This year the Department of Comparative Literature and Culture welcomed Professor Wiebke Denecke (Boston University) for the George Steiner Lecture, supported by the AHRC Open World Research Initiative (OWRI) as part of the Cross-Language Dynamics Research Programme.
Professor Denecke's research encompasses the literary and intellectual history of premodern China, Japan and Korea, comparative studies of East Asia and the premodern world, and world literature. Her lecture "World Literature, Premodern Comparisons and Global Cultural Memory in Action" demonstrated how the emerging field of comparative premodern studies can benefit from embracing the study of global human memory to help protect and utilise the historical experience of humanity in ethically responsible ways to face the challenges of today’s world, in particular those of inequality and fundamentalist nationalisms.