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  • Joseph Slaughter

    Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature
    511a Philosophy Hall
    Office Hours:
    Tues 2-4pm
    (212) 854 6433
    jrs272@columbia.edu

    Areas of Interest :
    Postcolonial literatures of Africa and Latin America; human rights and narrative theory; 20th-century ethnic and third world literatures
    Biography:

    Joseph Slaughter teaches and publishes in the fields of postcolonial literature and theory, African, Caribbean, and Latin American literatures, postcolonialism, narrative theory, human rights, and 20th-century ethnic and third world literatures. His many publications include articles in Human Rights Quarterly, Research in African Literatures, The Journal of Human Rights, Politics and Culture, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. His essay, “Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law,” appeared in a special issue on human rights of PMLA (October 2006) and was honored as one of the two best articles published in the journal in 2006-7. Selected book chapters appear in Humanitarianism and Suffering, African Writers and Their Readers, Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, Modernism and Copyright, Women, Gender, and Human Rights. Slaughter is a founding co-editor of Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development; he has co-edited a special issue on "Human Rights and Literary Form" of Comparative Literature Studies. His book, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (Fordham UP, 2007), which explores the cooperative narrative logics of international human rights law and the Bildungsroman, was awarded the 2008 René Wellek prize for comparative literature and cultural theory. He is currently working on two book manuscripts, “Pathetic Fallacies: Essays on Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and the Humanities” and "New Word Orders: Plagiarism, Postcolonialism, and the Globalization of the Novel," which considers the role of plagiarism (and other piratical textual practices) in the circulation and development of the novel form.

Latest News

Eleanor Johnson, "Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages"

“This lucid and insightful study offers a new way of thinking about the necessary relation of form and ethics in late-medieval writing.

Dames Receives the 2013 Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching

Nicholas Dames has won this year's Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching.

T. Austin Graham, "The Great American Songbooks"

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American authors pioneered a mode of musical writing that quite literally resounded beyond the printed page. Novels gained soundtracks, poetry compelled its audiences to sing, and the ostensibly silent act of reading became anything but.

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