ABSTRACT
DAVID DAMROSCH (B. 1953) SINCE 2009 holds the Chair of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where he is also Ernest Birnbaum Professor of Literature. Before, he taught for many years at Columbia University as a colleague of Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. He obtained his PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale, where he pursued interests in a wide range of ancient and modern languages and literatures. A prolifi c author of both scholarly and more popular material (he has written very entertainingly on The Buried Book: The Loss and Recovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh , 2006), his work has been translated into a variety of languages, including Chinese, Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish and Vietnamese. Although he had already started writing on world literature in the 1990s, Damrosch in 2003 established himself as the leading expert in the fi eld with What is World Literature? Damrosch also served as editorin-chief of the multi-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature ; which as of its appearance in the early years of the twenty-fi rst century quickly established itself as the most widely used anthology in the fi eld.
