Institute for Advanced Study

IAS Distinguished Fellow Profile

Professor Efrain Kristal

IAS Fellow 2002

Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Professor Kristal holds a PhD in Spanish Literature from Stanford University.  He studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and was a fellow of the von Humboldt Foundation in Berlin.  He is the author of numerous books and articles on topics of Latin American literature, philosophy and the arts, and the comparative study of North and South American literature.  He is author of Invisible Work. Borges and Translation (2002), Temptation of the Word.  The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa (1998), and The Andes Viewed from the City.  Literary and Political Discourse on the Indian in Peru (1987).

While at the Institute for Advanced Study Professor Kristal will be writing several essays on the political and moral dimension of Mario Vargas Llosa's novels, he will be doing preparatory work for the Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel which he has been commissioned to edit, and he will be exploring areas in which the comparative study of North and South American literature can be enhance by taking Australian literary phenomena into consideration.