American · b. 1953
David Damrosch turned world literature from a shelf into a verb. What Is World Literature? (2003) argues that a book joins world literature not by entering a canon but by circulating — traveling beyond the culture that made it and gaining, rather than losing, in translation. The claim reorganized a field. Damrosch founded Harvard's Institute for World Literature, general-edited the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature, and led the American Comparative Literature Association from 2001 to 2003. He works the same way in his other books: The Buried Book (2007) follows the Epic of Gilgamesh from a buried Nineveh library to George Smith, a self-taught bank-note engraver who read its flood tablet aloud to a London audience in 1872. Around the World in 80 Books (2021) reads a route from Woolf's London to Marquez's Macondo. Born in Maine in 1953, Damrosch is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.