Bio

Roanne Kantor's primary field is Global Anglophone literature and its relationship to other literary traditions of the Global South. Her first book, South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English is a winner of the 2021American Comparative Literature Association Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Prize. She also works on the conditions for interdisciplinary research in the humanities, especially literature's interface with medicine and the humanistic social sciences. Kantor is also a translator and the winner of the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation. Before coming to Stanford, Kantor taught at Harvard, Boston University, Brandeis, and The University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her Masters and Ph.D.

Academic Appointments

  • Assistant Professor, English
  • Assistant Professor (By courtesy), Comparative Literature

Honors & Awards

  • Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Prize, American Comparative Literature Foundation (2021)
  • Prize for Translation, Susan Sontag Foundation (2009)

Program Affiliations

  • Modern Thought and Literature

Professional Education

  • Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, Comparative Literature (2015)
  • M.A., University of Texas at Austin, Comparative Literature (2011)
  • B.A., University of California, Los Angeles, Comparative Literature (2008)

Contact

  • Academic
    rlkantor@stanford.edu
    University - Faculty Department: English Position: Assistant Professor
    • 450 Jane Stanford Way Ofc 415
    • Stanford,  California  94305-2004 

Additional Info

Links

Current Research and Scholarly Interests

Roanne Kantor works on the rise of the Global Anglophone and its relationship to other literary traditions of the Global South. Her first book, South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English, was published in 2022 in the Studies in World Literature Series at Cambridge University Press. Ever since T.B. Macaulay leveled the accusation in 1835 that 'a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India,' South Asian literature has served as the imagined battleground between local linguistic multiplicity and a rapidly globalizing English. In response to this endless polemic, Indian and Pakistani writers set out in another direction altogether. They made an unexpected journey to Latin America. The cohort of authors that moved between these regions include Latin-American Nobel laureates Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz; Booker Prize notables Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Mohammed Hanif, and Mohsin Hamid. In their explorations of this new geographic connection, they formed the vanguard of a new, multilingual world literary order. Their encounters with Latin America fundamentally shaped the way in which literature written in English from South Asia exploded into popularity from the 1980s until the mid-2000s, enabling its global visibility


Her more recent research explores the conditions for interdisciplinary research in the humanities, especially connections with medicine and the social sciences. Collected under the provisional title Figures of Suspicion, the various case studies in this project focus on the symbolism that undergirds narratives about health and public policy in India, illuminating how interdisciplinary study both requires and runs aground on shared metaphors. Figures is a meditation on method: showing how reading for narrative in allied fields like anthropology, medicine, and performance exposes underlying conflicts in literary studies. Operating across discourses, figurative language offers an essential window onto such conflicts, and their potential solutions.

2021-22 Courses

Stanford Advisees

All Publications

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3229-0888