Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé

Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature, and in the Department of English, where she is Director of Graduate Studies. She is also a faculty affiliate in the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, the Cinema Studies Program, and the Program for Gender and Sexuality Studies. She specializes in comparative, interdisciplinary work in Transatlantic English-language, European, and Latin American literature and thought of the 19th-21st centuries with a focus on comparative modernisms, their continued resonance in global fiction and film, and the relationship between philosophy and literature.

Zumhagen-Yekplé’s last book A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature After Wittgenstein (University of Chicago Press, 2020), argues that reading 20th-century literature after Wittgenstein—in light of his contemporaneous writing, and in the wake of recent scholarly thinking about his philosophy—allows for a deeper understanding of the interwoven commitments related to the concerns with difficulty, oblique ethical instruction, and a yearning for transformation that lies at the core of both Wittgenstein’s philosophical method and literary modernism, and which goes on to shape modernism’s afterlife in contemporary fiction.

Her current book project, Vanities, is a book of philosophical fragments on wisdom and its counterfeits, written in the form its subject demands. Taking its title from Qohelet’s havel havelim—the “merest breath” of ultimate meaninglessness and futility—and from vanity’s other sense, excessive self-regard, it asks what the search for authentic wisdom amounts to in a world in existential crisis, in the age of AI and climate emergency, in which answers arrive as platitudes, and when, how, and whether we can distinguish between the two.

Zumhagen-Yekplé is also co-editor, with Michael LeMahieu, of Wittgenstein and Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2017), and, with R. Lanier Anderson, of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2027). She has held long-term fellowships at Harvard, in Comparative Literature, and at Stanford, in the Andrew W Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities and the Department of English.