Department News

November 6, 2016
The American Comparative Literature Association recently selected Eugenia Kelbert, PhD 2015, as a co-winner of the 2016 Charles Bernheimer Prize. The Bernheimer Prize honors the best dissertation nominated in the field of comparative literature. Katie Trumpener, one of the readers for the dissertation, nominated Kelbert’s dissertation entitled Acquiring a Second Language Literature: Patterns in Translingual Writing from Modernism to the Moderns. Her advisers were Haun Saussy and Vladimir...
October 26, 2016
Ayesha Ramachandran, assistant professor of comparative literature, was recently honored with two awards: a New Directions fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a Director’s Award from the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center. She will use these award to conduct linguistic training and research into the Persianate courts of the 16th and 17th centuries, investigating cross-cultural communication between European and Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal cultures. For more information, see...
October 24, 2016
Professor Jing Tsu explains what 500,000 Chinese characters can do for the world in an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times.   “China’s Digital Soft Power Play”  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/25/opinion/chinas-digital-soft-power-play.html?_r=0
October 11, 2016
Yale News interviews Professor Jing Tsu on her award-winning research and book project http://news.yale.edu/2016/05/24/conversation-2016-guggenheim-fellow-jing…
February 29, 2016
The Comparative Literature Graduate Student Conference, with a topic of “On the Joke and the Joker,” will be held on April 1 and 2, 2016 with a Keynote address by Professor Ron Jenkins from Wesleyan University. Graduate Student Conference 2016 Department of Comparative Literature Yale University April 1 – 2, 2016 “…thanks to their façade, [jokes] are in a position to conceal not only what they have to say but also the fact that they have something—forbidden—to say.” – Sigmund Freud, Jokes...
January 20, 2016
Ph.D. candidate Kevin Holden recently published three books of poetry and was named in July as a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. The first book, Birch, was the recipient of the 2014 Ahsahta Press Chapbook Prize. The second, Sublimation, is now available from Little Red Leaves. The third, Solar, received the 2015 Fence Modern Poets Series Prize. His competitive fellowship supports a small number of scholars in an early stage of their careers for three years of study in any...
Professor Dudley Andrew holding his new publication, a collection of Andre Bazin's essays
December 1, 2015
Dudley Andrew, the biographer and chief advocate of André Bazin, has recently organized, translated, and introduced the famous film theorist’s copious startling articles on the new media of the 1950s: television, CinemaScope, and 3-D. Far more a cultural critic than anyone knew, and in the mode of his contemporary Roland Barthes, Bazin wrote cunningly about the technological, economic, sociological, and aesthetic concerns of these challenges to the regime of standard cinema. Along the way...