Michael Pifer

Michael Pifer’s research and writing focus on the connective tissues that run through Armenian, Persian, and Turkish literary cultures, particularly in medieval Anatolia, but also beyond. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan in 2014, which awarded him the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award. His current book project, tentatively titled Kindred Voices: A Literary History of Medieval Anatolia, 1250-1350, seeks to uncover shared cultures of poetic adaptation across Christian and Muslim communities in the pre-modern Mediterranean, as well as to reexamine the manner in which we approach literary history today. This project was supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2016-17.

Currently, he is an advisory member on the project “Jewish-Christian Relations: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean,” based in Bochum, Germany. His publications have recently appeared in Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies and The Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, and his translations of Armenian poetry on the city of Aleppo will appear in a forthcoming issue of Absinthe: A Journal of World Literature in Translation. His teaching interests include Armenian history, language, and literature; world literature, world history, and world cinema; cosmopolitanism and exile; borderlands and go-betweens; translation studies; the Mediterranean world; representation and trauma.