Marta Figlerowicz

Marta Figlerowicz is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University, holding tenure since 2024, with secondary appointments in Slavic Languages and Literatures, Film and Media Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. A prominent scholar in Literature, she received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013, an M.A. from the same institution in 2011, and a B.A. summa cum laude in English with a minor in French from Harvard University in 2009. Her career includes a Junior Fellowship in the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2013 to 2016, followed by joining Yale as Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English in 2014, promotion to Associate Professor in 2019, and tenure in Comparative Literature in 2024.

Figlerowicz theorizes literature from the eighteenth century to the present and contemporary visual media, studying how aesthetic objects mediate interpersonal and transcultural communication across over seven languages, with focuses on European and American authors, modernism, post-socialist critical theory, the novel, philosophy, anthropology, and new media theories. She authored Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Spaces of Feeling: Affects and Awareness in Modernist Literature (Cornell University Press, 2017), with forthcoming works including the translation The Maria Janion Reader (2025), It Must Be Possible: Modernity and Transcultural Knowledge, and Myth and Meme: Notes Toward a Genre History of the Present. Articles appear in English Literary History, PMLA, boundary 2, Critical Quarterly, L’Esprit Créateur, Textual Practice, Poetics Today, Camera Obscura, and Film Quarterly, alongside public essays in Boston Review, Foreign Affairs, and The Yale Review. A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow and Harvard Society of Fellows member, she received Yale’s Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching (2017) and prizes from Berkeley and Harvard. She co-edited symplokē (2016) and Qui Parle (2012), was Chief Editor of Qui Parle (2010-2013), co-chief editor of Narrative, and serves on editorial boards for Columbia and Oxford University Press series.

Professional Email: marta.figlerowicz@yale.edu