Wlad Godzich holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and Romance Philology from Columbia University. He has taught at Yale, the University of Minnesota, the Université de Montréal, the University of Toronto, and the Université de Genève. He is currently Distinguished Professor of General and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has held visiting professorships on all five continents, and has also served in various administrative capacities. His scholarly work has focused on the materiality of literary communication and on the relationship of literature to philosophy and to historical conditions. He helped fuel the turn to “theory” with the one hundred volume-strong series Theory and History of Literature (published by University of Minnesota Press). He has introduced the concept of “emergent literature” and launched the study of prosaics.