northwestern comparative literature phd

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DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS

Phd in comparative literary studies and classics.

At Northwestern, students admitted to the Comparative Literary Studies Ph.D. program have a second “home” in another department of their choice, with Classics serving as one of those possible homes. Students enrolled in the CLS/Classics doctoral track engage in a dialog between classical languages and literatures  and the methodologies of comparative literature and classical reception studies; they are offered teaching assistant opportunities in both undergraduate programs; and they typically write a dissertation co-directed by a Classics faculty member and a faculty in another relevant department.

CLS/Classics students are key members of the Graduate Classics Cluster and in the course of their studies typically complete one or more of the optional  Classics Graduate Certificates  (Greek, Latin, and Classical Reception Studies). Upon completion of the doctoral program they receive their degree from Comparative Literary Studies, with a strong focus on Classics.  Recent dissertations by CLS/ Classics students include projects on women’s rewritings of classical mythology in contemporary poetry and on classical influences during German Romanticism. 

COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

The Comparative Literary Studies Program reflects the belief that literary texts can best be understood within the context of diverse literary traditions and other cultural phenomena. The program is able to accomplish this by drawing on faculty from the various literature departments as well as from other disciplines (such as art history, film studies, music, and philosophy).

Learn more about our interdisciplinary and interdepartmental faculty and students:

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Faculty leaders

Program director:.

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• Office: Kresge 5-536
• Phone: 847-467-0958

Director of Graduate Studies:

Corey Byrnes (Associate Professor of Chinese Culture)

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Director of Undergraduate Studies:

Tristram Wolff (Assistant Professor of English)

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Administrative Staff

Phil hoskins , cls program coordinator room: kresge 5-538 phone: 847-491-3864 e-mail:   [email protected].

Ann Kelchner , Business Administrator Room: Kresge 3-512 Phone: 847-491-3658 E-mail:   [email protected]

Emily Berry,  Program Assistant Room: Kresge 3-512 Phone: 847-491-3656 Email:   [email protected]  

Richard Izzo, Program Assistant Room: Kresge 3-512 Phone: 847-491-3657 Email: [email protected]

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* comparative literature, comparative literary studies.

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Department website:  Comparative Literary Studies Crowe Hall, 1-117 1860 Campus Dr. Evanston, IL 60208 Phone: 847-491-3864

The undergraduate Comparative Literary Studies program is an interdepartmental, interdisciplinary program for the study of literature across national and linguistic lines. The PhD program in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern provides students with rigorous training in several literary traditions, critical theory, and the methodology of comparative literature, from the basis of their home department.

Key Resources

• Gale Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new window Provides access to biographies, bibliographies, and critical analayses of authors from every age and literary discipline. Covers more than 120,000 novelists, essayist, poets, journalists, and other writers, with in-depth coverage of 2,500 of the most-studied authors. Includes links to: Dictionary of literary biography, Contemporary authors, Contemporary literary criticism, and more.
• MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window Find scholarly articles about literature in over 4,000 literary journals. Also includes dissertations and books.
• Advanced NUSearch Although you can keyword search from the library's home page, advanced search allows you to combine different words or phrases to get the most comprehensive search results.

Guides for Specific Languages and Area Studies

• Asian Studies by Li (Qunying) Li Last Updated Aug 30, 2017 24 views this year
• * Classics by Basia Kapolka Last Updated Mar 27, 2024 203 views this year
• * English by Josh Honn Last Updated Aug 31, 2023 335 views this year
• * French Language and Literature by John Dorr Last Updated Mar 27, 2024 91 views this year
• * German Literature by Liz Hamilton Last Updated Mar 27, 2024 185 views this year
• * Italian Language and Literature by John Dorr Last Updated Mar 27, 2024 47 views this year
• Slavic Languages & Literatures by Jeannette Moss Last Updated Mar 8, 2024 161 views this year
• * South Asian Studies by Li (Qunying) Li Last Updated Mar 4, 2024 126 views this year
• Southeast Asian Studies Guide by Li (Qunying) Li Last Updated Feb 23, 2024 124 views this year
• * Spanish & Portuguese by Michelle Guittar Last Updated Apr 25, 2024 631 views this year
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• Last Updated: Oct 9, 2023 1:21 PM
• URL: https://libguides.northwestern.edu/complit

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Harris feinsod, associate professor of english and comparative literary studies.

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• 847-467-1762
• University Hall 319
• Office Hours: On Leave 2023-24

Harris Feinsod is a literary and cultural historian of the United States, Latin America, and the Atlantic world. His teaching and research emphasize poetry and poetics, modernism and the avant-garde in Europe and the Americas, multiethnic US literature, and transnational studies (especially hemispheric and oceanic approaches). At Northwestern since 2011, he earned a Ph.D. from Stanford (2011) and an A.B. from Brown (2004), both in Comparative Literature.

His first book, The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures (Oxford, hardcover 2017/paperback 2019), offers a detailed literary history of relations among poets in the US and Latin America across the mid-twentieth century. Fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Harry Ransom Center, and the University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center supported the research and writing of this book.

Feinsod is now at work on “Into Steam: The Worlds of Maritime Modernism.” A global account of transoceanic and dockside poetry, narrative fiction, visual art, and radical history in the early twentieth century, “Into Steam”   charts modernist culture as viewed from its industrializing seaways. Essays related to this project appear in American Literary History , English Language Notes , and Modernism / modernity , and it has been supported by a fellowship at the National Humanities Center (2019-2020).

Feinsod’s timely essays appear in popular and scholarly venues such as The Baffler, In These Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1 and Post45. He also collaborates on several large-scale translation and editorial projects. He is the co-translator (with Rachel Galvin), of Oliverio Girondo’s Decals: Complete Early Poems (Open Letter, 2018), which was shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry. He co-directs  Open Door Archive , a digital platform featuring reissues of neglected print cultures of the Americas. Previously, he served as assistant editor for The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition (2012). With Leah Feldman and Peter Kalliney, he is currently co-editing a global anthology of anticolonial thought. He serves on the editorial board of Northwestern University Press (2019–23) and is elected to the Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association’s Forum on Poetry and Poetics (2019–24).

At Northwestern, Feinsod has core appointments in the Department of English and the Program in Comparative Literary Studies (where he served as Director of Graduate Studies from 2018–22), and he is an affiliate of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Program in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Program in Environmental Policy, and Culture.  Highly committed to graduate education, he has served on more than 25 dissertation committees across many departments and programs, and he is active in the graduate clusters in Environment, Culture & Society, Global Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies, and Poetry & Poetics. He also co-organizes the Workshop in Transnational Cultural History (WITCH) with Kalyan Nadiminti (on hiatus for 2023-24).

Specializations

Modern, Poetry & Poetics, Literary Theory, American: 20th Century, Postcolonial, Critical Race & Ethnicity Studies, Latina & Latino Literature

Articles and Essays

• “ David Berman’s Edge Cities: Poetry, Commercial Real Estate, Municipal Feeling .” Post45: Contemporaries (January 30, 2023)
• “ Postindustrial Waterfront Redevelopment and the Politics of Historical Memory ,” Comparative Literature 73.2 (2021): 184–208. Special Issue on “Beaches and Ports”
• “ World Poetry: Commonplaces of an Idea ,” Modern Language Quarterly 80.4 (December 2019): 427–452. Special issue on “Literary History after the Nation?”
• “ Canal Zone Modernism: Cendrars, Walrond and Stevens at the ‘Suction Sea ,’” English Language Notes 57.1 (April, 2019): 116-128. Special section on “Hydro-critical Practices: Modernism and the Sea.”
• “‘ The Mayor Is a Tough Act to Follow’: Some Social Poetry in the Theaters of the Rahm Regime ,” Post45: Contemporaries (April 23, 2019)
• “ Oliverio Girondo’s Absurd Cosmopolitan World ” (Intro to  Decals ),  Literary Hub  (Dec 13 2018)
• “ Death Ships: The Cruel Translations of the Interwar Maritime Novel ,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus Vol. 3 Cycle 3 (September, 2018)
• “ Vehicular Networks and the Modernist Seaways: Crane, Lorca, Novo, Hughes ,” American Literary History 27.4 (Winter, 2015): 683-716.
• “ Between Dissidence and Good Neighbor Diplomacy: Reading Julia de Burgos with the FBI ,” Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 26.2 (Fall, 2014): 98-127
• “Reconsidering the ‘Spiritual Economy’: Saint-John Perse, His Translators, and the Limits of Internationalism,” Telos 138 (Spring, 2007): 139-161   
• “ All at Sea: Surveying the watery expanses of the world economy .” Review of Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula , by Laleh Khalili. The Baffler (Aug 24, 2020). Translated into Spanish as “ Mar revuelta ,” CTXT: Contexto y Acción , trans. Álvaro San José (March 29, 2021)
• “ Workers of the World Take the Mic: The Poetry of the Factory and the Soapbox .” Review of Social Poetics , by Mark Nowak. In These Times 44.4 (April 2020): 54-57
• Review of A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life & Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks , by Angela Jackson,  Chicago Review 62:04/63:01/02 (Summer/Fall 2019)
• Review of Surveying the Avant-Garde: Questions on Modernism, Art, and the Americas in Transatlantic Magazines by Lori Cole, The ALH Online Review Series XVII (Dec 4, 2018)
• “ Has Don Rafael Spoken? ” Commentary on Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas by Tom McEnaney, Syndicate Lit (June 26, 2018)
• “ Sub-Sub-Underground-Anti-Connoisseurship: Adrift with Allan Sekula ,” n+1 online (Aug 4, 2017)
• “ C.D. Wright’s Apology ,” Iowa Review 46.2 (Fall 2016): 193-198
• “ The Era of Inter-American Cultural Diplomacy ,” American Quarterly 66.4 (December, 2014): 1129-1141
• Review essay of Collecting as Modernist Practice by Jeremy Braddock and Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity edited by Jed Rasula and Tim Conley. Chicago Review 58.1 (July, 2013): 135-139 

Occasional Essays & Interviews

• Harris Feinsod on Williams Carlos Williams (“To Elsie”) , Close Readings with Kamran Javadizadeh . Podcast (April 17, 2023).
• “ Historical Fidelity: Margaret Randall on Translating Cuban Poetry ,” Los Angeles Review of Books (July 24, 2018)
• “ Rhyme at the End of Democracy: Leonard Cohen’s Futures ,” ARCADE: Literature, the Humanities, & the World (Dec 20, 2016)
• “ #DownWithCentennialism ,” ARCADE: Literature, the Humanities, & the World (9 Sept, 2015)
• “ Para-Library Science at the NYPL ,” ARCADE: Literature, the Humanities & the World (3 March, 2014)
• “ Glosses and Conjectures on the Inaugural Poem ,” ARCADE: Literature, the Humanities and the World (28 Jan, 2013)    
• “ The Tolson Exception: The Anthology in the 21st Century ,” ARCADE: Literature, the Humanities, & the World (9 Jan, 2012)
• “ World Poetry Grindhouse ,” ARCADE: Literature, the Humanities, & the World (13 Oct, 2011) 
• “ Denby, Edwin (1903-1983) ,” The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (Taylor and Francis, 2016).
• “Glossolalia,” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition , ed. Roland Greene et. al. (Princeton University Press, 2012): 572-573
• “Hypogram,” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition , ed. Roland Greene et. al. (Princeton University Press, 2012): 649
• “Sound Poetry,” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition , ed. Roland Greene et. al. (Princeton University Press, 2012): 1327-1329

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NORTHWESTERN CAREER ADVANCEMENT

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Comparative Literature

Industry areas.

Here are examples of industry areas students enter with this major, jobs/internships, typical employers that hire students, skills employers look for, and examples of where alumni work.  To find more information make an appointment with your career counselor/advisor.

Popular Industries (According to LinkedIn)

• Education (23%)
• Media and Communication (22%)
• Research (9%)
• Marketing (8%)
• Arts and Design

Professional Associations

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• Help & FAQ
• Comparative Literary Studies PhD Program
• Graduate Programs
• Arts and Humanities Graduate Programs

Chris Abani

• English - Professor, Board Of Trustees Professorship
• English PhD Program
• PAS - Program of African Studies - URIC Director

Person: Academic

Cesar A Braga-Pinto

• Spanish and Portuguese - Professor, George F. Appel Professorship in the Humanities
• Administration - Associate Dean for Academ Initiatives
• Spanish and Portuguese PhD Program
• PAS - Program of African Studies - Member

Laura Rebecca Brueck

• Asian Languages and Cultures - Professor

Graduate Cluster

The Poetry & Poetics Graduate Cluster is an interdisciplinary group of scholars and writers who share an interest in the long and varied tradition named by “poetics” and in the particular structures of thought that poetry articulates across languages and over time. Our highly engaged membership includes students and faculty from across the language-focused humanities fields, as well as scholars working in ethnic, area, and performance studies. Cluster faculty and students work together to generate theoretically innovative accounts of the poetries of the near and distant past, as well as of marginalized communities in the U.S. and abroad.

Members of the Graduate Cluster in Poetry & Poetics are core participants in the multi-platform initiatives of the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium (PPC), which is Northwestern’s central forum for the performance, discussion, and study of poetry and poetics. Students interested in pursuing a PhD in African-American Studies , Art History , Comparative Literary Studies , English , French and Italian , German Literature and Critical Thought , Music , Performance Studies , Philosophy , Spanish and Portuguese , Slavic Languages and Literatures , and Theatre and Drama are encouraged to find a second intellectual “home” in this interdisciplinary cluster.

For more information, visit our page at The Graduate School’s website.

Current Graduate Students

Dawn Angelicca Barcelona

Dawn Angelicca Barcelona (she/her) is a candidate in the Litowitz MFA+MA program at Northwestern University. Her chapbook, Roundtrip, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2025.

Laiba Niaz Paracha

Laiba Niaz Paracha is a PhD student in the Comparative Literary Studies Program, and her home Department is Asian Languages and Cultures. Her comparative work attempts to demonstrate the relevance of lyric interiority in unsettling neo-colonial territorialities and...

Yẹmí Ajíṣebútú

Yẹmí Ajíṣebútú (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in the Comparative Literary Studies Program. Her research focuses on the Being of the Diasporic self in the United States in contemporary narratives of African (Nigerian) descent writers, Art, Enslavement, and Oriki.

Isaac Ginsberg Miller

Isaac Ginsberg Miller (he/they) is a PhD candidate in African American Studies at Northwestern University. Isaac's chapbook Stopgap won The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Contest, and was published in 2019.

Katana Smith

Katana Smith (she/her) is a poet from Aurora, Colorado, a McNair Scholar, and a candidate in the MFA+MA program at Northwestern University.

Irene Kim is a PhD candidate in the English department. Her research focuses on the aesthetics of ambience in experimental Asian American film, art, literature, and performance from 1980 to the present.

Kira Tucker

Kira Tucker (she/they) is an artist from Memphis and a current MFA+MA candidate in poetry at Northwestern University. Kira's latest creative project is all about dreams and dreaming—a poetic investigation spanning the mythos of the American Dream and the landscapes of...

George Abraham

George Abraham (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet in the Litowitz MFA+MA program. Their debut poetry collection Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist.

Kayla Boyden

Kayla Boyden (she/her) is a PhD student in the Northwestern University English department. Her research interests include Black contemporary poetry and poetics, Black feminist thought, and Black critical theory.

Ryan Nhu (he/him) is a PhD student in English at Northwestern, where he researches post-1945 multiethnic American literature with interests in psychoanalysis, queer of color critique, and interracial desire.

Viola Bao is a PhD student in the Northwestern Comparative Literature Department. Their research focuses on documentary poetics.

Smith Yarberry

Smith Yarberry (they/them) is a PhD student in the Northwestern English department. Their research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century receptions of William Blake. Smith's first book of poems, A Boy in the City, is now out from Deep Vellum.

Avey Rips is a PhD student in the Northwestern English Department. Their research concerns 20th and 21st century American poetry with a focus on transportation and technology.

Cluster Alumni Highlights

Jayme Collins – Postdoc, Princeton University (ENG PhD, 2022)

Maria dikcis – college fellow, harvard university (eng phd, 2022), todd nordgren – director, office of lgbtq services, dickinson college (eng phd, 2020), jonas rosenbrueck – assistant professor of german, amherst college (cls phd, 2020), kritish rajbhandari – assistant professor of english and humanities at reed college (cls phd, 2019), chad infante – assistant professor of english and comparative literature, university of maryland, college park (eng phd, 2018), patricia anzini – postdoc, universidade catolica portuguesa (cls phd, 2018), toby altman – visiting professor, beloit college (eng phd, 2017), rickey fayne – fellow, michener center for writers (aal phd, 2016), alanna hickey – assistant professor of english, yale university (eng phd, 2016), katie hartsock – associate professor of english, oakland university (cls phd, 2015), laura passin – literature teacher, st. mary’s academy (eng phd, 2012).

Faculty, Master of Arts in Literature, Northwestern University School of Professional Studies - Northwestern School of Professional Studies

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Scott Durham

Faculty director.

Contact Information

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Scott Durham , Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literary Studies, is the faculty director for the MALit Program and the director of graduate studies in French at Northwestern. He has taught both graduate and undergraduate courses since 1994, with a primary focus on 20th-century literature, film and the relationship between literature and philosophy. His scholarly publications since he completed his doctorate at Yale include Phantom Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism (Stanford University Press), Jean Genet: In the Language of the Enemy (a special number he edited for Yale French Studies) and numerous articles. He is also the co-editor (with Dilip Gaonkar) of a collection of essays, Distributions of the Sensible: Rancière, Between Aesthetics and Politics (forthcoming from Northwestern University Press). He is currently writing two books, with the working titles Between Rancière and Deleuze: Aesthetics, Politics, Resistance and Eurydice’s Gaze: Historicity and Memory in Postwar Film , as well as co-editing a collection of essays (with Caitlyn Doyle), Geopolitics and Media Aesthetics.

Selected Publications

Recent courses.

Postmodern Film

Fictions of the City: Paris, New York, Los Angeles

20th-Century French Literature: Memory, Transgression and Engagement

Corey Byrnes

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Corey Byrnes received a BA from Brown University in 2003, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in 2005, and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013. His research and teaching areas include the environmental humanities; 19th-21st century Sinophone literature, film, and visual culture; animal studies; and landscape and spatial studies. He is jointly appointed in the Alice B. Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, and is also a core-faculty member and Director of Graduate Studies in the Comparative Literary Studies Program. Professor Byrnes’ first book project, Fixing Landscape (Columbia University Press, 2019), won Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute’s First Book Award in 2018 and was awarded honorable mention for the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2020 Harry Levin Prize for outstanding first book in comparative literature. His second project is about “cultures of threat” and how they produce unfolding environmental and social futures between the United States and China and across the Pacific. Cultures of threat encompass forms of representation and lived practices through which an imagined future, when feared, comes to seem not only real but imminent. Unlike risk, threat describes not what is likely or unlikely to happen—the probable— but rather what could conceivably happen—the possible. It takes shape through speculative fictions of the plausible designed to create fear—and to incite action. “Cultures of Threat” theorizes the understudied mechanisms of threat in two multi-chapter case studies that reconsider the relationship between “rising China” and a global environmental imaginary in which it is treated as an existential threat.

Geraldo Cadava

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Geraldo Cadava , an Associate Professor of History and Latina/o Studies, specializes in the histories of Latinas and Latinos in the United States, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and Latin American immigration to the United States. His first book, Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Harvard University Press, 2013 & 2016), is about cultural and commercial ties between Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, since World War II. It won the Frederick Jackson Turner prize, awarded annually by the Organization of American Historians to the author of the best first book in any field of American History. He is currently writing a history of Latino Conservatism from the 1960s to the 1990s. His scholarly and popular essays have appeared in the Journal of American History, The New York Times, and The Atlantic, among other publications. As a lifelong learner himself, he is especially interested in working students in Northwestern's School of Professional Studies.

The 2020 Election in Historical Perspective From Hamilton to “Hamilton” – American History by Lin Manuel Miranda

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Nick Davis is Associate Professor of English and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Northwestern. He recently received the NU Alumnae Teaching Professorship, one of the highest awards for classroom instruction across the university. Nick studies narrative film, queer theory, feminist and gender studies, and American literature. His book The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema theorizes a new model of contemporary queer cinema based on formal principles rather than identity politics, drawing heavily on Deleuzian philosophies of film and sexuality. He has published many other essays on subjects including Julie Dash’s Illusions, Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también, James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie, and the performances and political activism of Julie Christie and Vanessa Redgrave. He is also the author of the film reviews at www.Nick-Davis.com and a Contributing Editor at Film Comment magazine. Davis earned his PhD at Cornell University.

American Novel: Big Books (Post 1830) Critical Frameworks in Contemporary Film Cinema at the Turn of the Millennium Henry James and Film Patterns and Politics of Contemporary Adaptation

Caitlyn Doyle

• [email protected]  

Research Interests

Indigenous film

Aesthetics and politics

French literature

Critical theory

Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Northwestern University

Recognitions

Levitan Teaching Award, MIT, 2023

Kasey Evans

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Kasey Evans , Faculty Director and associate professor of English at Northwestern, teaches and writes about medieval and Renaissance literature. Her book Colonial Virtue: The Mobility of Temperance in Renaissance England (University of Toronto Press, 2012) argues that the virtue of temperance underwent a semantic sea-change during the English Renaissance, evolving from a paradigm of self-discipline and moderation into a value of time-management, efficiency, and colonial aggression. Areas of particular interest include English Renaissance adaptations of Italian poetry (Dante, Ariosto, Tasso); ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality as they shape Renaissance English literature; and literary and critical theory, from medieval exegetes through postmodern philosophers. Evans received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Adaptation and Hamlet Early Modern Literature of Grief and Mourning Representing the Psyche: Literature and Psychoanalysis The Seven Deadly Sins: Behaving Badly in Renaissance Thought, Art, and Literature Conceptions of the Body in Renaissance Literature Early Modern Seduction

Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch

Adjunct Lecturer, Assistant Director Center for Historical Studies

[email protected]

Northwestern University Historical Studies

Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch (Assistant Director, Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, Northwestern University) is a literary historian who has published articles on twentieth-century American authors John Barth and John Gardner, as well as on Henry James. Her chapter on the great Polish science fiction and experimental writer Stanislaw Lem appears in Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918, edited by Tamara Trojanowska, Przemyslaw Czaplinski, and Joanna Nizynska (University of Toronto Press, 2018). Elzbieta's current research focuses on the reception of classical antiquity in American culture, a topic that stems from her research during an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship at Harvard University. She has written on Athena as a cultural icon in the United States in the book American Women and Classical Myths, ed. Gregory Staley (Baylor UP, 2009) and she is now working on a study of the enduring influence of Greek and Roman myths in American fiction and popular culture. At SPS Elzbieta teaches classes on 20th-century experimental East European and American fiction, on global postmodern fiction, and on 19th-century British fiction. In addition, she teaches literature seminars at the Newberry Library in Chicago, often on detective fiction.

General Certificate of Education, London University Ph.D. University of Warsaw, Poland Postdoctoral ACLS Fellowship at Harvard University

Current Research Interests

Classical mythology in American fiction Classical antiquity in American culture Global 20th-C. experimental fiction Jane Austen and the rise of the novel Victorian detective, adventure, and travel fiction The history of crime fiction The use of detective fiction formulas in literary fiction Food in 19th-C. American fiction

“Futurological Philosophy: Stanislaw Lem.” Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918, edited by Tamara Trojanowska, Przemyslaw Czaplinski, and Joanna Nizynska, (University of Toronto Press, 2018). 417-427. “Henry James’s cultural capital: Rome as a moral testing ground in his 1870-1880 fiction,” City of the soul: The literary making of Rome, ed. Sabrina Norlander Eliasson and Stefano Fogelberg Rota, Suecoromana 8 (Stockholm, 2015). 123-133. “’Transmuted by Time’s Handling’: Metamorphosis in James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen,” Metamorphosis and Place, ed. Joshua Parker, Lucie Tunkrova, and Mohamed Bakari (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), reprinted in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism TCLC 314, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau (Farmington Hill, MI: Gale Cengage Learning, 2015). 83-87. “Liberating Woman: Athena as Cultural Icon in the United States,” American Women and Classical Myths, ed. Gregory A. Staley (Baylor UP, 2009) “Stanislaw Lem” (2008); “Ryszard Kapuscinski” (2006), “John Barth” (2004) entries for The Literary Encyclopedia http://www.LitEncyc.com “Literature,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. William A. Darity, Jr. 2nd edition (Macmillan Reference USA/Thomson Gale, 2007) “Classical Literatures and the Literary, Social, and Marketplace Culture of America 1820-1870,” American History through Literature, 1820-1870, ed. Janet Gabler-Hover and Robert D. Sattelmeyer (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2005) “Henry James’s Cosmopolitan Spaces: Rome as Global City.” The Henry James Review. 24.3 (Fall 2003) "Ambiguous Heritage: Classical Myths in the Works of Nineteenth-Century American Writers," International Journal of the Classical Tradition Vol.1, No. 3 (Winter 1995)

Recognition

2018 Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Community Excellence Award 2011-2012 Clarence Ver Steeg Award for supporting and mentoring graduate students

Jane Austen and the Rise of the English Novel Global Pomo: Postmodernist Fiction in the U.S. and the World Facing Absurdity: 20th-C. Experimental Fiction from East Europe and the USA

Christine Froula

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Christine Froula , professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Gender Studies at Northwestern, teaches and publishes widely on international and interdisciplinary modernism. Her books include: A Guide to Ezra Pound's Selected Poems (New Directions), To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Ezra Pound's Cantos (Yale), Modernism's Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce (Columbia), Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (Columbia). Some recent articles include: "War, Empire, and Modernist Poetry, 1914-1922," "War, Peace, and Internationalism in Bloomsbury," "Scribbling into Eternity: Paris, Proust, and Joyce's 'Proteus,'" "Sovereign Subjects: Stephen Dedalus, Irish Conscience, and Ulysses's Utopian Ethos," "Proust's China," "Unwriting The Waves," "'Dangerous Thoughts in Bloomsbury': Ethical Aestheticism and Imperial Fictions," "Orlando Lives: Virginia Woolf's Orlando in Global Adaptation and Performance," and "On Time: 1910, Human Character, and Modernist Temporality." A strong believer in lifelong learning, she has taught many graduate courses for SPS over the years, directed a number of Master's theses, some of them prizewinning, and enjoys working with the talented, committed adults who enroll in the SPS Master's degree programs.

Rethinking Literary Modernism Conceptions of the Body in Renaissance Literature Modern & Contemporary Drama Twentieth-Century Literature: James Joyce and Virginia Woolf Twentieth-Century British and American Literature: Empire, War, Worldliness

Dilip Gaonkar

[email protected]

Dilip Gaonkar is a professor of culture and communication and the director of the Center for Global Culture and Communication. He also directs the Center for Transcultural Studies, an independent scholarly research network concerned with global issues. Gaonkar has two sets of scholarly interests: the intellectual tradition of rhetoric with both its ancient roots and its contemporary mutations and global modernities and their impact on the political. He is currently the executive editor of the journal Public Culture, and he has written and lectured widely on rhetoric, globalization, democracy, and the media. In addition to his work for the Department of Communications Studies, Gaonkar also serves as an adjunct faculty member in the Department of African American studies, an affiliate faculty member in the graduate program in Screen Cultures in Asian Studies, and a senior affiliate fellow at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, India.

[email protected]

Jules Law is associate professor of English and comparative literature. His essays on Victorian literature, James Joyce, and literary theory have appeared in PMLA, Critical Inquiry, SIGNS, NLH, ELH, Nineteenth Century Literature, and other journals. His book The Rhetoric of Empiricism traces the philosophical figures of surface, depth, and reflection throughout the aesthetic theory of the 18th and 19th centuries. He is currently completing two books, one on the politics of fluids in the Victorian novel, and the other on the epistemology of narrative figures. He has received numerous teaching awards, most recently the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence. His PhD is from Johns Hopkins University.

Bill Savage

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Bill Savage (PhD Northwestern) has been teaching in the SPS MA Lit program for more than 15 years. He is a scholar of Chicago literature and culture, and his most recent publication is the co-edited and annotated edition of Chicago by Day and Night: The Pleasure Seeker’s Guide to the Paris of America (Northwestern UP, 2013). He also co-edited the 50th Anniversary Critical Edition of Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm and the Annotated edition of Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make. He writes regularly for local publications, and is a lifelong resident of Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood.

The Jazz Age: Love and Art in the 1920s Chicago Transformed: Actual and Textual Cities The Artist in the City: Chicago Voices and Visions Crime and the Criminal in American Narrative The Beats: Conformity and Aesthetics Imagining Chicago: Poems, Stories, Plans Mysteries of Cities: Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles Race, Space, and Place in Chicago: Ghetto and Neighborhood, White Flight and Gentrification

Domietta Torlasco

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Domietta Torlasco works at the intersection of film theory and practice. After receiving a PhD from the department of Rhetoric and Film Studies at Berkeley, she completed an MFA in Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 2003 to 2007 she was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago.  Torlasco’s research and teaching interests include critical theory, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, as well as Italian and French cinema, the SF and noir genres, and time-based media arts. She is the author of three books: The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film (Stanford University Press, 2008), The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and The Rhythm of Images: Cinema Beyond Measure (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). Her video essays, which explore questions of domestic labor, borders, surveillance, and debt, have screened at national and international venues, including the Galerie Campagne Première in Berlin, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

• Film Theory
• Critical Theory
• Psychoanalysis
• Phenomenology
• Time-Based Media Arts
• Italian and French Cinema

PhD, UC Berkeley MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Publications

The Rhythm of Images:  Cinema Beyond Measure (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2021, Cultural Critique Series) The Heretical Archive:  Digital Memory at the End of FIlm (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2013) The Time of the Crime:  Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film (Palo Alto:  Standford University Press, 2008) "The Anthropocene as Cinematic View:  Time, Matter, and Race in Blade Runner 2049," Camera Obscura:  Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, forthcoming in 2022 "Film | Rhythm | Essay," The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory, ed. Kyle Stevens (Oxford:  Oxford University Press), forthcoming in 2021 "Impossible Photographs:  Images of War from Rossellini to Documenta 13," Discourse:  Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, vol. 39.3 (Winter 2018), 110-131 House Arrest (digital video, 8 min., 2015), NECSUS, European Journal of Media Studies (Autumn 2016):  www.necsus-ejms.org    Philosphy in the Kitchen (digital video, 21 min., 2014), World Picture no. 11 (Summer 2016):  www.worldpicturejournal.com

Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, Research Residency, Winter 2020 Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Fellowship, Northwestern University, 2018-19 Provost Faculty Grant for Research in Humanities, Social Sciences and the Arts, 2020 Alumnae of Northwestern Research Grant, 2020

Media and Exhibitionism:  Rhythm in Film, Art, and Philosophy

Alejandra Uslenghi

[email protected]

Office phone: 847-467-1713

Office: Crowe Hall 3-113

Alejandra Uslenghi is Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative Literary Studies. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University and her MA from New School for Social Research. She is the author of Latin America at fin-de-siècle Universal Exhibitions.   Modern Cultures of Visuality (Palgrave, New Directions in Latino American Cultures, 2016) and editor of Walter Benjamin . Culturas de la imagen (Eterna Cadencia, Buenos Aires, 2011) and La cámara como método . La fotografía moderna de Grete Stern y Horacio Coppola (Eterna Cadencia, Buenos Aires, 2021). Her research focuses on modern literature and visual culture; photography and modern art in Latin America; critical theory and comparative modernist studies. She is currently at work on a book-length project that examines the intersection of modernist literary experimentation and photography, in particular twentieth-century women photographers.

Teaching Approach and Philosophy

Alejandra teaches in the seminar format, creating a collaborative interpretive framework to analyze literary texts, visual culture, and theory essays. Relying on her expertise, she provides contextualization and introduction to close reading - visual and literary methodologies. Then, within a common language of interpretation, she encourages active engagement with the course readings and class participation to achieve dialogical critical insights into them.

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Ivy Wilson teaches courses on the comparative literatures of the Black diaspora and U.S. literary studies with a particular emphasis on African American culture. His forthcoming book, Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Nationalism (Oxford UP), interrogates how the figurations and tropes of blackness were used to produce the social equations that regulated the cultural meanings of U.S. citizenship and traces how African American intellectuals manipulated the field of aesthetics as a means to enter into political discourse about the forms of subjectivity and national belonging. Along with recent articles in ESQ , Arizona Quarterly , and PMLA , his other work in U.S. literary studies includes two forthcoming edited books on the nineteenth-century poets James Monroe Whitfield and Albery Allson Whitman. His current research interests focus on the solubility of nationalism in relationship to theories of the diaspora, global economies of culture, and circuits of the super-national and sub-national. Wilson has a PhD in African American studies and English from Yale University.

In the Heart of the City: The Metropolis in Modern and Contemporary African American Culture Poetics of African American Literature Inventing the American Novel

Jane Winston

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Jane Winston is associate professor of French and gender studies, director of the Gender Studies Program and Jean Gimbel Lane Professor at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern. Her primary interests are in literary and cultural studies, the politics of representation, gender and race studies, feminist thought and political theory and transnational and globalization studies. She is the author of Postcolonial Duras: Cultural Memory in Postwar France and coeditor of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue. Winston received her PhD from Duke University.

Indochine in Film and Fiction Guy Debord and the Internationale Situationniste Literatures and Cultures of 1968 (France) Contemporary French and Francophone Women Writers

Anh Ly, Ph.D. Appointed as Assistant University Librarian for External Relations

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The Stanford University Libraries are pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Anh Ly as Assistant University Librarian for External Relations. Dr. Ly will work with Michael A. Keller, University Librarian, and the Library Executive Group, of which she will be a member, to define and implement the Libraries' programs of engagement with the Stanford campus community and the worldwide Stanford community at large. Dr. Ly will also design and implement various communications showing the progress made both strategically and tactically in our services to the Stanford academic community and research libraries everywhere.

After a national search, Anh Ly will be joining the Stanford University Libraries on Monday, 3 June 2024. 

Anh brings a combination of fundraising and marketing/communications skills to the position, a background she clearly demonstrated throughout the search process and in her presentations to the library leadership and staff during her campus interview. 

Dr. Ly began her career as a grant writer, supporting arts, cultural and youth organizations before joining the public university systems in California twelve years ago – first with the UC Press Foundation, the publishing arm of the University of California, and most recently as the Senior Development Director for the University Library and College of Humanities and the Arts at San José State University. 

“I am delighted to join the Stanford University Libraries under the leadership of Michael Keller and look forward to working with an impressive team of talented, engaged and committed individuals,” Dr. Ly has commented recently.  

Anh holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Northwestern University along with an MA from the University of Chicago and BA from the University of San Francisco. 

She lives in San José with her husband and two young daughters. Most weekends, she is hosting playdates or attending superhero themed birthday parties.

University Librarian Michael A. Keller observes: “Anh Ly with her deep and extensive education, as well as her markedly successful career in marketing, communications, and advocacy over the past seven years at San José State University, brings to Stanford a range of capabilities as well as academic experiences to the Stanford University Libraries in pursuit of enhanced relationships with numerous communities of interest.”

CUNY Graduate Conference in Comparative Literature

• By: Michael Williams
• May 13, 2024

CUNY graduate students announce the annual Graduate Conference hosted by the MA/PhD Program in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. This conference will be held in New York City on November 15th, 2024. Our call for papers includes guidelines and instructions for submission. We are very excited to announce that Alessandro Giammei of Yale University will deliver the keynote address.

The deadline for submitting abstracts is June 14th, 2024. Please send submissions and any other inquiries to [email protected] . Additionally, we have created a website for our event, which you may visit here .

We look forward to receiving your submissions and thank you for helping publicize our event.

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Academic Catalog

2023-2024 Edition

Comparative Literary Studies Major

Students must also complete the Undergraduate Registration Requirement and the degree requirements of their home school.

NOTE: This Catalog describes Weinberg College BA requirements that pertain to students who matriculated at Northwestern after spring quarter 2023. Refer to the Archives if you are following BA requirements described in the 2018-2019 through 2022-2023 editions.

Students pursuing a program of study in comparative literature need to be acquainted with at least two literary traditions. They choose a first literature, normally that written in their native tongue, and a second literature written in another language. They take at least 2 courses in each. They also take at least 2 courses in non-Euro/American literature, either in translation or in the original language.

The core 200-level CLS courses provide students with a range of theoretical approaches to literary texts in partic­ular and the study of culture in general. Advanced or 300-level CLS courses build on these core courses, allowing students to use their linguistic skills to further explore literary themes, movements, genres, and periods on a comparative basis.

During their junior year, majors in CLS should meet with the director of undergraduate studies (DUS) to ensure they are on track to complete requirements for the major, including literature courses taken in different genres , periods and regions , as specified by the major description. By spring of their junior year, students must choose a faculty advisor and begin to outline a senior research project.

All majors are required to take  COMP_LIT 398-0 Senior Seminar  in fall quarter of senior year, during which they write a substantial senior paper (which may be based on a previous paper written for another course). Students meeting the necessary requirements may opt to pursue honors in the major, by enrolling in COMP_LIT 399-0 Independent Study in the winter quarter of their senior year, and expanding their senior essay into an Honors Thesis.

Major Requirements (12 units)

2 courses required for all majors:.

• COMP_LIT 200-0 Introduction to Literary Theory
• COMP_LIT 398-0 Senior Seminar  (taken during Fall quarter of senior year)

10 literature courses, which must encompass the following categories  (a single course may fill multiple requirements):

• 300-level COMP_LIT courses : 3 advanced courses in comparative literary studies (chosen from any COMP_LIT 300-level course, except 398 or 399)
• Language : 4 courses
• 2 courses in first language, at least one 300-level
• 2 courses in second language, at least one 300-level (modification by consent of director of undergraduate studies)
• ​ Genre : One course each devoted to three of the following four genre categories:
• Drama & Performance

Film & Visual Studies

• Period : Two courses in each of two broad periods:
• 1830-present
• Region : Two non-Euro/American courses (can be in translation)

If the above category requirements are not fulfilled by the minimum of 10 literature courses, additional courses may be required. At most 2 courses counted toward the Comparative Literary Studies major may be double-counted toward another major.

Honors in Comparative Literary Studies

Majors with strong academic records may be recommended to pursue honors based on the strength of their senior essays. Recommended students expand their senior essay into a senior thesis (at least 30 pages long) during 1 quarter of independent study ( COMP_LIT 399-0 Independent Study), preferably in winter quarter. The COMP_LIT 399-0 Independent Study enrollment does not count toward the 12 courses required for the major. Students whose theses and grades meet program criteria are recommended to the college for graduation with honors. For more information consult the program website and Honors in the Major .

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