Professor Krzysztof Ziarek joined the faculty of Comparative Literature in spring 2004. Professor Ziarek did his doctoral studies in the University at Buffalo's English Department.

Krzysztof Ziarek teaches 20th-century comparative literature, especially contemporary poetry and poetics, aesthetics, philosophy and literature, and literary theory. He is the author of Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness, The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event. His newest work, The Force of Art is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.

Prof. Ziarek has also published numerous essays on Coolidge, Stein, Stevens, Heidegger, Benjamin, Irigaray, and Levinas, and co-edited a collection of essays, Future Crossings: Literature Between Philosophy and Cultural Studies. A volume of his poems in Polish, Zaimejlowane z Polski, was published in 2000. He has won NEH and ACLS fellowships. He is currently working on aesthetics and globalization.