Annette Damayanti Lienau is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (on leave 2011-12) and currently visiting UCLA as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature. She recently completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Yale (2011), and is working on a book manuscript (entitled Terms of Exchange) on the problem of language choice and ideology in the comparative literary histories of Indonesia, Egypt, and Senegal. Building on research materials in Arabic, French, Malay, and Wolof, her current book project addresses questions of script change (from Arabic to romanized forms), comparative legacies of devotional literature and sacralized language, and relationships between post-colonial literature, leftist transnationalism, and vernacular print-culture. Her research has been supported by a Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship granted by the Social Science Research Council and a Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies. At UCLA, she is developing an introductory, undergraduate survey course on the comparative literatures of the Indian Ocean and a senior seminar on comparative literature and leftist transnationalism.
