Wai Chee Dimock is William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University.[1] Originally from Hong Kong, she received her B.A. from Harvard University[2] and Ph.D. from Yale University. She is active in the movement to internationalize the curriculum, using the "planet" as an analytic horizon to broaden the contours of American literature.
Three concepts are important to Dimock: deep time; kinship among genres and media; and close reading. See reviews by Michael Davidson,[3] Robert Kern,[4] and Robert Gravil.[5]
Dimock has collaborated on many projects: with Michael Gilmore at Brandeis University, on Rethinking Class; Priscilla Wald at Duke University, on Literature and Science, a special issue of American Literature; Lawrence Buell at Harvard University, on Shades of the Planet; and Bruce Robbins at Columbia University, on a special issue of PMLA, Remapping Genre (Oct 2007). See also an exchange between Dimock ("Genre as World System") and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ("World Systems & the Creole"),Narrative 14 (January 2006).
Dimock was also a consultant for "Invitation to World Literature," a 13-part series funded by the Annenberg Foundation[6] and produced by WGBH, aired on PBS stations in the fall of 2010.[7] A related Facebook forum, "Rethinking World Literature," is still ongoing.[8] She is now at work on two critical books, "Low Theory" and "Many Islams," and a print-and-web anthology, "American Literature in the World." She writes a blog on that website -- http://www.amlitintheworld.org -- and posts images on its Facebook page.