David Damrosch

David Damrosch (born 13 April 1953) is an American literary historian, author, and scholar of comparative and world literature, and is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of nine books and editor or co-editor of two dozen collections, and is best known for his book ''What is World Literature?'' (2003), in which he defines world literature not as a set canon of texts but as “a mode of reading”, highlighting ways in which texts get circulated and translated. His further publications on this topic include ''How to Read World Literature?'' (2009), ''Comparing the Literatures'' (2020), and ''Around the World in 80 Books'' (2021). Among the collections Damrosch co-edited are the six-volume Longman anthologies of British Literature and World Literature. He is a co-editor in chief of the ''[https://brill.com/view/journals/jwl/jwl-overview.xml Journal of World Literature].'' His edition and translation of a francophone Congolese novel, Georges Ngal’s ''Giambatista Viko; or, The Rape of African Discourse'', came out in 2022.

Damrosch is a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association (2001-2003) and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of Academia Europaea. In 2023 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for his work on world literature. He gave the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of Utah in 2025. Provided by Wikipedia