David Pike
Department Chair, Literature
Department of Literature
Degrees
PhD, Comparative Literature, Columbia University MA, French & Romance Philology, Columbia University BA, Film, Literature & Critical Theory, Swarthmore College
Languages Spoken
French, Spanish, German, Italian (reading), Latin (reading)
Favorite Spot on Campus
My office, the magnolia tree that used to be outside my window, and the new tree growing there
Book Currently Reading
Mohsin Hamid, Exit West; Matthew Desmond, Evictions
Bio
Professor Pike is Chair of the Department of Literature (June 2016-May 2019). His most recent book is Canadian Cinema since the 1980s: At the Heart of the World (U of Toronto P, 2012). He is the author of Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001 (Cornell UP, 2007); Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London 1800–1945 (Cornell UP), shortlisted for the 2006 Modernist Studies Association book prize; Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds (Cornell UP), recipient of the 1997 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities from the Council of Graduate Schools and a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 1997; and articles on medieval literature, modernism, film, neo-Victorianism, subterranea, urban fantasy, global urban culture, and Paris and London. He is co-author of Literature: A World of Writing and co-general editor of the Longman Anthology of World Literature. In addition to urban culture and the underground, he teaches courses on European and Canadian cinema, film noir, the western, modernism, Dante, Roman literature, and the novel. From 1993 to 1995, Professor Pike was Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. Among his awards and fellowships are an NEH Fellowship for College Teachers, an ACLS Fellowship for Junior Scholars, and the American University Faculty Award for Outstanding Scholarship, Research, and Other Professional Contributions. Current projects include cold-war culture after the cold war, the 19th century city after the 19th century, and “Corruption Plots, Imagined Publics: The Ethics of Space in the Millennial City,” with Malini Ranganathan (SIS, AU) and Sapana Doshi (U of Arizona, Geography and Development), winner of an ACLS Collaborative Research Grant, 2017-2019.
