Mary Layoun is Emerita Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where she worked from 1985 – 2019. She earned a B.A. in Literature from the University of California at San Diego (1973) and an M.A. (1979) and Ph.D. (1985) in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.

Her work focuses on the intersections of politics, history, culture, and literature; nationalism; narrative; visual culture; translation; comic books; community-building, solidarity, and social movements; the history of the field and discipline of comparative literature.

She gives public talks and lectures and participates in community discussions on these and other topics, including on Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Greece, the European Union and the demos, Middle East and colonialism, transnationalism and the comparative, the new far-right, global security and the U.S. war on terror, colonialism and the post-colonial. Such talks and lectures include: “Rereading the Communist Manifesto” (SYRIZA - Thessaloniki) “Conversations with jailers, worlds we want to live in, and crossing lines: Borders, Communities, Mobility” (Tufts University); “Solidarity and the `somehow’ of justice in Palestine and Israel” Modern Language Association Presidential Panel on “Palestinian Literature: Conditions of Possibility, Conditions of Justice”); "Postcolonial Visions and the Mediterranean" (American Comparative Literature Association);

She served on the Steering Committee of Haven's Center for the Study of Social Structures and Social Change (1990–2019) in the Department of Sociology at U.W. Madison. And she organized and led civil rights history trips in the U.S. and international social justice trips to Cyprus.

Books include Wedded to the Land? Gender× boundaries× nationalism-in-crisis; Travels of a Genre: Ideology and the Modern Novel; Modernism in Greece?: Critical and Literary Texts on the Margins of a Movement, editor. Selected articles and book chapters: “The Trouble of Others”: Solidarity, Social Bonds, and Visibility” (Athens Journal of Philology), with A. J. Layon, MD.; “Are You Alright?” On Pandemic Death, Isolation, Connection, and Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller" (Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine) with A. J. Layon, MD; “Here and There, Now and Then: Nations and their Relations in Recent Palestinian Cinema” (Casting a Giant Shadow: The Transnational Shaping of Israeli Cinema, eds. Chyutin & Harris); “Reading World Literature Reading the World: The Poetry of Constantine Cavafy” (Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Literature); “’To Relearn the Sense of the World’: A Call to Arms” (Boundary2); “The Times and Spaces of the Postcolonial: After a category” (Oxford Research Encyclopedia); “‘Memory and the Essential Truth’: Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza” (American Historical Review); "Mobile Belonging?: Tracing the Global in the Work of Etel Adnan" (The Rise of the Arab Novel in English, ed. Gana); "Locating Crisis" Journal of Modern Greek Studies; “Endings and Beginnings: Re-imagining the Tasks and Spaces of Comparison” (New Literary History, eds. Felski & Friedman); “Visions of Security: Impermeable Borders, Impassable Walls, Impossible Home/Lands?” (Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the War on Terror, eds. Martin & Petro); “Telling Stories in Palestine: Comix Understanding and Narratives of Palestine/Israel” (Popular Palestines: Cultures, Communities, and Transnational Circuits, eds. Stein & Swedenburg); “Literary studies and the problems of disciplinary methods and sources in the study of women and Islamic cultures” (Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures); “The Sixth Day of Compassion: The Fiction of Andrée Chedid and the Gendering of Life towards Death” (Intersections: Critical Essays on Arab Women's Literature, eds. Majaj and Sunderman); “The Wedding Guest: Communities and Conflict in ‘Wedding in Galilee’” (Between Women and Nation, eds. Alarcon, Kaplan, and Moallem); “The Multi-, the Pluri-, the Trans-, and the Marketplace: A few thoughts on the comparative and ‘relational literacy’” (Passages); “A Small Comparative Space between Identity and Pluri-lingualism” (Proceedings of the 3rd Comparative Literature Congress of Portugal); “Trans-culturing the Nation, Gender, and the Diaspora: The Question of Wo/Man and the Citizen” (Revisita Critica); “A Small Reflection on a Dream Thrice Removed of Hope from a Refugee Camp” (Bloch in Our Time, eds. Moylan and Daniel); “The Future Present: Seduction, Struggle, and Utopic Remembering” (Mediations); “Fresh Lima Beans and Stories from Occupied Cyprus” (Cultures and Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Study, eds. Peck & Daniel)

Current books-in-progress: "Worlds of Difference: Graphic Narratives and History, Situated Seeing, and ‘Solidarity’” and “Occupying the National Family: Gender, Sexuality, and Citizenship in Early Occupation Japan and Post-WW II U.S. (1945 - 1947)."