CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR COMP LIT UNDERGRADUATES!

2016-2017

Olivia Alge (BS, Informatics) completed the Minor in Translation Studies with a capstone project, “Software Translation from English to Spanish.”

Jacqueline Alvarez (BA, Spanish) completed the Minor in Translation Studies with a capstone project, “Translating Her Story: A translation of And Still I Rise by Maya Angelou.”

Eliza Cadoux received the BA in Comparative Literature. She also graduated with a BA in the Residential College and Women Studies, and received the Guy Palazzola & Robert D. and Betsy D. Richards Memorial Award for  her work in the performance art collective, “Call Your Mom: Powerplay.”

Sara Cusack (BA, Asian Studies and Cognitive Science) completed the Minor in Translation Studies with a capstone project, by interning as law clerk at the Michigan Immigration Rights Center (MIRC).

Thomas Degroat (BS, Neuroscience) completed the Minor in Translation Studies with a capstone project, “Translating George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, from novel into screenplay.”

Adam Depollo received the BA in Comparative Literature. He also graduated with a BA in the Residential College, English, and Spanish.

Meagan Parmenter received the BA in Comparative Literature, with a Senior Thesis: “’Ciel Livide Où Germe L’Ouragan’: Animating Baudelaire’s Passante in the Subversive Works of Sophie Calle and Isabelle Mège.”

Timothy Peterson received the BA in Comparative Literature. He also graduated with a BA in Music Composition (Piano).

Haley Schafer (BA, French and International Studies) completed the Minor in Translation Studies with a capstone project, “Interviews In Translation: HUMAN: Le Film.”

Anjali Sundar received the BS in Comparative Literature with an Honor’s Thesis: “Looking Through the Language Lens”. She also graduated with a BS in Biomolecular Science and a Business Administration minor. She also served as co-editor of Canon Translation Review.

Winner of the 2017 Comparative Literature First Year Writing Prize

Clare Francis, Gendered Spaces

Winners of the 2017 Senior Prize in Literary Translation

Olivia Alge, Desde la ventana by Diana Chapa (Spanish)

Zahir Allarakhia, Last Night I Dreamt of You by Bahā’ Tāhir (Arabic)

Sara Cusack, A Patient by Mianmian (Chinese)

 

CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR COMP LIT GRADUATE STUDENTS!

2016-2017

Sahin Acikgoz was appointed as Junior Fellow in the Sweetland Fellows Seminar for the Winter 2018-Fall 2018 semesters, and he received a Rackham Summer Award. He was also accepted to participate in the 2017 Institute for World Literature in Copenhagen, Denmark, and to present a paper at ACLA in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Alexander Aguayo was accepted to participate in the 2017 Institute for World Literature in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Maximillian Alvarez has published over 15 articles and has accepted a position as a columnist for The Baffler magazine. His work has been translated into Portuguese and Italian. The Times Higher Education, Electric Literature, and a publishing house in Italy (Edizioni SUR) have all published and promoted essays he wrote about the class he taught for UM Complit ("Welcome to the Monkey House: How Politics Becomes a Reality Show"). He was recently interviewed by The Chronicle of Higher Education on public writing, and has a forthcoming essay about writing and consciousness coming out with the science magazine Nautilus. He won the Earl Lewis Award for Outstanding Graduate Students for research he did in summer 2016, and is completing the second year of his term as graduate student representative on the Advisory Board for the American Comparative Literature Association.  

Lauren Benjamin received awards from the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Community of Scholars, and the John D’Arms Fellowship from the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies.

Megan Berkobien translated Jenn Díaz's short story, “Death by Dying”, (Catalan) in A Public Space, Alba Cid's poetry (Galician) in The Offing, Jordi Nopca's introduction to the recent Catalan issue at Words Without Borders, Blanca Llum Vidal’s poetry (Catalan) forthcoming in Loch Raven Review (May), Joan Todó’s short story “Letters” (Catalan) forthcoming in Drunken Boat (June). She also published her own chapbook of bilingual micros (Spanish-English) from the micro-publisher Do the Print (Barcelona). She was chosen as a national fellow for Mellon's Humanities Without Walls program.

Vedran Catovic participated in the 2016 Institute for World Literature at Harvard University.

Etienne Charriere defended his doctoral dissertation in Comparative Literature: “We Must Ourselves Write About Ourselves.” The Trans-Communal Rise of the Novel in the Late Ottoman Empire. In fall 2017 he will begin a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, with joint appointments in Turkish Literature and the Program in Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas. Etienne will also serve as a Senior Associate Member at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, where he will be in residence on and off during the 2017-18 academic year, when his duties in Ankara allow.

Karl Gaudyn was accepted to participate in the 2017 Institute for World Literature in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Melissa Gelinas was awarded a two-year postdoctoral fellowship starting fall 2017 at Concordia University's Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Montreal, sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Sara Grewal defended her doctoral dissertation in Comparative Literature: Urdu Through Its Others: Ghazal, Canonization, and Translation. In fall 2017 she will begin a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Postcolonial and World Literature in the Department of English at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada.

Harry Kashdan’s article, "Anglophone Cookbooks and the Making of the Mediterranean," was published in Food and Foodways 25.1 (2017). He presented, "'I Don't Want to Become Like Them:' Choosing Solitude in Contemporary Arab Migration Literature," at the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies' conference, “Middle East and North African Migration Studies in a Time of Crisis” (North Carolina State University, April 2017). Harry was awarded the Marshall Weinberg Prize from the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, University of Michigan.

Yael Kenan received the Horst Frenz Prize for best graduate student paper at ACLA. She also had her paper, "Mourning: Black Life, Black Death," accepted for publication in an edited collection Black Lives Have Always Mattered, ed. Obiodun Oyewole (New York: 2Leaf Press, 2017).

Cassie Miura was awarded a Rackham/Proquest Distinguished Dissertation Award in spring 2017 for “The Humor of Skepticism: Therapeutic Laughter from Montaigne to Milton.”  

Mei-Chen Pan defended her doctoral dissertation in Comparative Literature: From Empire to Motherland: Writings and the Politics of Translation in the Literatures of Transcolonial Taiwan, 1937-1960.

Richard Pierre accepted a postdoctoral position in the Teaching of Writing in the Department of English at the University of Delaware, starting in fall 2017, and was selected to teach in the Comprehensive Studies Program at the University of Michigan in summer 2017.

Shira Schwartz received a short-term research fellowship through the New York Working Group in Jewish Orthodoxies for Spring 2017 at Fordham University. She presented her paper, "Suspended Bodies, Arresting Texts: The Material-Semiotics of Amenorrhea in the Women's Gap Year Yeshiva," at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting. She also participated in a co-working program in Detroit this summer to do research supported by the Brandt Graduate Fellowship Challenge Account in Judaic Studies.

Mariane Stanev participated in a co-working program in Detroit this summer to do research supported by the Brandt Graduate Fellowship Challenge Account in Judaic Studies.

William Stroebel won the Prize for Best Literary Translation in Arabic, Persian, Armenian, or Turkish, sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Contexts for Classics for his translation of a section of Leyla Erbil’s Kalan in April 2016.

Duygu Ula was awarded a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship, and named Graduate Student Fellow at the Michigan Institute for the Humanities. She also received the Robin I. Thevenet Memorial Fellowship for Graduate Certificate Students from the Women's Studies department for summer research. Duygu presented a paper, “Viewing Gender: Politics of Comparison in Mustang, Zenne and Conscience,” at the Middle Eastern Studies Annual Meeting in November 2016.

Peter Vorissis was accepted to participate in the 2017 Institute for World Literature in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Grace (Hobbs) Zanotti was awarded an Agnes E. Futterer Memorial Fellowship from the SUNY Albany Alumni Association to pursue research on Greek tragedy in performance.

 

CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR COMP LIT FACULTY!

2016-2017

Tatjana Aleksic had two articles published in 2016: “Sex, Violence, Dogs and the Impossibility of Escape: Why Contemporary Greek Film is so Focused on Family” with Intellect Books and “Of Families and Other Sacred Cows on the Serbian Screen” with Slavica Publishers, Indiana.

Catherine Brown was invited to give the keynote at the conference, "Medieval Materialities," at the University of Warwick in England in summer 2016. She also presented at the New Chaucer Society in London and the International Comparative Literature Association in Vienna.

Daniel Herwitz’s book, Aesthetics, Arts and Politics in a Global World, was published by Bloomsbury Press in January 2017. His essay, “Joel and Ethan Coen,” appeared in Makers of Jewish Modernity (ed. Jacques Picard, Jacques Revel, Michael P. Steinberg, Idith Zertal ed., Princeton University Press, August 2016), which won the 2016 National Jewish Book Award in the category of anthologies and collections. His short story, “In the Tropic Of…” was published in the Michigan Quarterly Review. Additionally, he published an exhibition catalog, "David Lurie's Photographic Ethics," for the exhibition Writing the City, Sulger-Buel-Lovell Gallery, Cape Town and London (2017); the chapter titled, "Modernist Visual Art," in Cambridge History of Modernism, edited by Vincent Sherry (Cambridge Press, 2016); and an essay, "Nature that Lives in the Past: Xu Bing's Background Story", in Critical Essays on Xu Bing's Background Stories and his Oeuvre, edited by Timothy Murray and Xu Bing (Beijing: Life Bookstore Publishing Co., 2016).

Vassilios Lambropoulos had a paper published in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies: "Left Melancholy in the Greek Poetry Generation of the 2000s after the Crisis of Revolution and Representation." He was also elected Corresponding Member of the 300-member, Athens-based Hellenic Authors' Society in 2016.

Tomoko Masuzawa was a 2016-17 Guggenheim Fellow to complete research for her book, “Promise of the Secular: William Robertson Smith and the Historical Constitution of Biblical Studies.”

Christi Merrill had three pieces of writing published: “Intimate Interrogations: the literary grammar of communal violence” was published as the first chapter in the book Memory and Genocide: On what remains and the possibility of representation (ed. Moradi, Buchenhorst, Six-Hohenbalkan); “Memoir as Translation, Memory in Translation” in the book Translators Writing, Writing Translators (ed. Massardier-Kenney, Baer, Tymoczko); and “The wrath of the goddess...’ and other acts of doktori: exorcising colonial possession in translation” in the journal Testimony: Between History and Memory.

Peggy McCracken’s book, In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France, was published by The University of Chicago Press in 2017. She was also appointed Director of the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities for a five-year term, starting in summer 2017. 

Benjamin Paloff’s book, Lost in the Shadow of the Word: Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2017. He also contributed to an edited volume on Ol’ga Sedakova (Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2016).

Yopie Prins’ book, Ladies' Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy, was published by Princeton University Press in 2017.  She served as outgoing president on the Executive Committee of the American Comparative Literature Association, and participated in a panel, "Victorian in a Comparative Field," at MLA in January 2017. In spring 2017, she was invited to give guest lectures on “the new Sappho” at Montclair State University and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. 

Anton Shammas’s article, “Torture into Affidavit, Dispossession into Poetry: On Translating Palestinian Pain,” was published in the journal Critical Inquiry. A shorter version of the article was published in French - “De la torture à l’affidavit: traduire la douleur palestinienne,” traduit de l’anglais par Hélène Boisson, in Palestine: territoure, mémoire, projection (Rasha Salti, ed.; Marseille: Édition du Mucem, 2017), p. 16-32. He participated in a panel, “Palestine: Territory, Memory, Projections,” Marseille, Mucem, March 16-19, 2017; and delivered the Inaugural Annual Lecture of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation at the British Library, London, Oct. 14, 2016 - “Blind Spots: a millennium of Arabic in translation.”

Xiaobing Tang contributed chapter titled, "Socialist Visual Experience as Cultural Identity: On Wang Guangyi and Contemporary Art," to the book Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution edited by Jie Li and Enhua Zhang (Harvard 2016). His article, "Lingting Yan’an: Yi duan tingjue jingyan de qishi (Listening to Yan’an: Revelations of an Aural Experience),” was published in the Journal of Modern Chinese Studies in 2017, and his article, “Street Theater and Subject Formation in Wartime China: Toward a New Form of Public Art,” was published online in Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, 2016. He was elected a senior fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows in 2017.

Antoine Traisnel’s book, Donner le change, co-written with Thangam Ravindranathan, was published in 2016 by Hermann Press. A shorter article version in English was published in SubStance. His article, “American Entrapments: Taxonomic Capture in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie,” was published in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. He gave a talk on climate change and realism at McGill, organized a symposium on "Uncommon Natures", and became an official member of the Theory Group, a "think tank" that meets twice a month at Macomb Correctional Facility to discuss and organize events around issues of restorative justice.

Silke-Maria Weineck had three articles published: "The Irony Monster" in Modern Language Notes, "God is Dead" in Keywords in German Aesthetics, Continuum, and "Laius" in the Handbuch Literatur & Psychoanalyse, deGruyter. In January, she presented “The Irony Monster” to the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin.