Literary Studies is the study of written works of the imagination, of which poetry, drama and narrative fiction constitute today the most familiar types or genres. Most students and teachers of literature, however, see it as a more complex matter. It might be more accurate to describe it as a set of methods for examining the richness and diversity of experience through unusual uses of language, through a language that we recognize as different from everyday language and that thereby aspires to produce a reflection of and on the world not available to us otherwise. As such, literary works are also primary documents for investigating national histories, world events, the individual psyche, race, class, gender, science, economics, religion, the natural world, leisure and the other arts. Because literary studies engages with countless other disciplines, it is among the most interdisciplinary of any field of study.

Gloria Allaire, Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts; chivalric literature; Arthurian romances in Italian reworkings

Molly T. Blasing, 9th-21st century Russian poetry; photography and poetic writing; lyric theory; the Russian short story; madness in Russian literature and culture

Jianjun He, Early Chinese intellectual history; Classical Chinese poetry and late-imperial vernacular fiction

Julie Human, Medieval French romance, Arthurian literature

Harald Höbusch, Literature and Politics (Thomas Mann, Literature of the Weimar Republic), Expedition Literature, Youth Literature

Liang Luo, Chinese literature and culture, Sino-Japanese literary and cultural interactions, East Asian performance literature and popular culture

Milena Minkova, Latin tradition in its continuity and globality; Medieval Latin and Neo-Latin; Latin Composition; Latin Pedagogy and Active Latin

Jeffrey Peters, Early Modern French Literature and Culture; Philosophies of Space; Masculinity and Rhetoric

Leon Sachs, History and culture of education, literary education, French republicanism, representations of war, science and literature, ecocriticism

Douglas Slaymaker, Film; Visual Arts; 20th-Century Japanese Fiction; Japanese Experience of France; Travel and Travel Writing

Jennifer Tunberg, Neo-Latin Fiction

Ghadir Zannoun, Modern Arabic Literature; Arab Women Writers; Nationalism in Modern Arabic Literature