Centre for Comparative Literature
List of Northrop Frye Professors in Literary Theory

The Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory is selected annually, to bring innovative comparative scholars to deliver one or two public lectures to the University of Toronto community, offer workshops and seminars at the Centre for Comparative Literature, and meet with faculty and students.

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Andreas Malm, October, 2025.  Lecture: Thursday, October 9, 4-6. Workshop: Friday, October 10, 12-2.

Christina Sharpe, April 3-4, 2025

Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory as Diagnostic, Abolition as Politics: Reimagining Anticapitalism, September, 2024

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, April, 2024 Acting Sentiments; Sensing Scripts: Sentiment Analysis, Surveillance, and the Perversion of Freedom

Toril Moi, 2023, “The Question of the New in Literary History: Wittgenstein, Kuhn, and the Advent of Modernism.”

Catherine Malabou, 2022, When signifiers do not float, or the end of a hermeneutical hegemony 

Denise Ferreira da Silva, 2022, Unpayable Debt: A black feminist reading of the scenes of value

Walter Mignolo, 2021, Semiosis, Literature and Coloniality: A Decolonial Story

Tiffany King, 2021 Georgia State University

Rey Chow, 2021, “Literary Study’s Biopolitics.”

Denise Ferreira da Silva, 2021 “Corpus Infinitum”

Anne Carson, 2020,  “Stillness”

Silvia Federici,2019,  Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons

Rita Felski, 2019,“Hooked: Art and Attachment”

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, 2018, “As We Have Always Done”

Elizabeth Povinelli, 2018, Political Concepts in the Wake of Geontopower; “Oceans in Oceans in Oceans of the 4 axioms of existence”

Jean-Michel Rabaté, 2017, “What can we learn from Derrida today?”

Fred Moten, 2017,”Manic Depression: A Poetics of Hesitant Sociology”

Ella Shohat, 2016 “Nation, Partition, and the Linguistic Imaginary: The Curious Case of Judeo-Arabic”

Sianne Ngai, 2016 “Theory of Gimmick”

Patricia Parker, 2015, “Multilingual Shakespeares”

Cathy Caruth, 2013 “Disappearing History: Scenes of Trauma in the Theater of Human Rights. A Reading of Ariel Dorfman’s Play, Death and the Maiden”

Jacques Rancière, 2013, “Politics of Time/Time of Politics” and “The Politics of Fiction”

Lauren Berlant, 2012, “Sex in the Event of Happiness”

Franco Moretti, 2011, “The Bourgeois”

Carol Mavor, 2011, “Blue Mythologies”

David Damrosch, 2010, “Anatomy of Comparison: Literary Studies for post-literary Age”

Françoise Lionnet, 2010, “Triages and Transplantations: Reading Nature, Writing Culture”

Emily Apter, 2008, “Properties of Translation: Signature, Copyright, Textual Ownership”

Jonathan Hart, 2008,  “Comparative Literature Studies in a Canadian Context”

Peter Stein, 2007,  “Staging the Canon: Classical Drama vs. Opera”

Edgard Sienaert, 2006,  “Research and Identity”

Paolo Fabbri, 2005,  “Rhetorics”

Sylvia Molloy, 2004,  “Translation and Discovery: A Few Cautionary Scenes”

Sidonie Smith, 2003, “Memory, Politics and the Uses of the Autobiographical”

James Phelan, 2002, “Issues in the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative: Character Narrators, Narrative Temporality, Audiences, and Ethics”

Wladimir Krysinski, 2001, “World Literature in the Context of Globalization”

L. M. Findlay, 2000, “Intellectuals, Artists, and Freedom: The Canadian-Europe-Other Nexus”

Michael Holquist, 1999, “Philology as History and as Task”

Tillotama Rajan, 1998, “Spectres of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Kristeva”

Ross Chambers, 1997, “Death at the Door”

Natalie Zemon Davis, 1996 “Displacement and Discovery: Cultural Description in Early Modern Travel Literature”

Charles Taylor, 1995, “Language and Poetics”

Marc Angenot, 1994, “Introduction to Social Discourse Theory”

Derek Walcott, 1993, “The Language of Poetry”

Julia Kristeva, 1992, “Proust and Perceptible Time”

Alvin A. Lee, 1991, “The Old English Poem Beowulf”

Vladimir Ivanov, 1990, “Diachronic Aspects of Semiotic Approaches to Literature”

Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, 1989,  “Problems in the Theory of Value and Judgement: Axiology and After”

Sander L. Gilman, 1988 “Freud, Race and Gender”

Mieke Bal, 1987, “Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition”

Edward Said, 1986 “Culture and Imperialism”

Hugh Kenner, 1985 “The Pursuit of Prose”

Robert Weimann, 1982

Henry Schogt, 1980, “Linguistics and Literary Criticism”

Paul Ricoeur, 1979,  “Narrative and Time”

Ralph Cohen, 1978

Frederic Jameson,1977