Around the World in Eighty Books: Worlding Literature in Translation

In summer 2020, the entire world is locked down due to the pandemic. David Damrosch, a professor of Comparative Literature, began a personal project that eventually turned into a global event. He launched a project called “Around the World in 80 Books” .  following the fictive itinerary of Phileas Fogg’s global travel, which Jules Verne wrote about in his famous novel Around the World in 80 Days. Damrosch’s project simultaneously manifests a global ambition and offers a reflection on what we have achieved, missed, or mistaken in the globalization over the past two centuries.

Mingwei Song is a Chair Professor of Chinese Literature at Wellesley College. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He was a former Dilworth Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and a former An Wang Fellow at Harvard University. His research interests include modern Chinese literature, the Bildungsroman, science fiction, posthuman theories, and the Neo-Baroque aesthetics. He is currently the Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Wellesley. 

He has been writing and publishing poetry and fiction since he was 13, with numerous works published under a pseudonym between 1987 and 1996. His recent poems and stories (after 2010) were published under his own name, with a collection of his poetry published by Taipei’s Ryefield Press (December 2022). His poems and stories have been translated into Italian and English.