COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

CLS graduate student, Menglu Gao, received the 2020-21 Buffett Institute Global Impacts Graduate Fellowship. This fellowship will allow Menglu to pursue her research and participate in the Global Impacts programming hosted by the Buffett Institute. Congratulations, Menglu!

CLS graduate student, Viola Bao, who received Honorable Mention for the 2020 Beiling Wu Prize in Writing for her paper, “World-Alienation and Worldy Objects? On Hannah Arendt and Object-Oriented Ontology.” Congratulations, Viola!

The Beiling Wu Prize in Writing, named for a former Northwestern graduate student in the humanities, is given to a doctoral or MFA student in the first year of the PhD or MFA program who wrote the best critical, analytic essay on literature or literary culture in the first year of their program.

Congratulations to the following Comparative Literary Studies graduate students who completed their PhDs in 2019-2020!

• Jonas Rosenbrück (German) | “Senses of Smell: The Differentiation of Air in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Ponge” | Advisors: Peter Fenves (chair), Jörg Kreienbrock, and Samuel Weber
• Scott Newman (English) | “Sound Figures in Postcolonial African Literature, 1970s to Present” | Advisors: Evan Mwangi (chair), Doris Garraway, and Nasrin Qader
• Folahan Olowoyeye (Slavic) | "Sans-Frontieres: Destruction, Creation, and Experiment in the Russian Literary Avant-Garde, 1908-1912" | Advisors: Clare Cavanagh (Chair); Chris Bush; Nina Gurianova
• Maziyar Faridi (English) | "On an Aproretic Poetics of Relation: Translation, Difference and Identity in Modern Poetry and New Wave Cinema of Iran (1920s-1970s)" | Advisors: Nasrin Qader and Brian Edwards (co-directors); Nasrin Rahimieh (Comparative Literature- UC Irvine), Hamid Naficy, Samuel Weber
• Marjan Mohammadi (English; Dual PhD Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 | "Beyond Redemption: The Crisis of Sovereignty and The Return of Melancholy" | Advisors: Samuel Weber (Chair); Isabelle Alfandary (co-chair); Axel Nesme, Christine Froula, Farzaneh Milani, Julie Duvigneau
• Nadav Avruch (German) | "Occasions of Underground: German Miners and Moles on the Essence of Ground (ca. 1780–1920)" | Advisors: Peter Fenves (chair); Jorg Kreienbrock; Samuel Weber
• Matthew Gilmore (German) | "Symbolic Logic in the Galant Style: Reading Gjerdingen with Leibniz, Kant, Cassirer, and Baumgarten" | Peter Fenves (chair); Michael Gallope (Univ of Minnesota); Samuel Weber

Two CLS core faculty members, Laura Brueck and Neil Verma, recently published a book, along with their co-editor Jacob Smith in RTVF, by University of Michigan Press! The book, Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship, is an edited collection of essays on South Asian sound studies that emerged out of several years of speaker series and workshops held at Northwestern.

Here is the link to the Press book site: https://www.press.umich.edu/11374202/indian_sound_cultures_indian_sound_citizenship 

 

Join us in congratulating Comparative Literary Studies graduate student, Azadeh Safaeian, for receiving the 2020 Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF). This prestigious fellowship is awarded to select graduate students to conduct dissertation research on non-US topics.

The IDRF competition promotes a range of approaches and research designs beyond single-site or single-country research, including comparative work at the national and regional levels and explicit comparison of cases across time frames.

Menglu Gao received the 2020 Walter L. Arnstein Prize for Dissertation Research in Victorian Studies for her dissertation, "The Lacquered Chinese Box: Opium, Addiction, and the Fantasy of Empire in Nineteenth-Century British Literature." Congratulations, Menglu!

The Midwest Victorian Studies Association offers the Annual Walter L. Arnstein Prize for Dissertation Research in Victorian Studies, a prize of $1,500 for dissertation research in British Victorian Studies undertaken by a student currently enrolled in a doctoral program in a U.S. or Canadian university.

Corey Byrnes' (Assistant Professor, Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literary Studies) book, Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges, receives Honorable Mention for ACLA's Harry Levin Prize for outstanding first book in comparative literature. You may find more information about the book here. Congratulations!

CLS graduate student, Arif Camoglu, received the 2020 A. Owen Aldridge Prize for the essay, "Loving Sovereignty: Political Mysticism, Şeyh Galib and Giorgio Agamben."  The prize recognizes excellence in scholarship among graduate students and to reward the highest achievement by publication.  Congratulations, Arif!

The A. Owen Aldridge Prize sponsored by Comparative Literature Studies in cooperation with the American Comparative Literature Association and supported by the Department of Comparative Literature at Penn State.

On September 21-22, 2019, Samuel Weber and Peter Fenves co-organized an international conference, "Aesthetics, Society and the Travels of Critical Theory" at Beijing Normal University.  The participants included scholars from around the globe, including China and the United States. Several Northwestern PhD graduates were in attendance, including: Julia Ng, now teaching at Goldsmith’s College, London, and Anthony Adler, teaching at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea. A major role in the organization of the conference was played by Li Shah, who studied for two years in the German Department at Northwestern and who is currently a Lecturer at Beijing Normal and a faculty research member of  the University’s Center for the Study of Literary Theories.   Other well-known Western scholars included Martin Jay, Professor Emeritus at  UC-Berkeley, and Professor Scott Lash of Goldsmith’s.

Polish author Olga Tokarczuk won the postponed 2018 Nobel Prize for literature. Tokarczuk’s novel “Flights” was translated into English by Northwestern alumna Jennifer Croft, who earned her PhD in comparative literary studies in 2010.

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Congratulations to Comparative Literary Studies PhD student, Mauricio Oportus, for receiving the 2019 Beiling Wu Prize in Writing! The Beiling Wu Prize in Writing is named for a former Northwestern graduate student in the humanities and is awarded to a doctoral student who wrote the best essay on literature or literary culture in the first year of the PhD program.