Irving GohInterim Director of Graduate StudiesProfessor, Comparative Literature

Biography

I am the author most recently of Living On After Failure (Duke 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). My next monograph, Touching Literature, or the Experience of the Limit, will be published by Cornell UP in their spring/summer 2026 catalogue.

My current research interests include World Literature, theorizing the Asian figure, literary texts that problematize our relation with work, and rethinking genius.

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. I am also invested in World Literature, contemporary Anglo-American literature, and French literature. Of late, I’m looking into the representations of work and/or “postwork imaginaries” in contemporary literature.

Publications