Our graduate program is recognized as one of the leading Comparative Literature programs in the country. The Department is a vibrant place for the research and study of literatures and cultures in an interdisciplinary framework, from transnational and cross‐cultural perspectives. Our faculty and graduate students develop new historical and theoretical frameworks, and rethink those we have inherited, opening new perspectives on social and cultural forms and relations.
Comparative Literature provides students with tools for engaging, analyzing, and interpreting texts; and for writing, editing, translating, and thinking across disciplinary and national boundaries. Our graduates take up various literary traditions, historical periods and genres, modalities, forms, and contexts, from, for example, Latin American concrete poetry, to discourses of political and race theory, to Yiddish experimental fiction. The Department offers rigorous training in numerous areas that highlight the expertise of our internationally recognized faculty, including Classics, East Asian Literatures and Arts, English, French, German, Italian, Hebrew Studies, Hispanophone Literatures, and Slavic Literatures and Cultures, as well as Critical Theory, Early Modern and Renaissance Studies, Film and Media, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Performance Studies, Comparative Poetry and Poetics, and Postcolonial Theory.