David Porter

Trained in Comparative Literature, I have focused in my research and teaching on the dynamics of transcultural translation, comparison, and interconnection in a variety of historical contexts. 

I have worked for many years on the problem of how to think China and Europe together in the eighteenth century and early modern period. My first book explored European responses to Chinese cultural achievements in language, religion, the arts, and trade between 1600 and 1800.  In its sequel, I focused more specifically on the circulation of aesthetic ideas and practices between England and China. More recently, I have taken up questions of transcultural comparison in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a project which has involved excursions into world literature, translation theory, comparative political and economic history, and Ming dynasty philosophy.

Tracing the Jesuit role in the early modern processes of globalization led me inevitably to the Great Lakes, another major center of their early missionary activity. I have been increasingly involved in public-facing projects designed to engage students and local communities with to the rich literary, environmental, and sociocultural history of the Great Lakes region, such as the Detroit River Story Lab, the Great Lakes Writers Corps, the Great Lakes Arts, Cultures, and Environments Summer Program, and LSA's Great Lakes Theme Semester.