Leland de la Durantaye is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of English at Harvard University. He has written numerous works on the subject of nineteenth and twentieth century literature and aesthetics in a variety of articles, reviews, journalism, encyclopedia entries, notes, translations, as well as the books Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, 2009) and Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (Cornell, 2007). His awards, fellowships, and special recognitions include several fellowships from Cornell University, where he received his master and doctoral degrees, as well as fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Center, Harvard University’s Department of Comparative Literature, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the American Academy in Rome, and the Fulbright Program. He is the translator of Upstaged, by Jacques Jouet (from the French; Darlkey Archive, 2011), and The Chruch and Its Reign, by Giorgio Agamben (from the Italian; Seagull Books, forthcoming).
During his time in Berlin at the American Academy, Durantaye worked on a project titled “Wörterstürmerei im Namen der Schönheit, or World and Work in Samuel Beckett,” a study of the art of Samuel Beckett informed by a chronological study of his own poetics, as enunciated most recently in the newly published Letters. It placed special emphasis on Beckett’s elective affinity with German culture and the German language and use a number of documents Beckett composed in German to clarify his work.
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