Wai Chee Dimock

William Lampson Professor of English & American Studies

Address: LC 417
Phone: 203-432-2228
Email: wai.chee.dimock@yale.edu
CV | Office hours

B.A. Harvard University, 1976
Ph.D. Yale University, 1982

Wai Chee Dimock experiments with close readings across different widths of space, and across a range of time-scales. Her book, "Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time" (2006), received Honorable Mention for both the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association and the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association. A collaborative volume, "Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature," further elaborates on these arguments.

Dimock's lecture course, "Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner," is available through Open Yale Courses.

Outside Yale, Dimock was a consultant for "Invitation to World Literature," a 13-part series produced by WGBH and aired on PBS stations in the fall of 2010.  A related Facebook forum, "Rethinking World Literature," is still ongoing. She is now at work on two critical books, "Recycling" and "Many Islams," and a print-and-web anthology, "American Literature in the world."  She posts images on its facebook page and helps organize an annual graduate conference.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

--Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton UP, 1989)

--Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (U of California P, 1996)

--Literature and Science: Cultural Forms, Conceptual Exchanges. Special issue of American Literature, co-edited with Priscilla Wald (Duke UP, 2002)

--Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time ( Princeton UP, 2006)

-- Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, co-edited with Lawrence Buell (Princeton UP, 2007)

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: Introduction to American Literature, The European Epic Tradition, Directed Studies Philosophy, American Literature and World Religions (freshman seminar), American Literature from Revolution to 1865, James, Wharton, Dreiser, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Classics and Their Progeny

GRADUATE COURSES: Problems in American Literature, Interdisciplinary Approaches to American Literature, American Literary Globalism, American Literature in a Transnational Context, Literary Genres and World Cultures, American Literature and World Religions, Hawthorne to Mukherjee