David Damrosch is a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association, and directed last year's ACLA annual meeting, held at Harvard. He has written widely on world literature from antiquity to the present. His books include The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (1987), We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (1995), 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 (2008). He is the founding general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004) and the editor of Teaching World Literature (2009) and co-editor of The Text and the World: A Comparative Literature Sourcebook (2009). Current research projects include a cultural history of the conquest of Mexico and its colonial aftermath, and a book on the role of global scripts in the formation of national literatures.