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 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.

Damrosch was born in Maine and raised there and in New York City. He studied at Yale University, earning his BA in 1975 and his PhD in 1980, with a dissertation titled “Scripture and Fiction: Egypt, the Midrash, Finnegans Wake.” At Yale he developed interests in a wide range of ancient and modern languages and literatures, including Egyptian hieroglyphics, Biblical Hebrew, Nahuatl, and Old Norse. As he recalls in an interview with Harvard Magazine, such an academic profile was unusual for a comparatist in the 1970s. When asked about his research area in 2015, he said: “I work mostly on literature between roughly 2000 and 2015. But ‘2000’ means 2000 B.C.E.”

At Columbia (1980-2008) and at Harvard since then, he has taught courses on ancient and modern literature and on theories and methods of comparative studies. He was the Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard from 2009 to 2022. He has given talks in more than fifty countries around the world, and his work has been translated into Albanian, Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Estonian, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish, Tibetan, Vietnamese, and Yiddish.

Damrosch has described his approach as that of “a structuralist in recovery,” balancing an interest in literary forms with a more contextually grounded analysis. He has always been preoccupied with questions of methodology and institutional practices. In We Scholars (1995), he calls for reforms in academia to combat alienation and foster new modes of scholarly interaction. He further explored these ideas in his novel Meetings of the Mind (2000), which he defines as “an autobiographical survey of comparative studies,” and implemented them in his role as the President of the ACLA. This experience informs his later works.

Damrosch’s thinking has been shaped by the ideas of Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye, and Kenneth Burke, on whom he has written extensively.

Alongside Pascale Casanova’s La République mondiale des lettres (1999) and Franco Moretti’s essay “Conjunctions on World Literature” (2000), Damrosch’s What is World Literature? is considered a foundational text in the contemporary study of world literature. He draws on Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur, rethinking it in light of increasing globalization and evolving academic politics. In this study, he defines world literature as:

1) an elliptical refraction of national literatures.