
Roanne Kantor
Assistant Professor of English and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
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
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Assistant Professor, English
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Assistant Professor (By courtesy), Comparative Literature
Honors & Awards
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Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Prize, American Comparative Literature Foundation (2021)
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Prize for Translation, Susan Sontag Foundation (2009)
Program Affiliations
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Modern Thought and Literature
Professional Education
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Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, Comparative Literature (2015)
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M.A., University of Texas at Austin, Comparative Literature (2011)
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B.A., University of California, Los Angeles, Comparative Literature (2008)
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
- Intro to Disability Studies: Disability and Technology
ENGLISH 108A, HUMBIO 178A (Aut) - Introduction to English III: Modern Literature
ENGLISH 12C (Aut) - Just Feelings
ENGLISH 84N (Spr) - Time Travel in the Americas
ENGLISH 137C, HUMCORE 137 (Spr) -
Independent Studies (4)
- Ad Hoc Graduate Seminar
ENGLISH 395 (Spr) - Individual Work
ENGLISH 198 (Aut, Win, Spr) - Research Course
ENGLISH 398 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Revision and Development of a Paper
ENGLISH 398R (Aut, Win)
- Ad Hoc Graduate Seminar
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Prior Year Courses
2020-21 Courses
- Books to Bollywood
ENGLISH 110A (Spr) - The World, The Globe, The Planet
ENGLISH 319A (Spr)
2019-20 Courses
- Intro to Disability Studies: Disability and Technology
ENGLISH 108A, HUMBIO 178A (Aut) - Introduction to English III: Modern Literature
ENGLISH 12C (Aut) - Stories at the Border
ENGLISH 155 (Spr)
2018-19 Courses
- Disability Literature
ENGLISH 108, HUMBIO 177 (Aut) - Global English
ENGLISH 116 (Spr) - Native Intelligence
ENGLISH 312 (Aut) - The Indian Novel
ENGLISH 110 (Spr)
- Books to Bollywood
All Publications
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IMPERFECT SOLIDARITIES: TAGORE, GANDHI, DU BOIS, AND THE GLOBAL ANGLOPHONE (Book Review)
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
2022; 74 (1): 141-143
View details for DOI 10.1215/00104124-9434563
View details for Web of Science ID 000759782200007
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Voice of the Voiceless Audiobook Performance and the Meaning of Sound in New Nonfiction from India
INDIAN SOUND CULTURES, INDIAN SOUND CITIZENSHIP
2020: 174-200
View details for Web of Science ID 000635760800008
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A Case of Exploding Markets: Latin American and South Asian Literary "Booms"
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
2018; 70 (4): 466–86
View details for DOI 10.1215/00104124-7215506
View details for Web of Science ID 000450500800006
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Futures Past: South Asian Literature "Post-Boom"
INTERVENTIONS-INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
2018; 20 (3): 345–53
View details for DOI 10.1080/1369801X.2018.1452626
View details for Web of Science ID 000433500500005
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"My Heart, My Fellow Traveller': Fantasy, Futurity and the Itineraries of Faiz Ahmed Faiz
SOUTH ASIA-JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES
2016; 39 (3): 608–25
View details for DOI 10.1080/00856401.2016.1189034
View details for Web of Science ID 000382770200007
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Common Ground Filth as an Idiom of Critique in Two South Asian Communities
COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF SOUTH ASIA AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST
2016; 36 (1): 134–51
View details for DOI 10.1215/1089201x-3482171
View details for Web of Science ID 000385621200010