Stathis Gourgouris
Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Stathis Gourgouris is a Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature, Columbia University and former Director of the Comparative Institute for Literature and Society. Professor Gourgouris writes and teaches on a variety of subjects that ultimately come together around questions of the poetics and politics of modernity and democracy. He is the author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, 1996); Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, 2003); and Lessons in Secular Criticism (Fordham 2013). Outside these projects he has also published numerous articles on Ancient Greek philosophy, political theory, modern poetics, film, contemporary music, and psychoanalysis. He is currently completing work on two other book projects of secular criticism: The Perils of the One and Nothing Sacred. He writes regularly in internet media (such as The Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Al Jazeera, Open Democracy, The Immanent Frame), as well as major Greek newspapers and journals on political and literary matters.
Professor Gourgouris has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, UCLA 1990. He has taught Comparative Literature at Princeton, Yale, UCLA, and the National Technical University in Athens and spent time as Research Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (National Endowment for the Humanities), the International Institute at the University of Michigan, and the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers. He has also served as Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia (2009-2015); President of the Modern Greek Studies Association (2006-2012); and at the Board of Supervisors of the English Institute, Harvard University (2006-2009). In 2015 he was honored with the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award.
Working Group Affiliation
Bandung Humanisms, Project Director