Educated at universities in Europe and the U. S., Christian Moraru has done research and taught primarily in the following areas: contemporary American literature, mainly fiction; literary and cultural theory; community theory; theories of intimacy and affect; new materialism; comparative and global studies with focus on the U. S. and post-World War II Western Europe; literature and philosophy, particularly post-Nietzschean tradition and Levinas, and history of ideas; Cold War and post-Cold War studies in transnational perspective; postmodernism and poststructuralism; postcolonialism and its Central-East-European developments.
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He published his first book in Romania in 1985, one year after he had finished college at University of Bucharest, where he majored in Modern Literature and Latin and completed a 500-p. thesis. The 1985 monograph was followed by two more in his native language. After 1989, he taught at the University from which he had graduated. In 1992-1993, he spent one year and a half at University of Heidelberg, Germany, as a Humboldt Research Fellow, before going on to pursue a double Ph. D. in English and Comparative Literature at Indiana University. There, he received two M.A.s and then the Ph.D. degree in 1998.
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His 1990 book on the history of mimetic theory, Poetics of Reflection: An Archaeology of Mimesis, was partially reprinted in The Play of the Self (SUNY Press, 1994). His latest books include Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning (SUNY Press 2001), Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in Postmodernism (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary(University of Michigan Press, 2011), and the edited collection Postcommunism, Postmodernism, and the Global Imagination(Columbia University Press, 2009). His co-edited essay collection The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century was brought out by Northwestern University Press in 2015. The monograph Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology came out from University of Michigan Press also in 2015. Since then, he has published the coedited essay collections Romanian Literature as World Literature (2018), Francophone Literature as World Literature (2020), The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory (2022), and Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons (2022), as well as the monograph Flat Aesthetics: Twenty-First-Century American Fiction and the Making of the Contemporary (2023), all from Bloomsbury.