woman with glasses and white hat

Emily Sun

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature

Department

Comparative Literature

Office

Professor Sun is on leave, academic year 2022-2023.
Office: Milbank 320D

Contact

Emily Sun is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies.  She received her B.A. in English and German from Amherst College and her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale University.  Her research interests include British and continental European Romantic and nineteenth-century literature, cross-cultural literary relations between China and the West, literary theory, politics and aesthetics, and psychoanalysis and literature.  At Barnard, she teaches courses required for the major in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies, including “Introduction to Comparative Literature,” “Topics in Comparative Literature,” and the “Senior Seminar in Comparative Literature”; as well as electives such as “Stories and Storytelling: An Introduction to Narrative,” “Fictions of Judgment: Austen and Kleist,” and the “Advanced Workshop in Translation.” She has advised senior theses on a range of topics and looks forward to mentoring future students in developing original, thoughtful, and creative work in comparative literature and translation studies.

Professor Sun is the author of On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China (Fordham UP, 2021), which is being translated into Russian for publication by Academic Studies Press. She is the author also of Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics (Fordham UP, 2010) and co-editor, with Eyal Peretz and Ulrich Baer, of The Claims of Literature: A Shoshana Felman Reader (Fordham UP, 2007) and, with Emily Rohrbach, of “Reading Keats, Thinking Politics,” a special issue of Studies in Romanticism (2011).  Her articles, translations, and reviews have appeared in Studies in Romanticism, the European Romantic Review, the Keats-Shelley Journal, the Yearbook of Comparative Literature, and the Journal of the History of Ideas in East Asia, among other journals.  She is now co-editing, with Orrin Wang, The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and World Literature, and beginning projects on comparative poetics and big novels.

  • B.A., Amherst College, English and German, 1993
  • Ph.D., Yale University, Comparative Literature, 2003

Books

On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China (Fordham University Press, 2021) https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823294794/on-the-horizon-of-world-literature/

Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010; paper 2012) https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823232802/succeeding-king-lear/

Edited Book

Eds., Emily Sun, Eyal Peretz, and Ulrich Baer, The Claims of Literature: A Shoshana Felman Reader (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007)  https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823227136/the-claims-of-literature/

Edited Journal Issue

Eds., Emily Rohrbach and Emily Sun, Reading Keats, Thinking PoliticsStudies in Romanticism 50.2 (2011) https://www.jstor.org/stable/i23056033

Selected Recent Articles and Book Chapters

"Reverberations: Traumatic Histories, Cultural Difference, and the Drama of Listening in Eileen Chang's Yuannü and The Rouge of the North."  Reading Catastrophe: Trauma and Literature in an Age of Globalization.  Eds. Jennifer Ballengee and David Kelman (forthcoming with Routledge).

"Shelley's Voice: Poetry, Internationalism, and Solidarity."  European Romantic Review 30.2 (2019): 239-247.

"Shakespearean Retellings and the Question of the Common Reader: Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare and Lin Shu's Yinbian Yanyu."  Journal of the History of Ideas in East Asia 13 (December 2017): 92-132

"Dissensus in Two Registers: Tintern Abbey in Taiwan."  Teaching Romanticism and Literary Theory. Ed. Brian McGrath.  Romantic Pedagogy Commons (online). July 2016.

"Your Friends and Lovers: Perfectionism's Recounting of Romanticism."  Stanley Cavell and the Event of Romanticism.  Ed. Eric Lindstrom.  Romantic Circles Praxis Series (online). July 2014.