Martin Hägglund

Martin Hägglund is a philosopher, literary theorist, and scholar of modernist literature. He is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University.

Hägglund is the author of three highly acclaimed books. In his native Sweden he published his first book, Chronophobia: Essays on Time and Finitude (2002), at the age of 25 and was awarded the Swedish Academy’s Grez Prize. His first book in English, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (2008), was the subject of a conference at Cornell University, a colloquium at Oxford University, and a 250-page special issue of The New Centennial Review, entitled Living On: Of Martin Hägglund. His most recent book, Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (2012) was hailed by the Los Angeles Review of Books as a “revolutionary” achievement, which shows how literary theory “can and should go on living: in unflinching fidelity to how it feels to be human.” He has received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Harvard Society of Fellows. In 2014, he was awarded the Schück Prize by the Swedish Academy. His work has been translated into eight languages.

As a Guggenheim Fellow, Hägglund will complete his new book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, which is forthcoming from Pantheon Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Ranging across literature, religion, politics, and philosophy, This Life develops a new vision of what it can mean to lead a resolutely secular life, both individually and collectively. An excerpt from the book can be read here.