Wai Chee Dimock is William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

. Originally from Hong Kong

Hong Kong

Hong Kong is one of two Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China , the other being Macau. A city-state situated on China's south coast and enclosed by the Pearl River Delta and South China Sea, it is renowned for its expansive skyline and deep natural harbour...

, she received her B.A. from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 and Ph.D. from Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

. She is active in the movement to internationalize the curriculum, using the "planet" as an analytic horizon to broaden the contours of American literature.

Three concepts are important to Dimock: deep time; kinship among genres and media; and close reading. See reviews by Michael Davidson, Robert Kern, and Robert Gravil.

Dimock has collaborated on many projects: with Michael Gilmore at Brandeis University

Brandeis University

Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...

, on Rethinking Class; Priscilla Wald at Duke University

Duke University

Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

, on Literature and Science, a special issue of American Literature; Lawrence Buell

Lawrence Buell

Lawrence Buell is the current Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University, specialist on antebellum American literature and a pioneer of Ecocriticism...

 at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, on Shades of the Planet; and Bruce Robbins at Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

, on a special issue of PMLA, Remapping Genre (Oct 2007). See also an exchange between Dimock ("Genre as World System") and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian literary critic, theorist and a University Professor at Columbia University. She is best known for the essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?", considered a founding text of postcolonialism, and for her translation of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. She...

 ("World Systems & the Creole"),Narrative 14 (January 2006).

Dimock was also a consultant for "Invitation to World Literature," a 13-part series funded by the Annenberg Foundation and produced by WGBH

WGBH-TV

WGBH-TV, channel 2, is a non-commercial educational public television station located in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. WGBH-TV is a member station of the Public Broadcasting Service , and produces more than two-thirds of PBS's national prime time television programming...

, aired on PBS stations in the fall of 2010. A related Facebook

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

forum, "Rethinking World Literature," is still ongoing. She is now at work on two critical books, "Low Theory" and "Many Islams," and a print-and-web anthology, "American Literature in the World." She writes a blog on that website -- http://www.amlitintheworld.org -- and posts images on its Facebook page.

Books

• Shades of the Planet (Princeton UP, 2007)
• Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton UP, 2006)
• Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (U of California P, 1997)
• Rethinking Class (Columbia UP, 1994)
• Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton UP, 1989)