Professor Eric Calderwood

Professor Eric Calderwood

Eric Calderwood is a Professor of Comparative Literature and Dean’s Distinguished Professorial Scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he is also the Director of the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.

He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2011. His first book, Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture, was published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2018. It has been translated into Arabic and Spanish and has won several awards, including the 2019 L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African Studies. His second book, On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus, was published by Harvard University Press in 2023. It was a finalist for the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2024 and received honorable mention for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association. Calderwood’s current book project, tentatively titled “Babel’s Bounty,” explores the politics and aesthetics of multilingual creativity and artistry in the western Mediterranean world, from the medieval period to the present. In addition to his scholarship, Calderwood has contributed essays and commentary to public-facing venues like Foreign Policy, McSweeney’s, the afikra Podcast, NPR, and the BBC.

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