Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé

Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé is Associate Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and English, and a faculty affiliate in the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, the Cinema Studies Program, and the Program for Gender Studies. She specializes in comparative, interdisciplinary work in Transatlantic, European, and Latin American literature and thought of the 20th-21st centuries with a focus on comparative modernisms, their continued resonance in contemporary global fiction and film, and the relationship between philosophy and literature.
Her most recent book, A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature After Wittgenstein https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo46479733.html

(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.
Zumhagen-Yekplé is now working on a new book manuscript, on The Vanities of Wisdom, and on another book project on Grace and Disgrace. She is also co-editor, with Michael LeMahieu, of Wittgenstein and Modernism https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo25019261.html

(University of Chicago Press, 2017), and, with R. Lanier Anderson, of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, expected 2026). Before coming to Tulane, Zumhagen-Yekplé held long-term fellowships in Comparative Literature at Harvard, and at in English and the Andrew W Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford.