Joseph R. Slaughter
Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature

My Contact Info

511A Philosophy, Mail Code: 4927, United States

Office Hours Fall 2022

Tuesdays 11:30 AM – 1:30 PM



+1 212 854 3215
[email protected]

Joseph R. Slaughter

Research Interests

Comparative Literature
African, Latin American, and Third-World Literatures
Postcolonialism
Narrative and Rhetorical Theory
The Global South
Globalization
Modernity
Critical and Narrative Theory
Human Rights
Intellectual Property
Law and Literature
Law and Humanities
Postcolonial and Global South
Africa
20th and 21st Century

Biography

Joseph Slaughter?specializes in literature, law, and socio-cultural history of the Global South (particularly Latin America and Africa). He’s especially interested in the social work of literature—the myriad ways in which literature intersects (formally, historically, ideologically, materially) with problems of social justice, human rights, intellectual property, and international law.
His honors include a?Guggenheim Fellowship, Public Voices Fellowship,?Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. 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. His essay, “Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law,” was honored as one of the two best articles published in?PMLA?in 2006-7. He was elected to serve as President of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2016.
His?essays and articles?include : “World Literature as Property” in?Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics; “However Incompletely, Human” in The Meanings of Human Rights: Philosophy, Critical Theory, Law; “‘It’s good to be primitive’: African Allusion and the Modernist Fetish of Authenticity” in?Modernism and Copyright; “The?Enchantment of Human Rights; or, What Difference Does Humanitarian Indifference Make?” in?Critical Quarterly; “Vanishing Points: When Narrative Is Not Simply There” in?The Journal of Human Rights; “‘A Mouth with Which to Tell the Story’: Silence, Violence, and Speech in the Narrative of Things Fall Apart” in?Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe; “Master Plans: Designing (National) Allegories of Urban Space and Metropolitan Subjects for Postcolonial Kenya” in?Research in African Literatures; “Introducing Human Rights and Literary Form; Or, the Vehicles and Vocabularies of Human Rights,” co-authored with Sophia A. McClennen, in?Comparative Literature Studies; “A Question of Narration: The Voice in International Human Rights Law” in?Human Rights Quarterly; “Humanitarian Reading” in?Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy through Narrative. Slaughter is a founding co-editor of?Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and?Development.
He is co-editing a volume of essays,?The Global South Atlantic, that explores some of the many social, cultural, political, and material interactions across the oceanic space between Africa and Latin America that have made it historically (im)possible to imagine the South Atlantic as a coherent region.?He is currently working on two monographs, “Pathetic Fallacies: Essays on Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and the Humanities” and "New Word Orders: Intellectual Property and World Literature," which considers the role of plagiarism, piracy, and intellectual property regimes in the globalization of the novel, as well the work the novel might do to interrupt globalization and to resist monopoly privatization of cultural and intellectual creations.

Selected Publications

Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, And International Law

Joseph Slaughter