Natalie Melas

Natalie Melas serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University's College of Arts and Sciences, with additional affiliations at the Institute for Comparative Modernities and Literatures in English program.

Her academic foundation includes a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with concentrations in English, French, and Ancient Greek from the University of California, Berkeley.

Melass research traverses Caribbean literary landscapes across Francophone and Anglophone traditions, modern Greek poetry, and theoretical frameworks examining colonialism's intersections with modernism. Her work interrogates temporal philosophies, racial capitalism, and landscape poetics through figures like Césaire and Cavafy, while advancing comparative modernities as a critical paradigm for world literature studies.

Recent publications reveal consistent engagement with comparative methodology's evolution, particularly how racial temporality and non-simultaneity challenge Eurocentric literary frameworks across Caribbean and Mediterranean contexts.

Her scholarly recognition includes the ACLA René Wellek Prize Honorable Mention (2008) for All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison and an award for the experimental film We Love We Self Up Here (2021).

Current funding through a Mellon Foundation "Just Futures" grant supports her transmedial research on Caribbean environmentalities via film collaboration, while her teaching includes advanced seminars on postcolonial theory and temporal poetics.

Creative partnerships with filmmaker Kannan Arunasalam and spatial theorist Tao DuFour drive her documentary practice exploring Trinidad and Tobago's cultural ecologies through poetic and architectural lenses.