David Harris

David Ferris 

(Ph.D., SUNY-Buffalo) is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at the University of Colorado at Boulder.  His research and teaching emphasizes modern literature and critical theory. 

Previously he held concurrent positions in

  • Comparative Literature, English, and German at the Graduate School and in Comparative Literature at Queens College of the City University of New York,
  • Comparative Literature and English at Yale University, and
  • English at Haverford College.  

Recent Work

Essays on Rilke, elegy and theology of language in Geoffrey Hill and Adorno, translation in Shelley's “Adonais,” the moral image in Hawthorne, Agamben's messianism, Diderot and Fragonard, the politics of the useless in Benjamin, Sebald and Proustian memory, aesthetic paradox in Jacques Rancière, life and interruption in Blanchot and Keats, and Schiller's aestheticization of Greece.  

Lectures

“Hölderlin's Oedipus: Tragic Time, Tragic Affect,” “Postcards from the Archive: Walker Evans and Walter Benjamin,” “Why Painting Matters,” and “Time to Compare.” He is also a contributor to the American Comparative Literature Association’s Ten Year Report on the Discipline, Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization (“Indiscipline”), and to the Blackwell Companion to Comparative Literature (“Why Compare?”).  

Fellowships/Awards

Senior Faculty Research Fellowship from the ACLS, NEH Summer Research Grant, and has been a Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale.  He has also been a fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge, UK and, most recently, he was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship in the School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, UK.