Gayle Rogers

Gayle Rogers is Andrew W. Mellon professor and chair of English at the Dietrich School Special Liaison for Outreach and Development. He is also affiliated faculty with the Global Studies Center, Center for Latin American Studies, European Studies Center, and Cultural Studies program.  He works primarily on the topics of risk and prediction; the history of ideas; global modernisms; translation theory; empire; comparative literature; English, American, and Spanish literatures; speculation and speculative fiction; critical history, and the intersections of literature, economics, and risk theory.

His recent works include Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI (Columbia University Press, 2021) and The New Modernist Studies Reader: An Anthology of Essential Criticism, ed. with Sean Latham (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). He was also editor of “Risk: A Dossier”, a special issue of Critical Quarterly (April 2021).

His previous books include Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of American and Spanish Literatures (Columbia UP, 2016), and Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History (Oxford UP, 2012). With Sean Latham, he co-authored Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). This book launched the New Modernisms series, which Latham and Rogers co-edit.

He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Departments of English and an MLA Certified External Reviewer. He serves on the editorial board of Modernism/modernity and, in the past, served on the board of the Modernist Studies Association. He was a member of the organizing committee for MSA’s 2014 conference in Pittsburgh. He has also been a member of the MLA First Book Prize committee, chaired the MSA Book Prize committee, and most recently chaired the MLA’s division on prose fiction. He is Associate Editor for Critical Quarterly, and with Jonathan Arac, was co-organizer of the 2016 Society for Novel Studies conference.  He is a founding member of the international consortium El ensayo literario. At Pitt, he has served on the Sexual Harassment and Discrimination Policy Committee, the Provost’s Advisory Committee on Undergraduate Programs, the Dietrich School Graduate Council, and many grant review committees. He has been chair of the Humanities Council, co-director of the Literature Program and associate chair of English, among his service roles. His teaching focuses on modernism, world literary history, the politics of translation and aesthetic theory, cosmopolitanism and history, and the novel.

His work has been funded by the NEH, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sports.

Representative Publications

“Cryptocurrency, Speculation, and How We Imagine the Future,” CUP Blog (November 2021).

“Too Much Information: Candor and the Department Chair,” Chronicle of Higher Education (October 2021).

“Why Does Speculation Persist in the Age of Predictive Data?”, History News Network (July 2021).

“Speculation” (New Books Network Podcast Interview).

“What the Memestock and Crypto Surges Say about Speculating in the 21st Century” (Thorns Have Roses Podcast Interview).

“From Tulips and Scrips to Bitcoin and Meme Stocks: How the Act of Speculating Became a Financial Mania,” The Conversation (April 2021; republished in 30+ media outlets).

“Risk’s Instruments: Speculation, Futurity, and Modernist Finance,” in The New Modernist Studies, ed. Douglas Mao (Cambridge UP, 2021): 278–96.

“Translation and/as Disconnection,” co-ed. and intro. with Joshua L. Miller,
Modernism/modernity Print Plus (Sept. 2018).

Oliverio Girondo’s ‘Superwords,’ Public Books

“Death by Prefix?  The Paradoxical Life of Modernist Studies,” LA Review of Books

“Translation,” in A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, ed. Eric Hayot and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Columbia UP, 2016), 248–62.

“American Modernisms in the World,” in The Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel, ed. Joshua Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), 227–44.

“‘Spanish is a language Tu’: Hemingway’s Cubist Spanglish,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 48:2 (August 2015): 224–42.

“Jiménez, Modernism/o, and the Languages of Comparative Modernist Studies,” Comparative Literature 66:1 (Winter 2014): 127–47.

“Restaging the Disaster: Dos Passos and National Literatures after the Spanish-American War,” Journal of Modern Literature 36:2 (Winter 2013): 61–79.

“1616, Bilingual Modernism, and Anglo-Spanish Literary History,” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 4:1 (2013): 100–110.

“El cosmopolitismo de Ortega: Kant, nacionalismo y el intelectual contemporáneo estadounidense,” trans. Sebastián Urli, Revista de Estudios Orteguianos 26 (2013): 79–99.

“Joyce and the Spanish Ulysses,” Modernism/modernity 19:2 (April 2012): 255–75.

“The Circulation of Interwar Anglophone and Hispanic Modernisms,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger (New York: Oxford UP, 2012), 461–77.

Interview and profile of Ben Lerner, Contemporary Literature 54:2 (Summer 2013): 219–38.

“Is the Spanish Language White?”, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 14, 2013: B1, 8.

“James Joyce in His Labyrinth” (translation, preface, and annotations to Antonio Marichalar, “James Joyce en su laberinto” [1924]), Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA) 124:3 (May 2009): 926–38.

Review of F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, by William J. Maxwell, Los Angeles Review of Books (January 2015): lareviewofbooks.org/review/g-men-literary-critics