This open access collection of more than 40 essays from distinguished and up-and-coming scholars provides a definitive point of reference for the field of comparative literature globally in the 2020s.

Worlds of Comparative Literature, the sixth incarnation of the ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) State of the Discipline Report, showcases the most up-to-date work of leading scholars in the field. With an editorial team made up of distinguished and authoritative voices, an international range of contributors, and a forward-thinking vision of current trends in scholarship, this is an invaluable snap shot of the field against a backdrop of constant change in the Humanities and higher education.

Organized around key concepts and paradigms, new directions and trends, global perspectives, and institutional representation, Worlds of Comparative Literature offers a broad range of coverage on new developments – such as Global South studies, Indigenous studies, and medical humanities – and reflects the current place of comparative literature at universities and colleges. The volume features essays by 10 past presidents of the ACLA and the ADPCL (Association of Departments and Programs of Comparative Literature) and 3 past presidents of the ICLA (International Comparative Literature Association). It also moves away from a US-centered approach, with global perspectives making up more than a third of the volume and contributors based in countries such as Argentina, China, Denmark, India, New Zealand, Qatar, and the UK.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA, and University of California, Los Angeles, USA.

Waïl S. Hassan is Professor and Head of the Department of Comparative & World Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA. His publications include Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature (2011), The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions (2017), and Arab Brazil: Fictions of Ternary Orientalism (2024).

Shu-mei Shih is Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies, and the Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Humanities at University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Her publications include The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937 (2001), Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (2007), and Against Diaspora: Discourse on Sinophone Studies (2017).