Rebecca L. Walkowitz is Associate Professor and Acting Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department at Rutgers University. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Comparative Literature Program. Her research focuses on the intersections between cosmopolitan aspirations and modernist aesthetics, and on transnational approaches to literary history.

Walkowitz's first book, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (Columbia UP, 2006), was one of the first monographs to argue that early twentieth-century modernist writers such as Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce need to be understood alongside late-twentieth-century transnational writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, and W.G. Sebald. Cosmopolitan Style showed how new theories of cosmopolitanism, whose champions in philosophy, literary criticism, and anthropology had resisted associations with aesthetic practices, are in fact crucially shaped by the history of literary modernism. In turn, she argued, transnational British literature published at the end of the century must be understood in the context of modernism – and not as a separate, antagonistic phenomenon. Cosmopolitan Style was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2008 Perkins Prize for best book in narrative studies. Concurrently with Cosmopolitan Style , Walkowitz published Bad Modernisms (2006), a 370-page anthology on “the new modernist studies” which she edited with Douglas Mao. Two years later, Mao and Walkowitz published “The New Modernist Studies,” a survey of current transformations and future directions solicited by the editor of PMLA . This essay, which has been widely cited, argued that emergent scholarship in the field has moved in two principal directions: towards the transnational history of the book, in which modernist scholars – for so long focused only on the analysis of singular texts – are examining the global publication, translation, and circulation of modernist works; and towards the history of institutions, in which scholars – for so long focused on paradigms of individualism – are analyzing modernist works' embeddedness in mass media and the state.

Walkowitz is the editor or coeditor of six additional books, including The Turn to Ethics (with Marjorie Garber and Beatrice Hanssen, 2000) and Immigrant Fictions: Contemporary Literature in an Age of Globalization (2007). Since 2006, Walkowitz has published six essays related to a new book project entitled “Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature.” One of those essays, on world literature and contemporary fiction, was recently translated into Danish. In addition to “Born Translated,” Walkowitz is the early stages of developing “A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism,” an anthology of experimental essays on the conjunction of modernist studies and world literature. She is editing that project with Eric Hayot.

She is an editor of the journal Contemporary Literature and serves on the board of the American Comparative Literature Association. From 2008-2011, she was the Program Chair of the Modernist Studies Association. At Rutgers, she is a member of the Executive Committee of the Center for Cultural Analysis . Walkowitz also runs a lecture and seminar series on Modernism & Globalization, which has sponsored a variety of events that have drawn scholars and students from around the area. This year, with Sarah Cole at Columbia, she is launching the NYNJ Modernism Seminar. Walkowitz is also launching Literature Now, a new book series edited with Matthew Hart (Columbia) and David James (Nottingham). Literature Now, published by Columbia University Press, will gather ambitious books that focus on the literature of “now” while considering what counts, now, as “literature.” It will be the first-ever book series to welcome studies of contemporary literature that are transnational and comparative as well as national and regional in approach.

Courses at Rutgers include a large lecture course on violence and creativity ; small undergraduate courses on the history and theory of critical and uncritical reading , on the literary and critical history of sophistication, and on James Joyce and the literature of explicitness ; and graduate seminars on modernism and transnationalism, on world literature; on the British novel after 1945; and on the global Anglophone novel.

Before coming to Rutgers, Professor Walkowitz taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she founded the Contemporary Literature Colloquium , a research group of faculty members and graduate students who work in the areas of literature and culture after 1945. In September 2006, she received the Phillip R. Certain Distinguished Faculty Award, which honors the most distinguished faculty member to receive tenure in the College of Letters & Science in the preceding year.

Walkowitz received her AB in American history and literature from Harvard-Radcliffe in 1992, an MPhil in English literature and critical theory from the University of Sussex in 1995, and an MA and PhD in English and American literature from Harvard in 1997 and 2000. She is the recipient of a Marshall Scholarship, a Javits Fellowship, an ACLS Fellowship, a National Humanties Center Fellowship, and three teaching prizes from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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