Cogut Institute for the Humanities

David Wills is Professor of French and Francophone Studies and teaches 20th-century literature and “high” theory of the period 1960–1985. His major work, published principally in three volumes in the Posthumanities Series at the University of Minnesota Press (Prosthesis, Dorsality, Inanimation), deals with the originary technicity of the human. He hails from New Zealand, where he completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees (University of Auckland), before undertaking doctoral studies at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3). He came to the U.S. in 1985, and held positions at Louisiana State University and SUNY-Albany, arriving at Brown in 2013. He is also well known for research on and translations of work by Jacques Derrida, notably Right of Inspection, The Gift of Death, The Animal That Therefore I Am, Theory and Practice, Clang (with Geoffrey Bennington), and two forthcoming volumes of the seminar Perjury and Pardon.