Wai Chee Dimock
Wai Chee Dimock writes about science, technology, public health, and literature, focusing especially on the symbiotic relation between humans and nonhumans. Now a researcher at the Harvard University Center for the Environment, her essays have appeared in Artforum, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, and the New Yorker.
Dimock is working on a new book, “Viruses, Humans, Artificial Intelligence: Coevolution and the Future of the Planet.” Her Weak Planet (2020) was published last fall by the University of Chicago Press. Other books include Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (2006); Shades of the Planet (2007); and a team-edited anthology, American Literature in the World: Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler ( 2017). Her 1996 book, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy, will be reissued in a new edition in 2021.
Dimock’s lecture course, “Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner,” is available through Open Yale Courses.
Outside Yale, Dimock was a consultant for “Invitation to World Literature,” a 13-part series produced by WGBH and aired on PBS stations in the fall of 2010. A related Facebook forum, “Rethinking World Literature,” is still ongoing.
Selected Publications
- Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival (University of Chicago Press, 2020)
- “Languages in the Time of Corona,” PMLA, Editor’s Column, October 2020
- “AI and the Humanities,” PMLA, Editor’s Column, May 2020
- “Opioid Education,” PMLA, Editor’s Column, March 2020
- “Hanging with Chefs,” PMLA, Editor’s Column, October 2019
- “Collateral Resilience,” PMLA, Editor’s Column, May 2019
- “Endangered,” PMLA, Editor’s Column, March 2019
- “Humanists as Builders,” PMLA, Editor’s Column, May 2018
- “Historicism, Presentism, Futurism,” PMLA, Editor’s Column, March 2018
- “Climate Humanists,” PMLA, Editor’s Column, January, 2018.
- “Education Populism,” PMLA, Editor’s Column, October, 2017
- “Climate Changed,” New York Times Book Review, May 5, 2017
- “Experimental Humanities,” PMLA, Editor’s Column, March 2017
- “Infrastructure Art,” Editor’s Column, PMLA, January 2017
- “Weak Theory,” Critical Inquiry 39 (Summer 2013): 732-753
- “Low Epic,” Critical Inquiry 39 (Spring 2013): 614-631
- Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, co-edited with Lawrence Buell (Princeton UP, 2007)
- Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton UP, 2006)
- Literature and Science: Cultural Forms, Conceptual Exchanges. Special issue of American Literature, co-edited with Priscilla Wald (Duke UP, 2002)
- Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (U of California P, 1996)
- Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton UP, 1989)