Masterpieces of World Literature

Martin Puchner is the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University and a global fellow at Queen Mary University of London. His prize-winning books range from philosophy to technology and the arts and include the Norton Anthology of World Literature, which has brought 4,000 years of literature to students across the globe; The Written World, a Wall Street Journal bestseller that has been translated into twenty languages; and Literature for a Changing Planet, which draws lessons from world literature for addressing climate change. His more recent book, Culture: The Story of Us, from Cave Art to K-Pop is a global history of the arts and humanities. He is a member of the European Academy and has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Cullman Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, the Humboldt Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award.

David Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard. A past president of the American Comparative Literature Association, he is the founder and director of Harvard's Institute for World Literature. His books include, What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), and How to Read World Literature (2009, 2017). He is the general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004, 2009), co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (2009), and editor of World Literature in Theory (2014). In 2023 he was awarded the Balzan Foundation Prize for his work in world literature.