Shaj Mathew

Shaj Mathew

Assistant Professor
Areas of Interest
World Literature, Comparative Literature, Global Modernism and Modernity.
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Curriculum Vitae

Shaj Mathew is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English.

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Profile

Shaj Mathew is a theorist of global modernism and modernity. His first book, The Dialectic of Cosmopolitan Time (Oxford, 2025), frames cross-cultural theory through time, instead of space. His scholarship looks to modern and contemporary Persian and Turkish literature, with a special interest in the antiquity of these expressions of modernity. His second book project studies the influence of ancient Indian philosophy on global modernist literature. Excerpts of these book projects, in addition to translations and articles, appear in PMLA, MLQ, Modernism/modernity, Philosophy and Literature, the ACLA State of the Discipline Report, and New Literary History, the latter of which awarded him the 2020 Ralph Cohen Prize. He occasionally contributes to The Nation, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

Educational Background

  • Ph.D. Comparative Literature, Yale University (2019)
  • B.A. Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania (2014)

Selected Publications

Books
Cover image for The Dialectic of Cosmopolitan Time
The Dialectic of Cosmopolitan Time
Oxford University Press, 2025

It is generally understood that the modern colonial encounter warped the experience of time in the postcolonial world, rendering it a pale imitation of the European present. In The Dialectic of Cosmopolitan Time, Shaj Mathew offers a powerful challenge to this well-known narrative by assembling a cohesive dialectic: if the colonial encounter produced allochronism (the denial of coevalness with Europe), postcolonial nations inevitably sought homochronism (temporal parity with their former European colonizers). Unable to achieve this, decolonial theorists then embraced anachronism, that is, a nativist return to their precolonial selves. This book reconstructs the dialectic as such before positing a crucial, previously unexplored final stage: cosmopolitanism, the temporal quality of cultural "coexistence."

Articles
  • "Comparative, Cross-Cultural, Connected." ACLA State of the Discipline Report. Forthcoming.
  • "Beyond Epistemic Pluralism." Philosophy and Literature 49.1 (2025): 245-253.
  • "Letter to a Young Girl in Antalya." From the Turkish ("Antalyalı Genç Kıza Mektup") by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. Introduction and translation with Selin Ünlüönen. PMLA 138.2 (2023): 356-361
  • "Global Autofictional Flânerie." Modernism/modernity 29.2 (2022): 219-239. *Reprinted in M/m Print+.
  • "The Multiple Simultaneous Temporalities of Global Modernity: Pamuk, Tanpınar, Proust." MLQ 82.4 (2021): 473-498. *Reprinted in Stanford Arcade Colloquy.
  • "Ekphrastic Temporality." New Literary History 52.2 (2021): 239-260. *Winner, Ralph Cohen Prize
  • "Traveling Realisms, Shared Modernities, Eternal Moods: The Uses of Chekhov in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep." Adaptation 12.1 (2019): 12-26.
  • "Ciudad Juárez in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666: Mexico’s Violent Cradle of Modernity." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 57.4 (2016): 402-416.
Public Scholarship

Contact Details

Shaj Mathew

English
68th Street West 1249B
mathew.shaj@hunter.cuny.edu