Plenary lectures

Keynote lecture

July 24: Homi Bhabha, "The Chimes of Freedom: On Race and Time

Homi Bhabha, a former member of the Institute’s board and the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English, will be delivering the keynote lecture for our 13th IWL session. Bhabha is the author of numerous works exploring postcolonial theory, cultural change and power, and cosmopolitanism, among other themes: On Art (forthcoming); A Global Measure (forthcoming); The Right to Narrate (forthcoming); Beyond Photography (2011); Our Neighbours, Ourselves (2011); Elusive Objects (2009); On Global Memory (2009); The Black Savant and the Dark Princess (2006); Framing Fanon (2005); The Location of Culture (2004, Routledge Classics); Still Life (2004); Adagio (2004).

Please note that the keynote lecture will be delivered via Zoom.

Special Events

July 17: A Reading and Conversation with Gish Jen

Gish Jen's short stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories five times, including in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,

 she has been the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award as well as a five-year Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has also been awarded NEA, Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Radcliffe fellowships, and delivered the William E. Massey lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard in 2012. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, and many anthologies and textbooks, and she currently serves on the Board of Directors of the MacArthur Foundation. Her ninth and most recent book is a collection of stories spanning the 50 years since the opening of China to the West. It is entitled Thank You, Mr. Nixon (Knopf).

Plenary talks

July 5: David Damrosch, "Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and Cultural Memory"

David Damrosch is Director of the Institute for World Literature and Ernest Bernbaum Professor 

of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. 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).

July 10: Simon Gikandi, "World Literature and the Question of the Foreign"

Simon Gikandi is the Class of 1943 University of Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Princeton University, where he is also affiliated with the Departments of Comparative Literature and African American Studies and the Program in African Studies.. Gikandi was elected second vice president of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in December 2016. He  was the first vice-presi

dent of the MLA in 2018 and became the association's president in 2019. He served as editor of PMLA, the official journal of the MLA, from 2011 to 2016.

   Born in Nyeri, Kenya, Gikandi earned his BA in literature, with first-class honors from the University of Nairobi. As a British Council Scholar at the University of Edinburgh, he graduated with an MLitt in English studies. He has a PhD in English from Northwestern University.

   Gikandi's major fields of research and teaching are Anglophone literatures and cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and postcolonial Britain; literary and critical theory; the black Atlantic and the African diaspora; and the English novel. His current research projects are on slavery and modernity, Decolonization and African Literature, and Global Modernism.

   He is the author of many books and articles, including Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature; Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism; and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a Choice Outstanding Academic Publication for 2004. He is the coauthor of The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English since 1945, the editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of African Literature, and the coeditor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. His book Slavery and the Culture of Taste was winner of the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Award; winner of the Melville J. Herskovits Award, given by the African Studies Association for the most important scholarly work in African studies; and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. He is the editor of The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950, volume 11 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English.

   Gikandi is the recipient of a number of awards, including the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University (2014), a Guggenheim fellowship (2001), and an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship (1989). He has also received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Gikandi was awarded the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton University in 2017. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018 and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2022.

July 19: Emily Greenwood, “World Literature, Libraries, and Institutional Legacies of Slavery: from Prospero’s Books to Christopher Codrington’s Books”

In April 2022, Harvard University released a report on “Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery” (Report), joining a growing number of universities that are reckoning with their past involvement; see, for example, the Consortium of International Universities Studying Slavery. This lecture will consider the reciprocity of mastery between universities and their slave-owning alumni who bequeathed physical books (and in some cases libraries) endowed from the profits of slavery, while simultaneously writing about and withholding books from those whom they enslaved. The lecture will focus on specific examples of books as vectors of slavery from Oxford University and Harvard in dialogue with theories of the hold and withholding in contemporary Black poetics and thought (including Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Dionne Brand, and Fred Moten). Finally, I will consider the implications of this history “on and in the books” for teaching World Literature in our universities.

Emily Greenwood is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, having previously taught  at St Andrews University, Yale, and Princeton. She specializes in ancient Greek literature and the plural histories of use that constitute the classical tradition of Greece and Rome, with a special interest in Africa and the Black diaspora. At the heart of her research are the questions: by whom and for whom were the so-called classics of ancient Greece and Rome written, by whom and for whom have they been interpreted and in light of which histories? Her books include Thucydides and the Shaping of History (2006), and Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century (2010). She has recently guest-edited a two-volume special issues of the American Journal of Philology entitled Diversifying Classical Philology (AJP 143.2, Summer 2022). Her current book projects are The Recovery of Loss: Ancient Greece and American Erasures, and Black Classicisms and the Expansion of the Western Classical Tradition.