DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH AND ITALIAN

Christopher Bush (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, UCLA) is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literary Studies and codirects the Global Avant-garde and Modernist Studies graduate cluster.

His research and teaching focus on transnational and interdisciplinary approaches to literary modernisms, especially the connections between European and East Asian avant-gardes, aesthetic theory, and media.

He is currently completing a book, for Columbia University Press, on the modernist haiku as world literature, and has recently published articles in Esprit créateur, T. S. Eliot Studies Annual, and the Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition catalog.

Previous publications include Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford, 2010); a collaborative translation and critical edition of Victor Segalen’s Stèles (Wesleyan, 2007); articles in such journals as Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, and Representations; and essays in such edited volumes as 1913: The Year of French Modernism (Manchester, 2020),  A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (Columbia, 2016), Ezra Pound in the Present (Bloomsbury, 2016), Modernism and Theory: A Handbook of Modernist Studies (Blackwell, 2013), and Drawing from Life (Mississippi, 2013). He was coeditor of the journal Modernism/modernity from 2016 to 2021 and continues to serve on its editorial board.

Academic honors include funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Fulbright research grant, the Princeton Society of Fellows, the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work, and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship.

He teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate courses, primarily focused on modernist literatures of the early twentieth century, the historical avant-gardes, and critical theory, including “The Avant-gardes in the World,” “Proust and the Arts,” “Time, History, Media: Chris Marker,” “The Surreal World,” and “Bergsonism and Global Modernism.”

He is the current Chair of the Department of French and Italian.