Daniel Heller-Roazen

Daniel Heller-Roazen is the Arthur W. Marks 1919 Professor of Comparative Literature. He is the author of Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons (2021); No One’s Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming (2017); Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers (2013); The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World (2011); The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations (2009); The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (2007), which was awarded the Modern Language Association’s 2008 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies; Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (2005); and Fortune’s Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (2003). These books have been translated into many languages. He has also edited the Norton Critical Edition of the Arabian Nights (2010) and has edited, translated and introduced Giorgio Agamben’s Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (1999). He is also the author of a number of articles on medieval and modern poetry and philosophy. He has received fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2010 he was awarded the Medal of the Collège de France. In 2018 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

At Princeton, Daniel Heller-Roazen teaches introductory courses in Comparative Literature and Humanistic Studies, upper-level seminars in medieval literature and graduate seminars on various topics in the history of philosophy and literature. Recent graduate courses have included seminars on negation; medieval Tristan romances; ancient and modern representations of chance and probability; Arnaut Daniel and the invention of rhyme; theories of sensation; and the history of aesthetics.

He was the Director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism from 2007 to 2015.

Read his full biography on the Department of Comparative Literature website.