Vincent Barletta is a literature professor and author based in Palo Alto, California.
A professor of Comparative Literature and Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University, Vincent Barletta is an award-winning author and educator with over two decades of experience in the public and private sector. From early web design in the 1990s to current AI-generated solutions, he has built his career at the forefront of change.
“Rhythm is an original and masterfully researched intervention in the study of rhythm and, more broadly, literature. Starting from the ancient Greeks and ending with Emmanuel Levinas, Barletta brings together an impressive number of authors and texts from over two millennia, offering a fresh reading of what we mean when we say ‘rhythm.’ He breaks apart narrow definitions of this idea, opening new pathways by which to think about rhythm ethically. This book testifies to Barletta’s astounding command of languages, literatures, poetics, and philology and yields an entirely new vision of what rhythm is and can be."
— Katharina N. Piechocki, author of Cartographic Humanism: The Making of Early Modern Europe
"Barletta offers a well-written, thoughtful, and original contribution to thinking on rhythm and poetic form. With its broad and speculative approach to the very concept of rhythm, this is a singular contribution to the field. Barletta asks us to reconsider our existing paradigms of rhythm by turning away from time-based models and toward a notion that emerges in pre-Socratic atomist thought, a fundamental sense of rhythm, ruthmós, as a force ‘that holds us all.’”
— Susan Stewart, author of The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook on Making
Stanford University
2007 – Current
As a faculty member in the Department of Comparative Literature and Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Vincent Barletta has taught courses and mentored students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He has also maintained an active research agenda, publishing several books and over 50 peer-reviewed articles. In 2021, he was awarded a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship to support his current book research on natality as a conceptual foundation for philosophy and literature. He is also developing a book project with Prof. Marcelo Rangel (UFOP, Brazil) on rhythmanalysis and history.