Director's Welcome

It is an immense honor to lead Harvard’s Institute for World Literature. Established in 2011 and nurtured for a decade and a half by David Damrosch, erudite and indefatigable advocate of the field, the IWL offers a unique comparative and global environment for studying literary worlds. Our seminars and colloquia bring together doctoral students, early career scholars, and experts in the field from across the globe for a period of intense study. Registering both the historicity and cultural particularity of literary traditions from ancient and early modern worlds to our contemporary age, the IWL promotes scholarship that is comparative, translational, intercultural, and multi-scalar. Our seminars trace the emergence of major language worlds and multilingual enclaves - Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Greek, German, Hindi, Latin, Nordic, Persian, Russian, Sanskrit, Slavic, and Spanish - that have shaped ecologies of local or minor languages over centuries. Our scholars explore histories of empire, exile, migration, colonialism, cosmopolitanism, and environmental crises, and the relevance of these to our contemporary world. While acknowledging the importance of the nation as an organizing principle in literary history, our seminars experiment with transregional cartographies - the hemispheric, the oceanic, the multi-local, the archipelagic - that in turn generate new comparative models. Comparative histories of forms and genres illuminate patterns of exchange, influence, and transformation across vast continental swathes. 

The IWL aspires to engage with world literature’s vibrant material history ranging from the discovery of cuneiform tablets to the study of parchment manuscripts, calligraphic art, and early printmaking. In the modern era, literary world-making is unthinkable without the circulation and reception of books across magazines, libraries, publishing houses, printers, book sellers, literary festivals, and digital repositories. Literature is now intermedial. Works are read, televised, filmed, and multi-mediated across cinema, television, the personal computer, tablets, and smart phones. Computational methods of literary analysis deal with scales that supplement traditional methods of literary criticism focused on close reading of a handful of texts. Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are on the cusp of revolutionizing textual and creative production and offer daunting challenges to contemporary literary studies. 

The myriad linguistic resonances of the term ‘world’ - vishwa in Sanskrit, jahan in Persian, kosmos in Greek, mundus in Latin, duniya in Hindi, Welt in German, and monde in French – are a measure of its philological richness as an aesthetic and a normative category, one that resists the homogenizing power of the global and the machinic. We look forward to welcoming new scholars into our fold and fostering hospitable conversations around the world. 

– Debjani Ganguly