Comparative Literature Ph.D.

The department is a preeminent site for integrating conceptual, historical, literary, and philosophical scholarship. We engage literature, culture, and thought across Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Our graduate programs in comparative literature emphasize the importance of reading tradition against the grain—of national boundaries, textual practices, and intellectual production in the humanities. We conceive literature broadly—as a field of interrelation between word, image, and sound—and comparatism as a polycentric enterprise. Over the years, graduates of our program have been very successful at carrying forward our department’s critical comparatism and signature stress on word, image, and sound in their own scholarship. Our faculty teach seminars that explore a wide range of literary and cultural problems, embedding the understanding of texts within their material and discursive conditions of possibility. We regard comparatism as the heart and soul of cross-cultural inquiry and understanding and encourage students to pursue interdisciplinary projects that are at the same time disciplined and critical.