Irving GohDirector of Graduate StudiesProfessor, Comparative Literature

Biography

I am the author most recently of Living On After Failure (Duke UP) and Touching Literature, or the Experience of the Limit (Cornell UP). My other books are The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (Fordham UP), which was awarded the MLA 23rd Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Book in French and Francophone Studies; L’Existence Prépositionnelle (Galilée); and with Jean-Luc Nancy, The Deconstruction of Sex (Duke UP). I am also the editor of the volumes Jean-Luc Nancy among the Philosophers (Fordham UP) and French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK (Routledge) and coeditor with Verena Andermatt Conley of the volume Nancy Now (Polity).  

I was also a recipient of a National Humanities Center fellowship in 2022/23 and was named Franke Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale in the fall of 2018. 

Research Interests

I am generally interested in theory in its various articulations – affect, literary, critical, race, queer, auto, etc. My current research interests include World Literature, theorizing the Asian figure, “postwork imaginaries” in contemporary literature, and rethinking genius. 

Publications

The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (Fordham UP) – winner of the MLA 23rd Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Book in French and Francophone Studies 

L’Existence Prépositionnelle (Galilée) 

The Deconstruction of Sex, with Jean-Luc Nancy (Duke UP); French original forthcoming with Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre (Collection “Collège International de Philosophie”) 

Living on after Failure (Duke UP) 

Touching Literature, or the Experience of the Limit (Cornell UP)