David Damrosch
Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, Harvard University

David Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association, and is the founder of the Institute for World Literature (www.iwl.fas.harvard.edu). He was trained at Yale and then taught at Columbia from 1980 until he moved to Harvard in 2009. He has written widely on issues in comparative and world literature, and is the author of The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (1987), We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (1995), Meetings of the Mind (2000), What Is World Literature?(2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), and How to Read World Literature (2009). He is the founding general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004) and of The Longman Anthology of British Literature (4th ed. 2009), editor of Teaching World Literature (2009) and of World Literature in Theory (2014), and co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (2009). His work has been translated into an eclectic variety of languages, including Arabic, Hungarian, Polish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

Faculty Courses

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Examine how great modern writers capture the intricacies of our globalized world and how their works circulate within that world to find their own audiences.

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Examine how cultures of the ancient world defined themselves through literature and how their vision of literature contributes to our understanding of civilization, culture, and literature today.

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