Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, UCLA 2000) is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literary Studies, and also serves on the steering committee for the French Interdisciplinary Group. He previously 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.

His first book, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford, 2009), explores the figure of the “ideograph” in relation to such modern forms of writing as photography, phonography, and cinematography. Through analyses of writers including Paul Claudel, Ezra Pound, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Paul Valéry, the book reconstructs the historically and theoretically important relationship between modernist conceptions of China, technological media, and writing.

His collaborative translation and critical edition of Victor Segalen's Stèles (Wesleyan, 2007) was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work, by the Modern Language Association. An electronic companion volume is available at www.steles.org.

He has articles published or forthcoming in the journals Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, and Representations, as well as in the essay collections Sinographies: Writing China and Pacific Rim Modernisms. He is currently working on The Floating World: Japonisme, Modernism, Globalization, on the role of Japan in Euro-American theories and practices of aesthetic modernity in art criticism, literature, and film.

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