David Damrosh - Biography#

David Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature

David Damrosch is the founding director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association.

He has written widely on world literature from antiquity to the present, and has lectured in over fifty countries worldwide. His books include The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (1987), What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), How to Read World Literature (2008), Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (2020), and Around the World in 80 Books (2021), and he is the editor or co-editor of twenty-two other books. He is currently writing a book on writing systems and cultural memory.