Rebecca L. Walkowitz is Provost and Dean of the Faculty, as well as Claire Tow Professor of English, at Barnard College. Previously, she was Dean of Humanities and Distinguished Professor of English in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University. For more than two decades, Provost Walkowitz’s research and teaching have explored cosmopolitanism, multilateralism, and multilingualism in 20th- and 21st-century literature. Her scholarship has focused on writers and other artists who create novels, poems, essays, films, and digital compositions intended for global audiences. Her current research considers how multilingual artworks can help us think about the global dimensions of local communities, including colleges and universities. She is currently writing a book called The New Multilingualism: Knowing and Not Knowing Languages in Literature, Culture, and the Classroom. An essay drawn from this project, on the importance of research and teaching in world languages, appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Another essay, “One,” about multilingual films designed for global audiences, appeared in the May 2023 issue of PMLA, the flagship journal of literary studies. 

Provost Walkowitz is the author or editor of 10 books, including Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature; A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism; and Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. She is also the author or co-author of many influential essays and articles, including “The New Modernist Studies,” with Douglas Mao, which has helped to set the agenda for the field of modernist studies over the past decade. She has delivered more than 80 keynote and distinguished lectures in the fields of modernism, contemporary fiction, and world literature in Asia, Europe, Australia, and North America, and has a substantial record of leadership service to the profession, including serving as president of the Modernist Studies Association in 2014-2015.