People

Debjani Ganguly

IWL Director
Professor of English, University of Virginia 

Professor of Literature, ACU Melbourne

Debjani Ganguly is Director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature and Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is also Professor of Literature at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, ACU Melbourne. She is the author of This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (2016) and Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (2005). Her latest monograph, Catastrophic Modes and Planetary Realism, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She is the editor of the two-volume The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021) and general editor with Francesca Orsini of the monograph series, Cambridge Studies in World Literature. As Director of Humanities Institutes at the University of Virginia (2016-2023) and the Australian National University (2007-2014), Debjani has fostered international projects in pre-modern global cultures, world literature,  environmental humanities, oceanic studies, digital humanities, informatics, big data, and AI. She has served on the board of the global Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes from 2009-2021.

David Damrosch

Chair, IWL Executive Committee
Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University

David Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and Chair of the Executive Committee of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature. His books include What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), How to Read World Literature(2d. ed. 2017), and Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (2020). He is the general editor of the six-volume Longman anthologies of British Literature and of World Literature, editor of World Literature in Theory (2014), and co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, and of two collections in Chinese, Theories of World Literature (2013) and New Directions in Comparative Literature (2010).

Delia Ungureanu

Executive Director, IWL
Associate Professor, University of Bucharest

Delia Ungureanu is Executive Director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature and associate professor of literary theory in the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Bucharest. She is the author of Time Regained: World Literature and Cinema (2021), From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature (2017), and Poetica Apocalipsei: Războiul cultural în revistele literare românești (1944–1947) (The Poetics of Apocalypse: The cultural war in Romanian literary magazines, 1944-1947, 2012). She has published essays on the transmedial world circulation of ideas and the global spread of surrealism. She has co-edited special issues of the Journal of World Literature on "Romanian Literature in Today's World" (2018, with Thomas Pavel), on the legacy of Pascale Casanova (2020, with Gisèle Sapiro), and on world literature and world cinema (2021, with Michael Wood).

© Cătălina Flămînzeanu

Maria Dabija

IWL Assistant (Balzan Scholarship questions)

Maria Dabija is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard. Originally from the Republic of Moldova, she received her BA in Romanian and Russian from the University of Bucharest in 2021. Maria is interested in World Literature, contemporary Russian fiction, modernism, postmodernism, and in their relation to the premodern. For any questions related to the Balzan Scholarship, please contact Maria Dabija at: mariadabija@g.harvard.edu

Bridget Kraynik

Administrative Assistant

Bridget Kraynik processes honoraria, reimbursements, and invoice payments for the IWL program. IWL Faculty and Group Leaders are welcome to be in touch with her regarding any payment issues or questions they might have. Bridget grew up in Ohio, where she also completed her bachelor's and master's degrees. She moved to Massachusetts in 2015, working short-term assignments at Harvard until being hired full-time in 2017.