With previous appointments at Columbia University and Stanford University, I am currently Professor of Literature, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I co-founded the program in World Literature and Cultural Studies and have served a
...MoreWith previous appointments at Columbia University and Stanford University, I am currently Professor of Literature, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I co-founded the program in World Literature and Cultural Studies and have served as the Director of the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Center. I completed my doctoral work in Comparative Literature at Yale, with a thesis on the politics of Alexandrian poetry--a body of work previously considered to be "art for art's sake"--with particular attention to the confluence of the Greek and Egyptian literary traditions in this body of work. Since then, I have worked primarily on literary texts and films situated at the confluence of two or more distinct cultural formations such that they intervene disparately in the several cultures and political economies that they address. To be able to do this work, I have learned over twenty languages from a variety of different language families.
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