COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

CLS core faculty member Jorge Coronado has been named as the editor of the prestigious book series "Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas."  Many congratulations to Jorge!

CLS core faculty member Corey Byrnes has been awarded a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship for 2021-22.  Many congratulations to Corey!

Congratulations to Azadeh Safaeian, who is the recipient of a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2021–2022.  Azadeh will be at work on her project “Toward a Minor Theory of Trauma: Literature and Cinema of the Iran-Iraq War, 1980-Present.”  

Maziyar Faridi (Assistant Professor, Clemson University; CLS Alum) has been awarded the prestigious Charles Bernheimer Prize for the best dissertation of 2020-21, conferred by the American Comparative Literature Association, for his dissertation On an Aporetic Poetics of Relation: Translation, Difference, and Identity in Modern Poetry and New-Wave Cinema of Iran (1920s-1970s).

Citation: “On an Aporetic Poetics of Relation” develops an elegant narrative arc about an understudied corpus of modernist Iranian literary and cinematic texts. Faridi argues for an Iranian “poetics that resists appropriation to modern discourses of national and linguistic identity and in this resistance produces the possibility for new forms of political relationality beyond the politics of modern sovereign subject.” Substantiated by a prodigious amount of archival research, the dissertation dialogues with Édouard Glissant’s interventions to map a non-teleological poetics of relation centering on four interconnected representative figures. Underscoring the intertextuality between Nima Yushij’s poetry and poetry and films of Forugh Farrokhzad, the study simultaneously attends to a transnational poetics of relation in remarkable comparatist readings. Faridi deftly draws out the resonances of Paul Éluard in the poetry of poet-filmmaker Férydoun Rahnéma who himself introduces contemporary French poetry to Ahmad Shamlou, the latter’s translations of Langston Hughes and Federico García Lorca in turn completing the circuit of transnational influence Faridi traces. The study’s philological commentary on Persian keywords is as rigorous as its inquiry into the migration of tropes between the media of poetry and film. This is a richly compelling contribution to comparatist global modernism studies.

NU Comparative Literary Studies alumnus, Arif Camoglu (PhD, 2020), has been appointed Assistant Professor of Literature at NYU Shanghai.  Many congratulations to Arif!