Notes on Contributors
Daniel Behar is an assistant professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he teaches modern Arabic literature and how to read Arabic literature as world literature. He has published on modern and contemporary Syrian literary culture, its intersections with history and politics, and its dialogue with non-Arab traditions such as European modernism and Soviet socialist realism.
Byron Byrne-Taylor was born in London. He studied English Literature at the University of Sussex, Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge, and History and Philosophy at the Central European University. His doctorate was spent between University College London and Harvard and Yale Universities (2018–22). His doctoral thesis uses World Literature, Translation Studies and the concept of untranslatability to reinvestigate and cross-contextualize the literary modernisms of Brazil, Russia and Germany.
Vedran Ćatović is a Lecturer in Slavic literatures and cultures at the University of Michigan, where he received his PhD in comparative literature. His work focuses on humor in literature across languages and cultures. His dissertation, Narrative Satire in Context: The Journey and Wisdom in West and East Europe, analyzes diverse satirical works, and the ways their authors employ humor to interrogate and subvert dominant narratives of their respective cultures.
Pheng Cheah is Professor of Rhetoric and Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1999. He has published extensively on the theory and practice of cosmopolitanism. He is the author of What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (2016) and has recently co-edited Siting Postcoloniality: Critical Perspectives from the East Asian Sinosphere (2022).
David Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and founder of the Institute for World Literature. His books include What Is World Literature? (2003), Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (2020), and Around the World in 80 Books (2021), and he is editor and translator of Georges Ngal’s Giambatista Viko, or the Rape of African Discourse (2022).
Matylda Figlerowicz is currently a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Working on writing in Basque, Catalan, Galician, Yucatecan Mayan, Nahuatl, Quechua, and Spanish, she studies the aesthetics and politics of multilingual literatures and proposes to understand multilingualism as a mode of critique. She is the author of La memoria en construcción (2015).
Ben Holgate works in the tech industry in London developing AI models with a particular focus on Natural Language Processing. He was previously an academic at Queen Mary University of London and the University of York, and holds a doctorate in literature from the University of Oxford.
Coral Lumbley is an assistant professor of English at Macalester College, where she teaches courses on premodern literatures. She holds a PhD in English and Medieval Studies from the University of Illinois. Her research interests include premodern critical race studies, trans and women’s studies, and the history of empire. Her first monograph explores the roles of ecological and anticolonial thought in medieval Welsh literature.
Nathanael Pree is of Australian and German heritage and was brought up in England. He completed undergraduate studies at University College London and obtained his PhD from the University of Sydney, where he currently teaches. His research and writing focus on transnational and comparative literature, and tropes where contemporary and older voices intersect.
Shaden M. Tageldin is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. Her monograph Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt (2011), was awarded the honorable mention for the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association. A Senior Editor for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Tageldin is completing a new book, provisionally titled Toward a Transcontinental Theory of Modern Comparative Literature.
Bhavya Tiwari is an assistant professor of Modern and Classical Literature at the University of Houston. Her research and teaching interests are world literature, comparative literature, and translation studies. She is the author of Beyond English: World Literature and India (2021), and of essays in Interventions, Journal of World Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Comparative Literature and Culture, and the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature.
Blaž Zabel is an assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He works on the history of scholarship, particularly the development of Homeric scholarship, philology, and comparative literature. He is currently leading a research project entitled Towards a History of Comparative Literature in a Global Perspective: Matija Murko and his International Collaborators.