Alexander Beecroft teaches courses in Greek and Latin language and literature, ancient civilizations, literary theory (ancient and modern) and the theory and practice of world literature. His major areas of research interest are in the literatures of Ancient Greece and Rome, pre-Tang Chinese literature (i.e. before AD 600), as well as current debates about world literature. His first book, Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China: Patterns of Literary Circulation was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. He was the recipient of a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship in the Humanities from the American Council of Learned Societies for the 2011-12 academic year for work on his next book project, An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day. (Verso, January 2015). His next project after that, A Global History of Literature, is under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press. He is also the Secretary-Treasurer of the American Comparative Literature Association.