Michael Palencia-Roth was born and raised in Colombia. His undergraduate degree is from Vanderbilt University in English and Philosophy; his graduate degrees are from Harvard in Comparative Literature (Germanics, Spanish, English, French and Latin). He taught for 30 years at the University of Illinois, taking early retirement in 2007 in order to dedicate himself more fully to research and writing. At the University of Illinois, he directed the Program in Comparative and World Literature for six years (1988-1994) and was affiliated with three other academic units: the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies; the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese; and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. He has authored and/or edited books and monographs on Gabriel García Márquez, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, the conquest period in Latin America, the Holocaust, Comparative Literature as a discipline, cross-cultural analysis, and comparative civilizational analysis. His approximately 90 other authored publications include major encyclopedia articles on Latin American authors, as well as essays on Germanic subjects, English literature, Latin American literature, the colonial literature of ‘Colombia’, the Spanish colonization of the New World, Sir William Jones in India, the ethical vision of Chikuro Hiroike and Western thought, the history of human rights and ecological theory, and theoretical issues in cross-cultural analysis.  

He has been awarded several major national fellowships, including two each from the Newberry Library, the John Carter Brown Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he has delivered invited and keynote lectures in many different countries.  He has been President of three international learnèd societies: the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations; the Association of Departments and Programs of Comparative Literature; and Association of Colombianists. In spring 1997, he was appointed Permanent Distinguished Extramura1 Professor of Humanities and Literature at the Universidad del Valle (in Colombia); in June 1998 he was decorated in Colombia with the “Order of Merit in Art and Culture Pedro Morales Pino” for his contributions to Colombian letters. 

Currently, he is Trowbridge Scholar in Literary Studies and Emeritus Professor of Comparative and World Literature and Latin American Studies as well as Research Professor at the University of Illinois. He is also ad hoc consultant for UNESCO and Senior Adviser- Visiting Professor for the Research Center of the Moralogy Foundation at Reitaku University in Japan.