David Damrosch

David Damrosch 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, rev. ed. 2017). 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).