Profile
Research Interests: Medieval Studies, Philosophy, Aesthetics, Poetics, Linguistics
Daniel Heller-Roazen is the Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Comparative Literature and the Council of the Humanities. He is the author of No One’s Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming(link is external)(2017); Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers(link is external)(2013); The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World(link is external)(2011); The Enemy of All:(link is external) Piracy and the Law of Nations(link is external)(2009); The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation(link is external)(2007), which was awarded the Modern Language Association’s 2008 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies; Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (link is external)(2005); and Fortune's Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency(link is external)(2003). These books have been translated into a dozen languages. He has also edited the Norton Critical Edition of the Arabian Nights(link is external)(2010) and has edited, translated and introduced Giorgio Agamben’s Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy(link is external)(1999). He is also the author of a number of articles on medieval and modern poetry and philosophy. He has received fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2010 he was awarded the Medal of the Collège de France.
At Princeton, Daniel Heller-Roazen teaches introductory courses in Comparative Literature and Humanistic Studies, upper-level seminars in medieval literature and graduate seminars on various topics in the history of philosophy and literature. Recent graduate courses have included seminars on negation; medieval Tristan romances; ancient and modern representations of chance and probability; Arnaut Daniel and the invention of rhyme; theories of sensation; and the history of aesthetics. He was the Director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism from 2007 to 2015.
An Associate of the Departments of French and Italian and German, Daniel Heller-Roazen regularly advises graduate students in English, French and German, as well as Comparative Literature.