Research Fields: Theory and methods of comparative literature and world literary studies; Bible and ancient Near Eastern literatures; modern European and global Anglophone literatures. Current research projects include a book on the role of global scripts in the formation of national literatures.

Education: B.A. 1975, Ph. D. 1980, Yale University

Selected Works: A past president of the American Comparative Literature Association, David Damrosch has written widely on comparative and world literature from antiquity to the present. His books include The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (1987), We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (1995), 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 edition 2017), Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (2020), and Around the World in 80 Books (2021). He is the founding general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004) and the editor of Teaching World Literature (2009) and co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (2009), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (2011), and Xin fangxiang: bijiao wenxue yu shijie wenxue duben [New Directions: A Reader of Comparative and World Literature], Peking U. P., 2010. He has just completed a translation of a Congolese novel, Georges Ngal’s Giambatista Viko: ou Le viol du discours africain, for the MLA’s “Texts and Translations” series.