Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, UCLA 2000) is Assistant Professor of French. He has taught at Harvard, Indiana, and Princeton Universities, and from 2003 to 2006 was a fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts.

His research and teaching focus on transnational, comparative, and interdisciplinary approaches to French, German, and American modernities. His areas of interest include intellectual and cultural history, aesthetics, avant-gardes, translation, media, and the interactions between East Asian and Euro-American modernisms.

He recently completed Ideographic Modernism: "China," Writing, Media, which explores the imagined (and largely imaginary) figure of the ideograph in relation to such other forms of writing as photography, phonography, and cinematography, and argues for a wide-spread and historically important interpenetration of modernism's technological and ethnographic imaginaries. Writers discussed include Paul Claudel, Ezra Pound, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Paul Valéry.

His collaborative translation and critical edition of Victor Segalen's Stèles --a companion volume to which is available at www.steles.org-- was recently published by Wesleyan University Press. He has articles published or forthcoming in the journals Comparative Literature (on Spivak's Death of a Discipline), Comparative Literature Studies (on the relationship between "theory" and cultural studies), and Representations (on Japanese aesthetics in the American Gilded Age), as well as in the essay collections Sinographies: Writing China (on image and allegory in modernist poetics) and Pacific Rim Modernisms (on nineteenth-century French japonisme). His current long-term project studies the transnational origins of national aesthetics during the modernist period, with special attention to the construction and dissemination of Japanese aesthetics.

He is a founder of and regular contributor to the blogzine printculture, where he writes primarily on popular culture, politics, and sports.

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