Efraín Kristal

Professor and Chair

kristal@ucla.edu

(310) 825-7650

Humanities 350A

Efrain Kristal specializes in Latin American literature in comparative contexts, translation studies, and aesthetics.  He is author of over eighty scholarly articles and prologues as well as the following books:  The Andes Viewed from the City.  Literary and Political Discourse on the Indian in Peru  (1987); Temptation of the Word.  The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa (1998); and Invisible Work. Borges and Translation (2002).  He has edited The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel (2005) and the Penguin edition of Jorge Luis Borges' Poems of the Night (2010).   He is also one of three associate editors of The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel (2010).  

His forthcoming publications include "Peter Sloterdijk and literature" for Sloterdijk Now, edited by Stuart Elden for the Polity Press; "Art and Literature in the Liquid Modern Age" for The Blackwell Companion to Comparative Literature edited by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas, an essay on Nicolas Poussin and Philosophy, the essay on translation theory for the Blackwell Companion to Translation Studies, an essay on Yves Bonnefoy's Shakespeare translations, and The Cambridge Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa co-edited with John King.

Kristal received his Ph.D. from Stanford University (1985), studied philosophy as a visiting foreign student at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris (rue d'Ulm), is a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; and held the Julio Cortazar chair at the University of Guadalajara.  He has been a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, the University of Göttingen, and the Institute d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Science Po).  He was a was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at La Trobe University in Australia, a fellow at the Centre for Philosophy, Literature and the Arts at the University of Warwick, and a visiting scholar at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.