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

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.

2023-24 Courses

Stanford Advisees

All Publications

  • South Asia and Latin America/Comparative Booms LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE IN TRANSITION 1980-2018 Kantor, R., Szurmuk, Castillo, D. A. 2023; 5: 250-264

    View details for Web of Science ID 001006133900017

  • IMPERFECT SOLIDARITIES: TAGORE, GANDHI, DU BOIS, AND THE GLOBAL ANGLOPHONE (Book Review) COMPARATIVE LITERATURE Book Review Authored by: Kantor, R. 2022; 74 (1): 141-143

    View details for DOI 10.1215/00104124-9434563

    View details for Web of Science ID 000759782200007

  • SOUTH ASIAN WRITERS, LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE, AND THE RISE OF GLOBAL ENGLISH Epilogue SOUTH ASIAN WRITERS, LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE, AND THE RISE OF GLOBAL ENGLISH Kantor, R. L., Kantor, R. 2022: 178-+

    View details for Web of Science ID 000918126200007

  • Displacee The Andalusian Allegory and Dreams of a Shared Past SOUTH ASIAN WRITERS, LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE, AND THE RISE OF GLOBAL ENGLISH Kantor, R. L., Kantor, R. 2022: 88-+

    View details for Web of Science ID 000918126200004

  • Transmigrant Neruda's Rebirth as the Soul of World Literature SOUTH ASIAN WRITERS, LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE, AND THE RISE OF GLOBAL ENGLISH Kantor, R. L., Kantor, R. 2022: 31-+

    View details for Web of Science ID 000918126200002

  • Stranger Paz's Peregrinations through Indian Poetry SOUTH ASIAN WRITERS, LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE, AND THE RISE OF GLOBAL ENGLISH Kantor, R. L., Kantor, R. 2022: 57-+

    View details for Web of Science ID 000918126200003

  • Revenant Dictator Fiction and Mobile Modernist Form SOUTH ASIAN WRITERS, LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE, AND THE RISE OF GLOBAL ENGLISH Kantor, R. L., Kantor, R. 2022: 144-+

    View details for Web of Science ID 000918126200006

  • Pilgrim Journeys to the Roots of Magical Realism SOUTH ASIAN WRITERS, LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE, AND THE RISE OF GLOBAL ENGLISH Kantor, R. L., Kantor, R. 2022: 113-+

    View details for Web of Science ID 000918126200005

  • SOUTH ASIAN WRITERS, LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE, AND THE RISE OF GLOBAL ENGLISH Introduction SOUTH ASIAN WRITERS, LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE, AND THE RISE OF GLOBAL ENGLISH Kantor, R. L., Kantor, R. 2022: 1-+

    View details for Web of Science ID 000918126200001

  • Voice of the Voiceless Audiobook Performance and the Meaning of Sound in New Nonfiction from India INDIAN SOUND CULTURES, INDIAN SOUND CITIZENSHIP Kantor, R. L., Brueck, L., Smith, J., Verma, N. 2020: 174-200

    View details for Web of Science ID 000635760800008

  • A Case of Exploding Markets: Latin American and South Asian Literary "Booms" COMPARATIVE LITERATURE Kantor, R. L. 2018; 70 (4): 466–86

    View details for DOI 10.1215/00104124-7215506

    View details for Web of Science ID 000450500800006

  • Futures Past: South Asian Literature "Post-Boom" INTERVENTIONS-INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES Kantor, R. L. 2018; 20 (3): 345–53

    View details for DOI 10.1080/1369801X.2018.1452626

    View details for Web of Science ID 000433500500005

  • "My Heart, My Fellow Traveller': Fantasy, Futurity and the Itineraries of Faiz Ahmed Faiz SOUTH ASIA-JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES Kantor, R. 2016; 39 (3): 608–25

    View details for DOI 10.1080/00856401.2016.1189034

    View details for Web of Science ID 000382770200007

  • Common Ground Filth as an Idiom of Critique in Two South Asian Communities COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF SOUTH ASIA AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST Kantor, R. L. 2016; 36 (1): 134–51

    View details for DOI 10.1215/1089201x-3482171

    View details for Web of Science ID 000385621200010

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