The Graduate Program of the Comparative Literature department invites students to the study and understanding of literature beyond linguistic or national boundaries. We challenge our students to engage with the theory, interpretation, and criticism of literature from across the globe and to explore its interactions with adjacent fields like visual and material culture, linguistics, film and media studies, psychology, law, philosophy and history. The department encourages students to develop their skill at textual analysis while challenging them to reflect theoretically on the acts of writing and reading, as on the connections between literature and other realms of human experience.
It is home to four doctoral degree programs: a degree in Comparative Literature, as well as three joint degrees with the Classics department, the Film and Media Studies program, and the Renaissance Studies program. Our current graduate students, who come from over fifteen different countries, work in over twenty languages from all over the world and pursued a variety of innovative research projects.