Eric Hayot

Eric Hayot is a professor in the department of Comparative Literature at Penn State, where he has been working since the summer of 2007.

The first decade of his career mainly focused on the ways in which China (and a variety of correlates each working to undermine the geographic, cultural, or political singularity of the word “China”) have affected the intellectual, literary, and cultural history of the West (similarly undermined). His first book, Chinese Dreams (Michigan, 2004), centers on the politics of translation and theatrical representation, attending to examples in English, German, and French. His second book, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford, 2009) tied the “invention” of the universal subject of a globalizing modernity to a series of legal, literary, sociological, medical, and photographic relations to Chinese suffering. In some sense the trajectory of these two projects can be mapped as an expansion of his interests from “modernism” to “modernity.” Hayot has since done another three books: On Literary Worlds (2012), The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities (2014), and Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan (2021).  He also writes occasionally for Public Books, the LA Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Hayot teaches graduate classes on modernity, theories of worldedness, and poetry and poetics, and directs or has directed dissertations in Chinese/Asian American comparative literature, modernist and Victorian literature, information and poetics, media theory, and postcolonial/African literature. At the undergraduate level, he teaches a large course on video games, as well as courses on modern narrative (Proust/Joyce), and one of the big introductions to the Global and International Studies major. He is the director of Penn State’s Center for Humanities and Information.