contributors from around the world. On the administrative front, she served from 2016-2023 as Director of UVA’s Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, and before that was Director of the Australian National University’s Humanities Research Centre from 2007-2014. She has been a supporter of the Institute all along, and we are immensely pleased and grateful that she has kindly agreed to take on this role. 

-- David Damrosch, Chair of the IWL Executive Committee