David Robert Wills is a noted translator of Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...

 to include The Gift of Death, Right of Inspection, Counterpath, and The Animal That Therefore I Am. Currently, Wills is a professor of French and English and chair of the department of languages, literatures, and cultures at the University at Albany, SUNY

University at Albany, SUNY

The State University of New York at Albany, also known as University at Albany, State University of New York, SUNY Albany or simply UAlbany, is a public university located in Albany, Guilderland, and East Greenbush, New York, United States; is the senior campus of the State University of New York ...

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To date much of Wills's own original and published work "has concentrated on literary theory, especially the work of Derrida, film theory, comparative literature" with an emphasis on how and where we think through (and with) technology and politics. As noted, Wills's writing "rethinks not only our nature before all technology but also what we understand to be technology."

Wills began teaching at SUNY-Albany in 1998. He has degrees from the University of Auckland

University of Auckland

The University of Auckland is a university located in Auckland, New Zealand. It is the largest university in the country and the highest ranked in the 2011 QS World University Rankings, having been ranked worldwide...

, and received his doctorate from the Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle

University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle

The New Sorbonne University is a public university in Paris, France.The Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle is a founding member of the Paris Universitas, a union of 6 Parisian universities....

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Selected bibliography

Translator

• Works by Jacques Derrida:
  • Derrida/Marie-Françoise Plissart, Right of Inspection (Monacelli, 1998).
  • Catherine Malabou
    Catherine Malabou
    Catherine Malabou is a French philosopher. She is currently professor in the Philosophy Department at the Université Paris-X Nanterre and Visiting Professor in the Comparative Literature Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo...
    
    /Derrida, Counterpath (Stanford, 2004).
  • The Gift of Death (2nd edition) & Literature in Secret (Chicago, 2008, [1st edition, 1995])
  • The Animal That Therefore I Am (Fordham, 2008)

Single author

• Self (De)construct: Writing and the Surrealist Text (James Cook University Press, 1985).
• Prosthesis (Stanford, 1995; Editions Galilée, 1997, 1998 [author’s translation]).
• Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction (Stanford, 2005).
• Dorsality: Thinking Back Through Technology and Politics (Minnesota, 2008)

Co-author

• Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory (with Peter Brunette
  Peter Brunette
  Peter Brunette was a film critic and film historian. He was the author of several books, including biographies of Italian directors Roberto Rossellini and Michelangelo Antonioni...
  
  , Princeton, 1989).
• Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Textual Analysis (with Alec McHoul
  Alec McHoul
  Alec McHoul is a British/Australian Ethnomethodologist. He has written numerous books and articles, many of which are informed by Ethnomethodology.He is currently Emeritus Professor at Murdoch University....
  
  , Illinois, 1990).

Editor/co-editor

• Deconstruction and the Visual Arts (with Peter Brunette, Cambridge, 1994)
• Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (Cambridge, 2000)

Essays and articles

• “Techneology or the Discourse of Speed,” in Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (eds.), The Prosthetic Impulse (MIT, 2006).
• “Notes Toward a Requiem or the Music of Memory,” Mosaic 39, 3 (2006).
• “Dorsal Chances: An Interview with David Wills,” Parallax 13, 4 (2007).

External links

• Will's review of Derrida's The Beast and the Sovereign Volume 1
• Two Words Pro-Derrida Wills describes this piece as "adapted from - and translated from - my participation in two roundtable discussions on translation"