Medieval and classical literature in the western European languages and in the modern languages of China, India, Africa, and the Middle East. Special research focuses include the afterlife of Greco-Roman antiquity in later Western literature; the tradition of melancholy from antiquity to 1800; modern Greek poetry; pain in African literature; gender and modern Chinese literature; space in the 19th-century European novel; Palestinian and Israeli world literature; linguistics, philology, and comparative literature.