Matthew L. Keegan — Before World Literature
Scholar Matthew Keegan examines pre-modern literary traditions across cultures, exploring the global flows of texts before the modern literary canon.
Date & Time at 6:15 PM EST
Location Columbia University New York, US
Organizer Columbia University
Why we picked this
A corrective to the idea that global literary exchange is a modern invention — Keegan traces the networks that connected readers and writers across cultures long before the printing press.
Matthew L. Keegan presents research from Before World Literature, examining how literary texts traveled across languages and cultures in the pre-modern period. The lecture challenges the assumption that global literary exchange is a product of modernity, revealing sophisticated networks of translation and circulation that predated the Western canon.
Held at Columbia University as part of a series celebrating recent faculty work, the talk draws on manuscripts and traditions from across the medieval and early modern world. Free and open to the public.