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Department of English > Faculty and Staff Biographies
John Burt Foster, Jr.
University Professor
John Foster's research and teaching focus on literature in translation, world literature, and comparative literature, the field in which he earned his doctorate from Yale University. He teaches at all levels in the department, from sophomore world literature surveys and courses in world literature and in 19th and 20th-century European fiction, to graduate seminars on the modern novel, on theories of comparative literature, and on research methods. His scholarship includes books on Nietzsche and early 20th-century fiction (Princeton UP, 1981; rpt. 1988), Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism (Princeton UP, 1993), and Thresholds of Western Culture: Identity, Postcoloniality, Transnationalism (Continuum, 2003). He is now working on the famous Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, with the idea of better explaining his significance for world literature. From 1992 to 2005 he was review editor and then editor of The Comparatist, an annual journal of comparative literature, and he now edits Recherche littéraire / Literary Research, an international journal that circulates worldwide. Before coming to George Mason, he taught at Stanford University, and he has held visiting positions at New York University and at Harvard.Email:
Phone: 703.993.2774
Office: Robinson Hall A 426
Department Affiliations: Mason Topics