معرفی
Robert Chodat is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at Boston University, specializing in post-WWII American fiction and the intersection of literature and philosophy. His research examines how language of agency and purpose persists within reductively naturalistic cultural frameworks across individual acts, lives, and collective practices.
Chodat earned his BA and MA from McGill University and PhD from Stanford University, establishing a foundation for his interdisciplinary work bridging literary studies and philosophical inquiry.
His scholarly focus centers on meaningful behavior in postwar literature, engaging deeply with Wittgenstein, Cavell, and pragmatism while analyzing authors like Richard Powers, Lorrie Moore, and Philip Roth. Key themes include naturalism's limitations, narrative function, and evolutionary perspectives on aesthetics, revealing consistent exploration of how literature sustains normative concepts in scientific worldviews.
Chodat's recent publications demonstrate growing emphasis on ordinary language philosophy's application to literary analysis, particularly through Wittgensteinian frameworks examining narrative ontology and aesthetic judgment in contemporary fiction.
His research has been supported by prestigious awards:
- National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2013-14)
- BU Humanities Foundation Fellowship (2008-09)
- Humboldt Research Fellowship (2006-07)
- Visiting Scholar, American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2003-04)
- Mabel McLeod Lewis Fellowship (2002-03)
- Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Stipendium (1999)
As Director of Graduate Studies, Chodat mentors emerging scholars and shapes curriculum through courses like 'Philosophical Fictions' and 'Reading After Wittgenstein.' Since 2018, he has organized the annual BU Workshop on Literature, Philosophy, and Aesthetics, fostering cross-disciplinary dialogue between literary scholars and philosophers while advancing his research on agency through collaborative intellectual exchange.
