Djelal Kadir

Between 1991 and 1997 Kadir served as the Editor of World Literature Today (WLT) where he published some twenty special issues on postcolonial figures and on a number of national literatures in historic realignment. He edited monographic issues on such authors as Assia Djebar, Luisa Valenzuela, Kamau Brathwaite, Maryse Condé, João Cabral de Melo Neto, and Manuel Puig. He also published, in collaboration with UNESCO, a number of special issues on shifting literary cultures at critical junctures in their history such as contemporary Indian (American) literatures, Russian literatures after perestroika, contemporary Australian literature, literatures of India fifty years after independence, German literature after re-unification, post-apartheid South African literature, literatures of post-Soviet Central Asia. Kadir has also served as guest-editor for special issues of a number of international journals such as Annals of Scholarship (on Christopher Columbus 1992), Siglo XX/20th Century: Critique & Cultural Discourse (on the cultural criticism of Nobel laureate Octavio Paz), Neohelicon (on literary theory, globalization, and comparative literature), PMLA (on America and American Studies), and Comparative Literature Studies (on globalization and world literature). In 1994, in conjunction with the American Academy of Poets, Kadir translated and edited the poetry of Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto for the Wesleyan Poetry Series.

Kadir earned his B.A. from Yale University in 1969 and his Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico in 1972. He previously taught at Purdue University (1973–1991) and at the University of Oklahoma (1991–1997), where he served as editor of World Literature Today and Chairman of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. As an accomplished equestrian, he also served as the faculty advisor to the University of Oklahoma Polo Team, an NCAA sports Club. He was the recipient of the State Governor’s “Marilyn Douglas Memorial Award” for outstanding contribution as member of the Oklahoma Arts Council (1991–1996). He is a member of Italy’s Accademia da Monta di Lavoro, which has conducted Italy’s annual equine “transhumance” for centuries.

Djelal Kadir (born 1946 in a shepherds’ village on the island of Cyprus) is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, where he teaches literatures of the Americas, modernism, postmodernism, world literature, and classical and modern theory, and where he has been the recipient of departmental teaching awards and the College Distinguished Service Medal. He has published more than one hundred articles and is the author and editor of a dozen books on the Americas, globalization, world literature, postcolonialism, modernism and literary theory as well as editor of more than twenty special issues of literary periodicals. Kadir’s own poetry and scholarly works have been translated into Greek, Polish, Turkish, French, Arabic, and Spanish.