Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Writer: Philip Lee Williams, 706/542-8501, phil@franklin.uga.edu
Contact: Dorothy Figueira, 706/542-2748, figueira@uga.edu

UGA professor Dorothy Figueira named president pro tem of the International Comparative Literature Association

Athens, Ga. – Dorothy Figueira, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Georgia, has been elected president pro tem of the International Comparative Literature Association. Figueira assumes the post following the death of ICLA President Tania Carvalhal and will serve until the organization’s next General Assembly meeting in Rio de Janeiro in the summer of 2007.

The association has four vice presidents, and Figueira received the highest number of votes in the vice presidential election during the group’s last congress, which was held in Hong Kong.

Figueira has been a faculty member at UGA since 1999. She holds graduate degrees in the history of religion and theology from Université de Paris and Harvard and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in comparative literature.

Her scholarly interests include religion and literature, translation theory, exoticism, myth theory and travel narratives. She is the author of Translating the Orient (1991), The Exotic: A Decadent Quest (1994) and Aryans, Jews and Brahmins (2002), and is the editor of La Production de l'Autre (1999) and Literature in the Age of Theory and Technology (2004). 

Her latest book (under contract) is titled Otherwise Occupied: Theories and Pedagogies of Alterity. She has written more than 60 articles and given more than 100 conference papers. After serving on the Board of the International Comparative Literature Association for two terms, she was elected vice president and now serves as president pro tempore. 

She has also served on the boards of the American Comparative Literature Association, the Southern Comparative Literature Association and the Southern Association for Asian Studies. Next year, she will assume the editorship of The Comparatist. 

She has taught at the University of Illinois, State University of New York, Cornell and the University of Chicago. She has held American Institute for Indian Studies, Fulbright Foundation and NEH grants.

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