Department News

August 20, 2020
Are you a Yale graduate/professional school student or postdoctoral fellow at Yale interested in mentoring an undergraduate? The Yale Graduate-Undergraduate Mentorship Initiative invites you to submit a profile to our database to pair Yale undergraduate students with postdoc, graduate student, and professional student mentors from a wide range of fields.   We hope that through these valuable mentorship relationships, mentors will be able to impart valuable advice onto curious, driven...
August 12, 2020
We are proud to announce Shaj Mathew has won the New Literary History’s 2020 Ralph Cohen Prize. Click here to read the announcement. Shaj is elated and starts his new position as an Assistant Professor of English this fall at Trinity University, San Antonio. Cheers to you Shaj!
July 17, 2020
We are delighted to announce that our alumna, Masha Shpolberg, will be starting as an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at UNC–Wilmington in Fall 2020. Masha’s research focuses on global documentary and Russian and Eastern European cinema, with a special interest in feminist, ecological, and labor aesthetics. Her first book, Labor in Late Socialism: The Cinema of Polish Workers’ Unrest 1968-1981, argues that cinema played a crucial role in the formation of the Polish “Solidarity”...
July 17, 2020
Linday Stern, PhD student at Yale’s Comparative Literature Department and author of The Study of Animal Languages. A Novel, has published “What Can Bonobos Teach Us About the Nature of Language” in Smithsonian Magazine, July 2020. The essay tells the story of the paleontologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and her controversial work with primates at the Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary at Des Moines in the years 2006 to 2013. See the article here.
June 25, 2020
Hsin-Yuan Peng  Comparative Literature & Film and Media Studies, Meteorology by Cinematic Means: Aesthetics and Epistemology of Weather Images Hsin-Yuan Peng’s research focuses on the use of moving image technologies by Japanese meteorologists Abe Masanao, Nakaya Ukichirō, and their European colleagues. She argues that scientific visualization of weather is a complex act of construction rather than passive documentation. By analyzing meteorological filmmaking it is possible to imagine a...
Illustration from Liu Cixin’s graphic novel ‘The Wandering Earth’ © ComicChina 2019
May 29, 2020
Why sci-fi could be the secret weapon in China’s soft-power arsenal First came Beijing’s ‘panda diplomacy’. Now there’s a fan-backed drive to host the ‘Olympics of SF’ Last November, thousands of diehard Chinese science-fiction fans thronged to Chengdu for the first ever AsiaCon, a high-profile convention that drew in writers and film-makers from Asia, Europe, the US and the Middle East. The mayor of the capital of Sichuan province gave his blessing against a digitised backdrop of a blue galaxy...
May 21, 2020
Spring 2020 will undoubtedly be remembered as the strangest semester of our lifetimes—the rapid swerve from what should have been a blissful spring break with the promise of warmth and daffodils, to a tightly imposed shutdown that cut us off from each other and forced us to congregate in little boxes on Zoom. But through the fear, the crises, the strange stilling of time, and the disconnections of online teaching, we have been moved and inspired by our students who continued to show up for...