Jack of All Trades; Master of None! - featuring Ali Behdad of UCLA

This reflexive talk addresses the challenges of engaging in literary studies in an era marked by the expansion of the literary globe. It argues that there is a value in viewing the work of literary comparison as a form of scholarly amateurism that embraces intellectual mobility and shuns specialization that academic institutions often valorize. It elaborates a model of literary scholarship that is critical towards the narrowness of disciplinary formation and the lure of mastery that comes with the cult of expertise.

Ali Behdad is John Charles Hillis Chair in Literature, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and the Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA. He has published widely on issues of travel, immigration, Orientalism, photography, and Postcolonialism, including three books, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Duke University Press, 1994), A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States (Duke University Press, 2005), and Camera Orientalis: Reflections on photography of the Middle East (U. of Chicago Press, 2016) He is also the co-editor of A Companion to Comparative Literature (Blackwell, 2011) and Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation (Getty Research Institute, 2013).