Rebecca L. Walkowitz

Rebecca L. Walkowitz is Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Barnard College, where she is also Claire Tow Professor of English. Over the past 25 years, her research and teaching have focused on aspects of cosmopolitanism, multilateralism, and multilingualism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature.  She is the author or editor of 10 books, including Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature, Bad Modernisms, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, and Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation.  In her dual role as academic leader and literary scholar, she is writing The New Multilingualism: Knowing and Not Knowing Languages in Literature, Culture, and the Classroom, which will be published by Columbia University Press.  In this book, she calls for new ways of counting, organizing, and valuing world languages inside and outside the university and traces the emergence of historically new examples of multilingual art and entertainment.  Her essay on the value and social impact of research in world languages, “Gutting Language Departments Would Be a Disaster,” was published by The Chronicle of Higher Education in September 2023.