Today at Brown

Some people have a clear and linear career path, while others take a more roundabout route. Peter Kishore Saval falls into the latter category. When he takes up his post as assistant professor of comparative literature at Brown this fall, Saval will have his requisite academic stripes, plus an extra: He was trained as an attorney, and spent two years practicing law before turning to academe.

“I’ve always been fascinated by interdisciplinary study,” Saval says. As an undergraduate in the English department at the University of California–Los Angeles, his thesis focused on the afterlife of the second-century Roman writer Apuleius in Renaissance literature, philosophy, and art. The next step was Berkeley School of Law at the University of California, where he pursued the intersection of law with ethics, jurisprudence, and humanities in many classes outside the law school. “The law seemed to touch on so many areas of life, and some of the interesting work in law is often done in other departments, he says.

Still, Saval learned that if you go to law school, “there’s a good chance you’ll end up as a lawyer.” And he did. He practiced law as an associate in two firms, but also found a way to sneak books into the office. “I needed to find a way to continue to read — and not just leases.” He also had his eye on graduate school.

Saval says that when Harvard accepted him as a doctoral candidate in its English program, no one was skeptical about his career path. Instead he jokes, “There was a sense that another one had been saved.”

At Harvard, his dissertation studied the connection between Shakespeare’s plays and certain concerns at the center of 17th-century metaphysics and Renaissance philosophy. The project sought to re-examine the relationship between the individual and the cosmos in Renaissance drama.

At Brown, Saval plans to continue his study of the Renaissance. The Renaissance, he says, calls out for comparative literature. “It crosses so many regional and disciplinary boundaries. It was a period in which music, visual art, poetry, drama, mathematics, the sciences, and politics intersected in many fascinating ways.”

Saval finds teaching to be connected to his intellectual life, even in areas different from his research. “I have continually turned to teaching as an opportunity to discover, along with my students, the fulfillment that comes with reading a work with interpretive patience and tenacity,” he says. In some of his Harvard tutorials he would spend an entire semester on a single text, such as Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure or Plato’s Phaedrus.

Saval says his unusual route to his discipline makes academic pursuits all the more pleasurable for him. “Living in the corporate world makes you appreciate a life of study.”