Joseph Slaughter is a professor of postcolonial literature and theory, cultural studies, human rights, and literary approaches to international law in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is currently the Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and a member of the Committee on Global Thought. Slaughter has published numerous articles on African and Latin American literatures, human rights, and intellectual property. His book Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, won the 2008 René Wellek Prize for Comparative Literature and Cultural Theory. He was a founding co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Humanity, and co-editor of a volume of essays on Latin American, Caribbean, and African literatures and culture entitled The Global South Atlantic. He is currently completing a book At the Edges of Legality: A Critique of Human Rights Reason (and Humanitarian Sentiment), to be published by Verso Press, and finishing another, New Word Orders, on intellectual/cultural property and world literature.