Djelal Kadir

Djelal Kadir is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, at Pennsylvania State University and Visiting Professor at Università 'La Sapienza' di Roma, Scuola di dottorato in Scienze dell'interpretazione e della produzione culturale (2016). He is the Founding President of the International American Studies Association and former Editor of the international quarterly World Literature Today and Director of the Neustadt International Prize in Literature.  He has served on the editorial board of PMLA and continues to serve on the editorial board of many journals, including, The International Literary Quarterly, Comparative Literature Studies, Comparative American Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, CR: Centennial Review, Revue Française d'Études Américaines, Comparative Critical Studies: The Journal of the British Comparative Literature Association, and Dedalus: Revista Portuguesa de Literatura Comparada. Among other collaborations, he is the Co-editor (with Theo D’Haen and David Damrosch) of the Routledge Companion to World Literature (2012; 2023), the Co-Editor of Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History, 3 vols. (Oxford UP, 2004), of the Longman Anthology of World Literature, 6 vols. (2004; 2009), and of Other Modernisms in An Age of Globalization (Heidelberg:  Universitaetsverlag C. Winter, 2002).  He has been a Board member of Synapsis: The European School of Comparative Studies; a Senior Fellow and Executive Board member of The Stockholm Collegium of World Literary History; and a Board member of the Institute for World Literature (Harvard). He is co-author and the editor of the volume 4 of the four-volume Literature: A World History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2022, translated to Chinese and published by Sichuan People's Publishing House, 2024). Kadir’s own authored books include: Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe's Prophetic Rhetoric As Conquering Ideology (University of California Press, 1992, Chinese translation Jiuzhu, 2025); The Other Writing: Postcolonial Essays in Latin America's Writing Culture (Purdue University Press, 1993); Questing Fictions: Latin America's Family Romance (University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Memos from the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability (Stanford University Press, 2011). His latest book project is on Solitude. His essays have been translated and published in French, Italian, Greek, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, and Arabic. He has been appointed to the Fulbright Specialist Roster Program by the Institute of International Education for a five-year period (2015-2020) for international lecturing in American and Inter-American Studies and in Comparative and World Literature.
Phone: +1 (814) 470-1391