Overview
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (English, French, Ancient Greek), UC Berkeley. Her interests range across Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean literature and thought, modern Greek, modern French and modern English poetry, comparison, modernism and colonialism, Homer, Césaire, Cavafy, philosophies of time, decadence, barbarism, alexandrianism, comparative modernities, world literature in world history, postcolonial or decolonial studies, aesthetics and politics, racial capitalism and the poetics of landscape. She is the author of All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (Stanford UP, 2007) and co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (Princeton UP, 2009). She is slowly finishing a book tentatively titled Modern Lyric and Racial Time around Aimé Césaire and C.P. Cavafy. Her current research centers on a transmedial inquiry into Caribbean environmentalities through poetic and visual registers and has taken the form of an award-winning collaborative short experimental film made with documentary filmmaker Kannan Arunasalam and architect and spatial theorist, Tao DuFour, “We Love We Self Up Here” (2021) https://vimeo.com/612111115?embedded=true&source=vimeo_logo&owner=105731070
That collaboration continues with the making of a second full-length film, funded by a two-year Mellon Foundation “Just Futures” grant through the Cornell Migrations initiative.
Research Focus
- Transcultural Theory (between postcolonialism and globalism)
- Comparison
- Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean literature and thought
- Modernism and colonialism
- World Literature in a postcolonial frame
- Poetics and politics of time
Publications
- All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (Stanford UP, 2007) (ACLA René Wellek Prize Honorable Mention 2008)
- co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (Princeton UP, 2009).
- "Poetry's Circumstance and Racial Time (Aimé Césaire, 1935-1945 or thereabouts)" special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on Cesaire and Negritude, July 2016
- "Afterlives of Comparison: Equivalence, Value, Literature" for Ronan McDonald, ed, The Values of Literary Studies: Critical institutions, Scholarly Agendas. Cambridge University Press 2015
- "Comparative Non-Contemporaneities: Ernst Bloch and C.L.R. James" in Daniel Stout and Jason Potts, ed. Theory Aside. Duke University Press, 2014.
In the news
- Professor’s feature-length documentary film debuts at Cornell Cinema
- Migrations grants fund worldwide interdisciplinary projects
- Fulbright scholar engages with indigenous communities