CHAIR OF THE DEPARTMENT:
Professor Nancy Ruttenburg

DIRECTOR OF GRADUATE STUDIES:
Professor John T. Hamilton

The Department of Comparative Literature explores the range of literature, its transmission, and its dynamic traversing of linguistic, geographical, cultural, political, and disciplinary boundaries. Students in the department adopt a global perspective and interdisciplinary outlook as they pursue work in various languages, traditions, and academic fields. Faculty members offer courses that embrace the ancient and modern periods of world literature and explore critical, theoretical, and historical issues and problems of representation in the broadest sense. This type of analysis expands the field of literature to include a wide variety of cultural practices—from historical, philosophical, and legal texts to artifacts of visual and popular culture—revealing the roles literature plays as a form of material expression and symbolic exchange. Focus falls on how literature is defined at specific times or in specific places; how rhetoric, genre, and aesthetic styles create literary language; and how such language inflects or transforms social categories of gender, race, and power.

The department offers programs leading to both the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees.

Faculty

Emily Apter, Professor, Comparative Literature, French. Ph.D. 1983 (comparative literature), M.A. 1980 (comparative literature), Princeton; B.A. 1977 (history and literature), Harvard.
Nineteenth- and 20th-century literatures of France, North Africa, the Caribbean, Germany, Britain, and North America; translation studies; history and theory of comparative literature, critical theory, psychoanalysis and politics, postcolonial theory.

Ulrich Baer, Professor, Comparative Literature, German. Ph.D. 1995 (comparative literature), Yale; B.A. 1991 (literature), Harvard.
Nineteenth- and 20th-century poetry; the poetics and politics of witnessing and memory; theoretical and formal approaches to photography; contemporary German literature and thought.

Gabriela Basterra, Associate Professor, Comparative Literature, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures. Ph.D. 1997 (Romance languages and literatures), M.A. 1990 (Romance languages and literatures), Harvard; B.A. 1987 (Hispanic philology), Zaragoza.
Philosophy and literature; ethical subjectivity; phenomenology; psychoanalysis; the tragic; poetry; modern and contemporary literature in Spanish; the ethical and the political.

Kamau Brathwaite, Professor. D.Phil. 1968, Sussex; B.A. 1953 (history), Cambridge.
Caribbean literature, culture, and society.

John Chioles, Professor. Ph.D. 1972 (dramatic literature, theory, criticism, and directing for the stage-interdisciplinary), California (Berkeley); M.A. 1964 (philosophy), CUNY; B.A. 1962 (philosophy), Hunter College (CUNY).
Tragedy; mythopoesis; phenomenology; philosophy and literature.

Manthia Diawara, Professor; University Professor; Director, Institute of African American Affairs. Ph.D. 1985 (comparative literature), Indiana; M.A. 1978 (literature), B.A. 1976 (literature), American.
African literature and film; Afro-English and Afro-American film.

Ana María Dopico, Associate Professor, Comparative Literature, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures. Ph.D. 1998 (comparative literature), M.Phil. 1993 (comparative literature), M.A. 1988 (English and comparative literature), Columbia; B.A. 1985 (English, history), Tufts.
Literature of the Americas; global North-South studies; nationalism and postcolonialism; Cuban studies; comparative cultural genealogies; politics of theory; public intellectuals; Latino cultures; feminist studies.

Hala Halim, Assistant Professor, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Comparative Literature. Ph.D. 2004 (comparative literature), California (Los Angeles); M.A. 1992 (English and comparative literature), American (Cairo); B.A. 1985 (English literature), Alexandria.
Globalization, cosmopolitanism, alternative modernities; Eastern and Western travel literature; postcolonial Arabic literature, Arab Anglophone and Francophone literatures.

John T. Hamilton, Professor. Ph.D. 1999 (comparative literature), M.A. 1996 (comparative literature), B.A. 1985 (German/classical languages), New York.
The classical tradition in Germany, France, and England; the Age of Goethe; romanticism; philosophy of language and hermeneutics; music and literature; Horace and the lyric; history and theory of translation.

Mikhail Iampolski, Professor, Comparative Literature, Russian and Slavic Studies. Habil. 1991, Moscow Institute of Film Studies; Ph.D. 1977 (French philosophy), Russian Academy of Pedagogical Sciences; B.A. 1971, Moscow Pedagogical Institute.
Slavic literatures and cinema; theory of representation; the body in culture.

Daniel Javitch, Professor, Comparative Literature, Italian Studies. Ph.D. 1971 (comparative literature), Harvard; M.A. 1970 (English), Cambridge; B.A. 1963 (English), Princeton.
European literature of the Renaissance; poetic theory before 1700; postclassical history of ancient genres.

Jacques Lezra, Professor, Comparative Literature, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures. Ph.D. 1990 (comparative literature), M.Phil. 1987 (comparative literature), B.A. 1984 (comparative literature), Yale.
Literary and critical theory; early modern narrative and philosophy; Shakespeare and Golden Age and early modern comparative literature; Renaissance art history and literature; post-1945 American and Latin American novel.

Avital Ronell, Professor, Comparative Literature, German. Ph.D. 1979 (Germanic languages and literature), Princeton; B.A. 1974, Middlebury College.
Literary and other discourses; feminism; philosophy; technology and media; psychoanalysis; deconstruction; performance art.

Kristin Ross, Professor. Ph.D. 1981 (French literature), M.A. 1977 (French literature), Yale; B.A. 1975 (French studies), California (Santa Cruz).
French literature and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries; Francophone Caribbean literature; urban history, theory, and politics; literature, culture, and ideology.

Nancy Ruttenburg, Professor; Chair, Department of Comparative Literature. Ph.D. 1987 (comparative literature), M.A. 1982 (comparative literature), Stanford; B.A. 1980 (English), California (Santa Cruz).
American colonial through antebellum literature and culture; 19th-century Russian literature and culture; democratic theory; novel theory; theories of authorship; political/literary subjectivity.

Mark Sanders, Associate Professor. Ph.D. 1998 (comparative literature), M.Phil. 1994 (comparative literature), M.A. 1992 (English), Columbia; B.A. 1990 (English), Cape Town.
African literature; literary theory; narrative theory; autobiography and testimony; postcolonial literature and theory; global Anglophone literature.

Richard Sieburth, Professor, Comparative Literature, French. Ph.D. 1976 (comparative literature), Harvard; B.A. 1970 (comparative literature), Chicago.
Comparative poetics; history and theory of translation; sociocriticism; romanticism; symbolism; modernism.

Cristina Vatulescu, Assistant Professor. Ph.D. 2005 (comparative literature), B.A. 1998 (literature), Harvard.
Aesthetics and politics; artistic and extra-artistic genres, in particular the novel, autobiography, and the police file; Russian and Eastern European 20th-century culture; cinema and visual culture; the interdisciplinary study of subjectivity, drawing on literature, film, psychology, and criminology; immigration and cultural exchange.

Xudong Zhang, Professor, Comparative Literature, East Asian Studies. Ph.D. 1995, Duke; B.A. 1986, Peking.
Modern Chinese literature, film, culture; theory and politics of culture; intellectuals and society.

DISTINGUISHED SCHOLAR IN RESIDENCE AND PROFESSOR EMERITUS

Timothy J. Reiss. Ph.D. 1968 (French and comparative literature), M.A. 1965 (French), Illinois; B.A. 1964 (French), Manchester.
Classical and Renaissance literature, philosophy, and history; 18th-century literature, history, and politics; history and theory of theatre; Caribbean culture; cultural and political theory.

ASSOCIATED FACULTY IN OTHER DEPARTMENTS

Thomas Bishop, French; Sibylle Fischer, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures; John Freccero, Italian Studies; Toral Gajarawala, English; Sylvia Molloy, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures; Mary Louise Pratt, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures; Robert P. Stam, Cinema Studies; Jane Tylus, Italian Studies; Jini Watson, English; Robert Young, English.

AFFILIATED FACULTY IN OTHER DEPARTMENTS

Gerard Aching, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures; Charles Affron, French; Michel Beaujour, French; J. Michael Dash, French; Yael Feldman, Hebrew and Judaic Studies; Anselm Haverkamp, English; Denis Hollier, French; Bernd Hüppauf, German; Philip Kennedy, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies; Kenneth Krabbenhoft, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures; Darlene G. Levy, History; Laurence Lockridge, English; Perry Meisel, English; Mona Mikhail, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies; Richard Schechner, Performance Studies; Ella Shohat, Art and Public Policy (Tisch School of the Arts), Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies; Evelyn Birge Vitz, French; George Yúdice, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures.