David Damrosch is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and past president of the American Comparative Literature Association. He has written widely on world literature from antiquity to the present. His admired books, with lively appeal not only to the academic world but also to general readers, include The Narrative Covenant (1987), What Is World Literature? (2003), and The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007). In addition to editing the Longman Cultural Edition of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," Rudyard Kipling's "The Man Who Would be King," and Other Works on Empire, he is the inspired genius, founding force, and general editor of the first three editions of the six-volume Longman Anthology of British Literature and now general editor of The Longman Anthology of World Literature.