About Joseph R. Slaughter

Joseph R. Slaughter teaches postcolonial literature and theory, human rights, and third-world approaches to international law in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has published numerous articles on the intersections of comparative literature and international law. His book Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, which excavates the shared logic underpinning human rights law and the form and ideology of the Bildungsroman, won the 2008 Rene Wellek Prize for Comparative Literature and Cultural Theory. He has co-edited a volume of essays on Latin American, Caribbean, and African literatures and culture entitled The Global South Atlantic (2017), and is currently finishing two books: New Word Orders, on intellectual property law and the institutions of world literature, and Pathetic Fallacies, a collection of essays on human rights and the humanities. He recently completed his term as President of the American Comparative Literature Association.