Vincent Barletta

Vincent Barletta is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Iberian and Latin American Cultures. Like most Stanford faculty, he regularly offers classes on the ancestral and unceded land of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. Prof. Barletta is a Research Associate at Stanford's Europe Center and associated faculty in the Center for African Studies, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and the Center for Latin American Studies. He is also a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2021) and the Kay Philips Award for Outstanding Adult Ally, Youth Community Service (2019-20). His research and teaching focus primarily on medieval and early modern Iberian literatures, especially texts associated with the Portuguese empire; Iberian Islam; classical reception; comparative literature; literature and linguistic anthropology; literature and philosophy.

Professor Barletta's latest book, Rhythm: Form and Dispossession (Chicago, 2020), analyzes key philosophical and poetic theorizations of rhythm from ancient Greece to the modern era. Central to this book project are different poetic and philosophical accounts of flow (reô), form, mimesis, ethics, and subjectivity. If Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa is right in arguing that “rhythm corresponds to an intimate movement of the soul,” what is this correspondence, what is meant by movement (kinésis), and what is the status of the soul? This book addresses these and other questions over a period spanning two millennia and in texts written in over ten languages.