Eric Hayot

Eric Hayot is a professor in the department of Comparative Literature at Penn State, where he has worked since the summer of 2007. From 2008-2012 he served as the first Director of Penn State's Asian Studies Program. He is currently first Vice President of the American Comparative Literature Association.

His work over the past ten years has mainly focused on the ways in which China (and a variety of correlates each working to undermine the geographic, cultural, or political singularity of the word "China") have affected the intellectual, literary, and cultural history of the West (conceived as both an ideological monolith and a set of particularities). His two books and the co-edited collection Sinographies are the results of that work.

His latest book, On Literary Worlds, attempts to retheorize the literary history of the past four hundred years (there's no real way to say that modestly, but there you go). In his spare time he does a lot of cycling.

At Penn State, his classes range from first-year seminars on the process of literary reading to graduate courses on globalization and diaspora; he has also taught or courses on comparative modernisms, the history of modernity, poetry and poetics, Asian American studies, and new media literatures.

The story of how Hayot met his wife was featured on an episode of the NPR show This American Life, which first aired in February 2009.