Department of Comparative Literature Kudos 2023-2024
Congratulations to Comp Lit Undergraduates!
Comparative Literature Majors
Duaa Caldwell graduated with a BS in Comparative Literature and in Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience.
Nico Magana graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature, with honors, and in English with honors. Nico also served as one of the department's first Undergraduate Peer Mentors.
Jishi Sun graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature and in Mathematics.
Olga Yatsenka served as one of the department's first Undergraduate Peer Mentors.
Translation Studies Minors
Avery Berger completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Avery graduated with a BS in Biology, Health, and Society Major and in Spanish.
Mia Brodeur completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Mia graduated with a BA in German and in Linguistics.
Ava Dobos completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Graduated with a BA in German and completed a second minor in Museum Studies.
Xilin Gao completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Xilin graduated with a BBA in Business Administration.
Evelyn Hempel completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Evelyn graduated with a BS in German and completed a minor in Biochemistry.
Jinny Kim completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Jinny graduates with a BA in Psychology and a minor in User Experience Design.
Kate Louissant completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Kate graduated with a BFA in Musical Theatre.
Justin Scott completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Just graduated with a BA in Asian Studies.
2024 Comparative Literature First Year Writing Prize
Katherine Schultz was awarded the 2024 Comparative Literature First Year Writing Prize for the essay "A Fresh Fusion of Music Genres."
Serafina Sabatini received a First Year Writing Prize honorable mention for the essay "Self Diagnosis: The Intersection of Limerence and Borderline Personality Disorder in the Digital Age."
2024 Senior Prize in Literary Translation
Mia Brodeur was awarded the 2024 Senior Prize in Literary Translation for her translation from German of "Die Freundin."
Nico Magana was awarded the 2024 Senior Prize in Literary Translation for his translation from Spanish of "Noon at the Border (Mediodía de frontera)."
Evelyn Hempel received an honorable mention for select poems from "Gedichte" translated from German.
Michelle Wu received an honorable mention for selections from Kim Namju's Poetry Collection (김남주 시전집) from Korean.
Congratulations to Comp Lit Graduate Students!
Arianna Afsari was awarded a Friends of Princeton University Library Research Grant to conduct a two-week research stay at the Special Collections at Firestone Library. She also published translations of selected poems and a preface taken from Juan Gelman’s book, Dibaxu, for Absinthe.
Lis Fertig completed the Graduate Certificate in Critical Translation Studies with a capstone project titled, "Translating Sound, Gender and Voice in Jelinek’s Radio Play 'Ballad of Three Important Men'."
Srimati Ghosal had a paper published in South Asian Popular Culture, "Drawing the lines: Studying the Common Man caricatures by R.K. Laxman to understand dominant political discourse around legitimate political contestations in postcolonial India." Srimati also organized the 13th University of Michigan Pakistan Conference with the Center for South Asian Studies and will be presenting at the 26th Law Culture Humanities Conference on the 16th-18th of May in Vancouver.
Lena Grimm completed the Graduate Certificate in Critical Translation Studies with a capstone project titled, "To read, to see, to spin, and to turn — Reintroducing Barbara Köhler's Elektras."
Graham Liddell received a ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award for his dissertation “Narrative Wayfinding: Author-izing Arab and Afghan Migration across Morphing Borderscapes”.
Delsa Lopez served as a Comp Lit DEI Ally during the 2023-24 academic year.
Júlia Irion Martins received the 2024 Rackham Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award. Júlia also served as one of the graduate student representatives during the 2023-24 academic year.
Marina Mayorski completed the Graduate Certificate in Critical Translation Studies with a capstone project titled, "The Ottoman Captain: A Ladino Novel by Elia Karmona."
Sam McCracken served as one of the graduate student representatives during the 2023-24 academic year.
Arakel Minassian had the pleasure of organizing the UM Center for Armenian Studies International Graduate Student Workshop with a fellow graduate student in Linguistics, Emma Portugal. This was a two-day workshop on the Armenian language today, called "Language Revitalization and Resurgence: The Case of Modern Armenian." The workshop had 20 participants from across the country (and three from Armenia and Hungary) all focusing on Armenian from linguistic, historical, and literary perspectives. It was a very successful and exciting workshop!
Dylan Ogden successfully defended his dissertation, "Dissertation Title: Cracks in the Iron Curtain: Reception and Influence of the Nouveau Roman in Late-Soviet Russia."
Jaideep Pandey served as a Comp Lit DEI Ally during the 2023-24 academic year.
Ana Popovic successfully defended her dissertation, "Invalid Feelings: Affect in Crip Literature."
Katherine Tapia completed the Graduate Certificate in Critical Translation Studies with a capstone project titled, "From Latin Quill to Spanish Pen: Unveiling the Aberdeen Bestiary in Translation."
Congratulations to the 2024 CLIFF team–Arianna Afsari, Delsa Lopez, CC Barrick, and Sanju Ramanathan–for organizing a successful and thought-provoking conference!
Congratulations to Comp Lit Faculty!
Catherine Brown's second book was published in March 2023. Remember the Hand: Manuscription in Early Medieval Iberia is available online for free via Open Access!
Aaron Coleman signed the contract to publish his translation of The Great Zoo by Nicolás Guillén with University of Chicago Press in October 2024. Five poems from the collection were published by the Academy of American Poets at poets.org. He also published two new poems in Jet Fuel Review. Aaron presented papers at the AfroCuban Legacies Conference and Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference.
Vassilis Lambropoulos has launched and directs a Greek-language website, Ποιητική κρίση (Poetic judgment/crisis) which solicits original essays on the production and reception of 21st century Greek poetry. In addition to books, it covers literary sites and mechanisms, such as anthologies, bookstores, performances, publishing houses, and awards. The site is sponsored by the C.P. Cavafy Modern Greek Chair and the Greek think tank “Institute for Alternative Policies.”
Yopie Prins served as 2023 chair of the Executive Committee for the MLA Forum on Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century, and she moderated a panel at MLA in January 2024 on "Nineteenth-Century Poetry and (in, as, of) Translation." She also collaborated with Professor Kristin Dickinson to work on projects for translatingmichigan.org, a public humanities initiative that was awarded $30,000 in grants from OVPR and the Michigan Humanities Council, and featured in the Fall 2023 issue of LSA Magazine ("Michigan in Translation"). In addition, she led a team of faculty and staff in developing a proposal for a new Translation Major, with $10,000 support from the CRLT Whitaker Fund for the Improvement of Teaching.
Niloofar Sarlati published two essays this year, one in Comparative Literature, titled “Suspicious Gifts and Speculative Translations: Colonial and Semicolonial Encounters between English and Persian,” and one in the Keyword Issue of Victorian Literature and Culture, titled “Ta’ārof.” She was awarded an Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship for AY 2024-2025, where she will work on completing her book manuscript.
Will Stroebel has signed a contract with Princeton University Press for his book, Literature's Refuge, which is now in production phase and will be coming out with the Translation-Transnation series in early 2025.
Silke Weineck, together with her co-PI Stefan Szymanski, nabbed a $40,000 grant from the UM Arts Initiative to produce a documentary about Detroit's 1963 bid for the 1968 Summer Olympics. Her essay on Joe Louis and the Ford Motor Company, "How Racist Car Dealers KO’d Joe Louis," appeared in The Nation in May 2023. It was featured on a list of "Best History Writing of 2023." She added to her growing portfolio of UM critique at the Chronicle of Higher Education with "The University of Michigan Demands Flattery for President — While Crushing Labor" and "Michigan’s New Protest Policy Is a Scandal." A seminar she co-organized with Princeton's Barbara Nagel on "Playing in the German Dark" has been solicited for the book series Spektrum. She is excited about retiring, effective January 1st, 2028.]
Congratulations to Comp Lit Staff!
Julie Burnett was nominated for the Kay Beattie Outstanding Individual Employee award for the Humanities Division.
Katie Colman was promoted to Executive Secretary in April 2023.
Stephanie Hart was nominated (and is in the middle of participating in) the Michigan Leadership Academy. This is an accelerated 4-day immersive learning experience to invest in the development of University of Michigan leaders so that they can reach higher levels of success and produce better results for the University. Stephanie was nominated for and appointed to serve as one of two Humanities Division CAs on the CA Steering Committee and College Operations Council for AY2024-25 and AY2025-26.
Giota Tachtara published her first book of fiction and will participate in the International Book Fair in Greece later in May. In November 2023 she gave a TEDx talk on communications, contact, and the experience of living between two languages, at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki.
Department of Comparative Literature Kudos 2022-2023
CONGRATULATIONS TO COMP LIT UNDERGRADUATES!
Comparative Literature Majors
Sundus Al Ameen is graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature and in History with honors. She is also graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Education.
Peter Matarweh is graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature and in International Studies, and with a minor in Translation Studies.
Julia Raguckas is graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature, Communication and Media, and with a minor in Creative Writing.J
Julian Wray is graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature.
Tyler Berndt is graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature with honors.
Translation Studies Minors
Kara Kozma completed the Minor in Translation Studies and is graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English with honors and in Latin Language & Literature.
Peter Matarweh completed the Minor in Translation Studies.
Emmanuel Orozco Castellanos completed the Minor in Translation Studies and is graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies BA and with a minor in Latin American & Caribbean Studies. Emmanuel received the Central Campus Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Spirit Award for his work with immigrant communities, asylum seekers, and underserved high schools in Southeast Michigan.
Momoka (Emma) Saito completed the Minor in Translation Studies and is graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology.
Shuchen Wen completed the Minor in Translation Studies and is graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Cognitive Science.
2023 Comparative Literature First Year Writing Prize
Maya Bonevich was awarded a Comparative Literature First Year Writing Prize for the "Give Me Your Answer, Do: To Speak as a Robot."
Sara Wong was awarded a Comparative Literature First Year Writing Prize for the essay "Little Shop of Horrors and the Consequence of Choice."
Alex Zhang was awarded a Comparative Literature First Year Writing Prize for the essay "Calculator Kid to Kung-Fu Guy: An Address to Asian Tokenism in Media."
2023 Senior Prize in Literary Translation
Fiona Caughey was awarded the Senior Prize in Literary Translation for her translation of selections from the prefaces and notes for the Dictionary of the Fine Arts by Eugène Delacroix.
William McClelland was awarded the Senior Prize in Literary Translation for his translation of Bacchae lines 912–976 by Euripides.
Jada Lin received an honorable mention for her translation of Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge.
Peter Matarweh received an honorable mention for his translation of Hayat Mu‘allabah by Haifa Zangana.
CONGRATULATIONS TO COMP LIT GRADUATE STUDENTS!
Tomi Drucker won The Kasdan Scholarship for Creative Writing 2023 for her screenplay "Lia's Lens" through the Hopwood Program Writing Contest. She is proud to have stood in solidarity with the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO 3550) during this year's contract negotiations and campaign for a living wage.
Luiza Duarte Caetano, Dylan Ogden, and Berkay Uluç are the recipients of Rackham Humanities Research Fellowships. Luiza also received a Chateaubriand Fellowship to conduct research in France next year. This prestigious fellowship will allow her to spend four months in Paris working under the guidance of Prof. Jean-Marie Roulin.
Lis Fertig was awarded both a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship and a Humanities Institute Graduate Student Fellowship for AY '23-'24, based on her in-progress dissertation Radiopoetics: On Sound as Literary, Critical and Pedagogical Practice, and looks forward to beginning her residence at the Humanities Institute in the fall. She also developed and taught a FYWR course in audio composition, CL122: Writing With Sound, in which students learned to plan and produce an original audio piece. In March, she received a Rackham Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award in recognition of her work teaching first-year writing and multimodal composition. Along with the aforementioned accomplishments, Lis is also proud to have stood in solidarity with the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO 3550) during this year’s contract negotiations and campaign for a living wage.
Amanda Kubic presented papers at the Modern Greek Studies Association 2022 Symposium and the 2023 Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting. In the Winter 2023 term, Amanda interned at Monument Lab (a nonprofit public art and history studio based in PA) through the Comparative Literature Academic Term Internship Fellowship Program. She was offered a Rackham Predoc Fellowship and a Graduate Student Fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities for the 2023-24 academic year, the latter of which she has happily accepted. She has also had the honor of serving as a graduate representative for the CompLit department this year. Along with the aforementioned accomplishments, Amanda is also proud to have stood in solidarity with the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO 3550) during this year’s contract negotiations and campaign for a living wage.
Sam McCracken received a Critical Language Scholarship from the US Department of State to study Portuguese in Florianópolis, Brazil between June and August 2022, was nominated for Outstanding GSI (Winter 2023), and was awarded a State Department Student Internship for Fall 2023. One of Sam's Winter 2022 COMPLIT 122 students (Kyr Bonevich) won Comparative Literature First-Year Writing Prize. Sam also participated in CompLit Ph.D. program interviews. Sam had an article published in Spectator Journal Special Issue “Waste” 2022 titled “Waste Not, Want Not: Notes on Digital Hoarding.” His encyclopedia entry, “Ryane Leão • Onde Jazz Meu Coração,” for Latin American Digital Poetics, edited by Luis Correa-Díaz and Scott Weintraub, is forthcoming in July 2023. Sam also had two book reviews published: A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes by Kyle Parry in Film Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 3, and metaverse By Luis Correa-Díaz in Latin American Literature Today. He organized (with Ben Woodworth, others) department participation in GEO’s 2023 work stoppage. Along with the aforementioned accomplishments, Sam is also proud to have stood in solidarity with the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO 3550) during this year’s contract negotiations and campaign for a living wage.
Genta Nishku has accepted a 2023-24 fellowship at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Genta's proposed project is “Silenced Histories: Remembering the Roma Holocaust in Albania and Kosovo.”
Júlia Irion Martins was awarded the 2023 Rackham Public Scholarship Grant for her project “Detroit’s Other Rosa Parks: Teaching the Civil Rights Legacy of Sarah E. Ray.” Júlia will partner with the Sarah E. Ray Project, whose objective is to document and bring awareness to the long-forgotten story of Detroit Civil Rights activist Sarah E. Ray (later known as Lizz Haskell). This project makes Ray’s life and work known in a variety of media accessible to diverse audiences, including a creative non-fiction book, a short documentary, and an interactive website. The guides will discuss a variety of topics, ranging from Ray’s role in desegregating Detroit’s Boblo Boat as a 24-year-old to her later work establishing the community center Action House in Detroit’s Airport Community region.
CONGRATULATIONS TO COMP LIT FACULTY!
Catherine Brown published Remember the Hand: Manuscription in Early Medieval Iberia. Anybody can read it for free, as it's available via Open Access. It's full of beautiful pictures and a lot of weird Latin.
Aaron Coleman had the pleasure of co-organizing with Renée Ragin Randall and Giulia Riccó a three-part series in the fall titled, “Race and Racism, Comparatively,” participated in the Helen Zell MFA Writers’ Program Faculty Flash Reading, and shared a hybrid presentation/performance titled, ““Poetics of Black Inheritance: Writing Other Americas Between History, Genealogy, & Imagination” at the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (A2RU) National Conference at the University of Michigan. Aaron also organized a roundtable, “Blackness in Translation” as part of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Sites of Translation in the Multilingual Midwest (cosponsored by DAAS and NCID). He joined a panel on “The Future of Black Studies” organized by the Institute for the Humanities as part of the Humanities Afrofutures month-long series. Aaron also presented at the Association for Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference on a panel sponsored by the American Literary Translators Association titled, “Translation 101: How to Become a Translator.” He was invited by CUNY’s Center for Humanities for “Colloquy: Translating the Caribbean” with Kaiama Glover and Urayoán Noel Aaron was deeply honored to return to Washington University in Saint Louis for a series of events celebrating the opening of an exhibition on his work by the Julian Edison Special Collections, titled “Wherein I Am: Highlights from the Aaron Coleman Papers.” Aaron published “South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred Hills” in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, “The Flag Eater” in The Rumpus, “Glitch Miracles Here” in Indiana Review (forthcoming), several of his poems will be featured in The Missouri Review, and his poem-sequence, “Stained Glass Speaks,” was featured in a special issue on Diasporic Poetry in ERGON: Greek/American Letters. At the start of winter term, Aaron joined the National Center for Institutional Diversity as the Anti-Racism Collaborative Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Translation Studies. He also co-directed three Helen Zell Writers’ Program MFA theses with Prof. Khaled Mattawa. Aaron designed and taught a new meet-together translation workshop/translation studies seminar titled “Poetic Methods of Translation” (COMPLIT580/ENGL630). He also joined the Cave Canem Faculty & Fellow Advisory Committee after becoming a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow in summer 2022.
Daniel Herwitz published "Negotiating Offence of Fallist Proportion: Cecil Rhodes and the Removal of University of Cape Town’s Statue" in Third Text.
Vassilios Lambropoulos gave a lecture called “The Tragedy of Autonomy in the Modern Theater of Liberation,” for the 2022-23 seminar series Politics of Liberation in October 2022. He also gave a lecture called “The Melancholic Pursuit of Freedom in the 21st Century” at The American College of Greece in November 2022. He presented a paper, “Post-colonial Tragic Theatre,” at the online symposium In the Event of Antigone: Crossings, Translations, Restagings in December 2022. He participated in two literary panels, one on the Greek Poetry Generation of the 2000s (Thessaloniki) and one on relations between new Greek poetry and criticism (Athens) in May 2023 and he joined the Advisory Board of the Greek Chamber Music Project, based in San Francisco (Fall 2022).
Yopie Prins participated in a Symposium at Northwestern University in January 2023, on “Translation Across Institutional Boundaries: From the Scholar to the Public.”
Renée Ragin Randall won an Institute for the Humanities summer fellowship where she will work on the final chapter of her monograph. She also won an LSA summer research program award to travel to Istanbul, Gaziantep and Beirut for a collaborative research project with a scholar at Sabanci University on the combined impact of man-made and environmental traumas. She also launched a tri-campus mental health support group for students of color at EMU, UM and WCC through her work as a board member with NAMI-Washtenaw County.
Will Stroebel, along with Kristina Gedgaudaite, guest-edited a special issue of The Journal of Modern Greek Studies, titled 1922–2022: A Century of Border Making and Refugeehood. Graham Liddell contributed an amazing article to the issue, and Michigan Comp Lit alumna Aslı Iğsız (NYU) also shared an article. It was a kickass project with lots of Michigan Comp Lit in the mix!
Niloofar Sarlati wrote an essay for the forthcoming Keyword issue of Victorian Literature and Culture. She also wrote a chapter entitled "Sweet and Salty: A Taste of (Semi)translating Colonial Modernity in Iran" for Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature, coedited by Laura Brueck and Praseeda Gopinath.
