Comparative Literature the University of Texas at Austin Comparative Literature the University of Texas at Austin
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Program in Comparative Literature The University of Texas at Austin Comparative Literature The university of texas at austin Comparative Literature Newsletter Spring 2014 Letter from the Interim Director The Program in Comparative Literature Letter from the Director 1-2 has had yet another very successful year in 2013-2014. We welcomed a new cohort of five graduate students who have studied Program News at such diverse institutions as Rutgers, Incoming Graduate Students 2 Florida State, and the Sorbonne in Paris. In Note from GRACLS 2 September we held our annual Graduate Fall 2012 Courses 3 Student Conference, at which papers were presented by some 37 participants both from Student News and Profiles UT and from universities around the country. Degree Recipients 3 The keynote address was given by Professor Prizes and Fellowships 4 N. Katherine Hayles who is the Director of First Year Student Profiles 5 Dr. Wayne A. Rebhorn Graduate Studies of the Program in Literature GRACLS Conference Reflections 6 at Duke University and who is one of the country’s leading scholars Student Profiles in the Digital Humanities, Literature, Science, and Technology, Flora Chuang 7 Science Fiction, and Critical Theory. Her well-attended keynote Maryam Shariati 8 address, “Materiality, Narrative, Text,” brought together work Katie Logan 9-10 Kaitlin Shirley 10 on popular culture, on music, video, and games, on translation, trauma, and post-colonialism, on gender, space, and place, and on Faculty News and Profiles 11-12 the digital humanities. Like many participants in the conference, she was concerned with linking traditional print culture to digital Alumni Profiles media as well as with experimental fiction and with the use of Alan Miller 13 Adria Frizzi 13 digital analysis to determine the meaning of texts. In short, her address epitomized the concern of the conference to go beyond the boundaries of disciplines and national traditions, bringing many ACLA 14-15 disparate entities together in our increasingly global contemporary News in Brief 15-19 world, and thereby honoring the internationalist, boundary-crossing 2012 Proseminar 20 nature of Comparative Literature both at UT and around the world. 2014 GRACLS Conference CFP 21 Job Placement News 22 Bringing things together from all over the world is also what faculty and students in the Program were doing last year, whether they were studying at the Institute for World Literature, attending conferences around the globe, publishing books and articles on a host of topics ranging from the Middle Ages to contemporary film and popular culture while moving from the East to the West, and even taking the first steps to initiate a new program to teach world literature to inmates in the local Travis County jail. For next year two continuing students have won Comparative Literature Graduate Excellence Fellowships, a third had the distinction of winning a David L. Boren Fellowship for Hebrew study, and an incoming student will also receive a Comparative Literature Graduate Excellence Fellowship. Three continuing students have won Foreign Language Area Studies fellowships, and our six new students will all be awarded summer fellowships. In this Newsletter we have reports from alumni who have been quite successful, in their different ways, during the years since they Program News (Director’s Letter Continued) A Note from GRACLS by Kaitlin Shirley left the Program. Our placement rate this year was quite enviable, especially considering The 2013-2014 school year was yet another success for Graduate Comparative Literature Students (i.e. GRACLS). The levels of in- how difficult the market is in the Humanities. volvement across cohorts has been especially remarkable, and we Nevertheless, we placed five out of six students want to thank old friends and new for their contributions to the who were seeking jobs, and we did so at such organization’s projects. institutions as the University of Oregon, Cornell University, Michigan Tech, and Ohio Wesleyan. We’ve been particularly invested this year in continuing to build I am happy to report that we have admitted a strong and interdisciplinary scholarly community within the an extremely well-qualified cohort of six new bounds of the program. This community came out in full force at students for next year from such schools as the the tenth annual GRACLS conference, “What We Read: Materiality, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Narrative and Text.” Featuring 37 participants from across the uni- and UCLA. Finally, I should mention that the versity and across the country, the conference brought together Program modified its structure this past spring work on popular culture, music, and video games; translation, to create the position of Chair of the Graduate trauma, and (post)colonialism; gender, space, and place; and digital humanities. GRACLS members at every level of the program staffed Studies Committee, someone who would focus the welcome table, presented sophisticated papers, and attended on our course offerings and on student affairs, Dr. N. Katherine Hayles’ illuminating keynote address. The biggest leaving the Director a freer hand to concentrate thank you goes to our Graduate Coordinator Billy Fatzinger for on such matters as funding and interfacing helping Cory Hahn and Hannah Alpert-Abram’s throughout the with the university administration. We elected process. We’re all looking forward to the return of the conference our first Chair, Professor Lynn Wilkinson of the next fall, as organizers, Rae Wyse and Jamila Davey have invited German Department, who has had a long and Dr. Natalie Melas to campus to headline “Rethinking Comparison: productive relationship with the Program and Relationality, Intertextuality, Materiality.” who will begin her three-year term next fall. Our academic conversations have also continued in a forum devel- I am writing this letter as the Interim Director of oped by our illustrious former presidents Dusty Hixenbaugh and the Program, standing in for Professor Elizabeth Katie Logan. Our roundtable series still offers the student body the opportunity to discuss theoretical frameworks as a community, Richmond-Garza, who has held the position with but the installments this year also aimed to highlight the work that distinction for something like a dozen years and goes into getting a PhD at UT. We had a meeting about getting an who is enjoying a well-deserved research leave article published and another meeting about the Qualifying Exams, this spring and next fall. We all look forward to with older students sharing their experience with the younger co- her returning to the helm of the Program in the horts. Roundtables will continue this fall with an emphasis on both spring of 2015. theoretical and practical issues. Wayne A. Rebhorn Lest anyone think our year has been one of work alone, we’re im- mensely grateful to Destini Price, our current social chair, for all of the work that she puts into our happy hours, and to all of GRACLS for attending the poetry nights, which we began in 2012 and which will continue in the fall. GRACLS isn’t possible without the involve- ment of the community so I just want to thank everyone for all of their hard work and participation. 2014 - 2015 GRACLS Officers President: Kaitlin Shirley Secretary: Kim Canuette Grimaldi Social Coordinator: Destini Price Conference Organizers: Jamila Davey & Raelene Wyse Committee Representatives: Yucong Hao & Chienyn Chi Page 2 Comparative Literature Spring 2014 Fall 2014 Courses and Degree Recipients Undergraduate Courses Degree Recipients C L 315 Masterworks of World Literature Ernest Kaulbach C L 323 Master of Arts: Squaring the Vienna Circle Katherine Arens The Writer Within Spring 2014: Ofir Galfa Living Epics of India Edeltraud Harzer Clear Nika Setek: Masculinity in Cantar de Mio Cid: The Roles of Metonymy and Hierarchy Classics of World Poetry Michael Hillman Kaitlin Shirley: Imagination and Morality: The Third The Scandinavian Contribution to World Literature Party Spectator in Julie Ou La Novelle Heloise Jakob Holm Jennie Wojtusik: The Brothers Karamazov: Guilt, Supernatural in Traditional Chinese Fiction Chiu-Mi Lai Alterity and the Divine Feminism and Film: Women Filmmakers Raelene Wyse: Exploring Jewish Forms of Speaking in Northern and Central Europe Lynn Wilkinson to God: The Use of the Apostrophe in David Danticat and Diaz Rosenmann-Taub’s Cortejo y Epinicio Jennifer Wilks Graduate Courses Doctor of Philosophy: C L 180K Introduction to Comparative Literature: Proseminar in Methods of Study and Summer 2014: Research Samer Ali Pearl Brilmyer: The Intimate Pulse of Reality: C L 381 The Cannibal Imagination from Columbus to Shakespeare Sciences of Description in Fiction and Hannah Wojciehowski Philosophy, 1870-1920. Metropolitan Visions: Seeing, Subjectivity, and Modernity Alexandra Wettlaufer Francisca Aontonia Sofia Folch- Modernisms and Modernity, 1880-1925 Couyoumdjian: The Marquis de Cuevas Lynn Wilkinson Pushing the boundaries of Self. Michal Raizen: Ecstatic Feedback: Toward A C L 382 Theories of Transnational Cinema Literary Acoustics of the Eastern Blake Atwood Mediterranean and North Africa. Cognitive Cultural Studies and Early Modern Cory Reed Bhavya Tiwari: Beyond English: Translating Modernism inthe Global South. C L 386 Arabic in Europe Samer Ali Madness and Madmen in Russian Literature MIchael Pesenson C L 390 Literary & Cultural Theory Since 1900 Tarek El-Ariss Please visit the Comparative Literature website for course descriptions: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit/courses/