Rate My Professor Chris Danta

Professor Chris Danta is Professor of Literature in the School of Cybernetics at the Australian National University. He holds a BA from the Australian National University, a BA (Honours) in English from the University of Melbourne, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Monash University. Danta previously held the position of Professor of English at the University of New South Wales, where he remains an Honorary Professor. He was an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow from 2009 to 2011, focusing on the evolution of the animal fable after Darwin, and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow from 2021 to 2024. His research operates at the intersection of literary theory, philosophy, science, and theology. Describing himself as a literary anthropologist, Danta examines how literary writers rethink humanness by drawing on knowledge systems such as religion and science. His Australian Research Council Future Fellowship project, Future Fables: Literature, Evolution and Artificial Intelligence (2021-2025), investigates how the post-Darwin literary imagination has shaped anxieties about artificial intelligence and how writers envision the co-evolution of humans, animals, and machines. Research interests include comparative literature, animal studies, posthumanism, ecocriticism, cybernetics, storytelling, fables, and evolutionary theory.

Danta is the author of two monographs: Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot (Bloomsbury, 2011) and Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature, Speciesism and Metaphor (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Recent publications include 'Dear AI Reader: Nonhuman Perspective and Evolutionary Thinking in the Human-Machine Relation' (American Literature, 2025), 'The Blue Fox: Cryptic Storytelling and Nonhuman Mimicry in the Work of Sjón and Jeff VanderMeer' (Contemporary Literature, 2024), 'J.M. Coetzee and the Aesthetics of Disgust' (Angelaki, 2023), and contributions to journals such as New Literary History, SubStance, Textual Practice, Literature and Theology, and Modernism/modernity. In 2024, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA). He has served as president of the Australasian Association for Literature and is recognised as an internationally acclaimed literary historian and theorist specialising in comparative literature.