NEWS FOR 2008-2009

5/08 Recent Faculty News

Jacques Lezra will begin his appointment as Chair of the Department as of 9/1/08. Professor Lezra is a Professor of Comparative Literature as well as a Professor of Spanish and Portuguese. He is a specialist in literary theory and in the literary, visual and philosophical culture of the early modern period. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University in 1990, and has taught at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, at Yale, Harvard, and at the Bread Loaf School of English.

The Department thanks Nancy Ruttenburg for her years of energetic and productive service as Chair of Comp Lit, congratulates her on her Guggenheim Fellowship for 2008-2009, and wishes her well in working on her new book.

Ulrich Baer was appointed NYU's Vice Provost for Globalization and Multicultural Affairs where he directs all of NYU's semester-long international study sites and supports NYU's multicultural and international centers.
John Hamilton's new book, Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language, was released in April by Columbia University Press.
Daniel Javitch's co-edited book, The Way it Wasn't: From the Files of James Laughlin, was singled out by Art Forum as one of the ten best books of 2007.
Avital Ronell recieved an Alexander von Humboldt-Stiffing grant for her work on German philosophy, and has been promoted to the position of University Professor at NYU.
Nancy Ruttenberg was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on her new book on Dostoevsky and the culture of American democracy.

5/08 Recent Graduate Student Awards

Congratulations to our many accomplished grads!

Haytham Bahoora received the Arts and Science Prize Teaching Fellowship for 2008-2009.
Jennifer Cayer received the GSAS Summer Predoctoral Fellowship.
Ipek Celik received the 2008-2009 Penfield Fellowship.
Jieun Chank received the 2008-2009 Anais Nin Memorial Fellowship.
Robyn Creswell received a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH for the summer of 2008.
Bregtje Hartendorf-Wallach received the 2007-2008 Anais Nin Memorial Fellowship.
Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz received a DAAD German Studies Research Grant for the summer of 2008.
Jennifer Kaplan received the ARCE Fellowship to Egypt for the 2007-2008 term.
Michael Kramer received the Robert Holmes Travel and Research Awards for African Scholarship for the summer of 2008.
John Patrick-Leary received the Patricia Dunn Lehrman Fellowship and the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for the 2008-2009 term.
Katharina Piechocki received the NYU Global Fellowship (for a two-month period: June and July 2008 at NYU-in-Florence).
Pu Wang received a 4th Liu Li-an Poetry Award.
Erica Weitzman received a Freie Universitat exchange/scholarship for the 2008-2009 term.

NEWS FROM PREVIOUS YEARS

5/31/07 Recent Graduate Student Awards

Congratulations to our many accomplished grads!

Christopher Apap received the NYU Dean's Dissertation Fellowship for 2007-08.
Magali Armillas-Tiseyra received the NYU University of Cambridge Mainzer Fellowship in Gender Studies for the Lent 2007 term.
Ipek Celik received the Kostas and Eleni Ourani Foundation Research Fellowship and Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. The Newcombe is administered through the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and is awarded yearly to only thirty PhD candidates in the nation.
Lori Cole received the Tinker Field Research Grant for Summer 2007 and participated in the IFA-GSAS Graduate Forum on Forms of Seeing.
Jennifer Kaplan received a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Cairo.
Anna Krakus received a Visiting Fulbright from Sweden.
Micaela Kramer was nominated to be the Dean's Fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell this summer.

5/01/07 AAAS Elects Richard Sieburth

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) has elected Richard Sieburth, professor of Comparative Literature and French, as fellow. Sieburth shares the honor of this year's election with four other NYU faculty, former Vice President Albert Gore, Jr., former Supreme Course Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The mission of AAAS is to "advance science and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people".

9/06 Graduate Update

Susan Matthias (PhD. January '06) has been awarded the 2006 Elizabeth Constantinides Translation Prize by the Modern Greek Studies Association for translation from modern Greek of Six Nights on the Acropolis, the only completed novel by Nobel laureate poet George Seferis. The translation has been accepted as the first novel to be published in "The Modern Greek Literature Library," a new series from Cosmos Publishing.

7/06 New Faculty Members

We're happy to announce six(!) new faculty members. Having long been "associated faculty" and valuable contributors to the department and discipline of comparative literature, Professors Emily Apter, Gabriela Basterra, Ulrich Baer, and Avital Ronell became voting joint faculty in January, 2006. With one foot in their original departments and one in Comp Lit, they now join fully in our comparative mix. The exciting results of last year's faculty searches, Assistant Professors Cristina Vatulescu and Hala Halim also join our department in 2006-07. Professor Vatulescu's research interest include aesthetics and politics; artistic and extra-artistic genres, in particular the novel, autobiography, and the police file; Russian and Eastern European twentieth century culture; cinema and visual culture. A joint appointment with Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Professor Halim will begin in January 2007. Her first Comp Lit course will be a graduate seminar "Postcoloniality and Translation" and her cross-listed undergraduate course from MEIS will be "Topics in Modern Arabic Culture: Globalization and the Middle East."

7/06 New Faculty Books

Professor Richard Sieburth's latest book from Archipelago Books, Stroke by Stroke, is a pairing of two of Henri Michaux's most suggestive texts. Translated from the French, these two pieces are poetic explorations of animals, humans and the origins of language. In addition, Sieburth has included Michaux's ideogrammic ink drawings to illustrate the explosive and contemplative nature of the writer's verbal and pictorial gestures.

Professor Mark Sanders's book Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory has recently been published by Continuum International Publishing Group. Concentrating on the thought of one of the world's most provocative and original theorists, this book delves into Spivak's theories on deconstruction, Marxisim, feminism and issues of postcoloniality and globalization. A concise, comprehensive and accessible text, Sanders's latest work explores Spivak's own questions about literacy and intellectual responsibility, and also includes a new interview with Spivak herself.

6/06 Kamau Brathwaite Wins Griffin Poetry Prize!

At a gala event in Toronto, Ontario, Professor Kamau Brathwaite was awarded the prestigious Griffen Poetry Prize for his new volume of widely-acclaimed poetry Born to Slow Horses. The Canadian-based Griffin Prize is the world's most valuable prize for poetry. In the course of his career as a major contemporary poet and voice of the Caribbean, Professor Brathwaite has also been awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Cuba's Casa de las Americas Premio, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Fulbright Fellowship.

We are pleased to announce the promotion of Professor Ana Maria Dopico to Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese; of Professor Mikhail Iampolski to Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies; and of Professor Xudong Zhang to Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of East Asian Studies. Professor Dopico's new book, Houses Divided: Genealogical Imaginaries and Political Visions in the Americas, is forthcoming from Duke University Press, and she is editing a two volume selection of Jose Marti's prose works for the Library of Latin America. Professor Iampolski received the Andrei Bely Prize in Literature for his Physiology of the Symbolic, released last year. A collection of Professor Zhang's essays since 1985, Traces of Criticism: Essays in Cultural Theory and Cultural Criticism, has recently appeared, as has his Cultural Identity in the Age of Globalization.

Professor Kamau Brathwaite's latest book of poetry, from Wesleyan University Press, Born to Slow Horses, is a collection of poetic meditations on islands and exile, language and ritual, and the force of personal and historical passion and grief. In addition to unearthing the roots of the Carribean culture, Brathwaite's experiences with New York City and 9/11 provide a modern influence on his work. The subject of Brathwaite's poems run the gamut from the slave children to BMW luxury cars. This eclectic mix provides insight into the author's experiences with the history of the Carribean and the modern western world.

CHINA TRIP! Professor Xudong Zhang organized and led a delegaton of ten NYU graduate students to Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Beijing to participate in Sino-US symposia on comparative literature. Click here for pictures and reports of the goings-on.

Professor John Chioles's book Romeo the Pothead and Juliet the Snitch has recently been published (2004, in Greek) by Kastaniotis Editions in Athens. Weaving philosophy and humanity, its twelve whimsical stories bring the likes of Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Heliodorus, and Shakespeare into the lives of street urchins, displaced persons, and haunted students. As the Kastaniotis description of Romeo the Pothead and Juliet the Snitch notes, "A burning fire hovers over these short stories. The conflagration is both real and figurative, as deportation, immigration, exile...." (more)

The Department of English at Morehouse College in Atlanta is sponsoring a Caribbean Literary Studies Symposium, to be held April 13-14, whose focus, and one of whose participants, will be Professor Kamau Brathwaite. A call for papers ("proposals are sought for individual papers or panel sessions, which focus on the work of the internationally renowned Caribbean poet, cultural critic, and historian Kamau Brathwaite") can be found here.

Zoltan Markus, who received his Ph.D. from the Department, is in the midst of his first year at Vassar College, where he is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in English. (He is also in the midst of his first year as a parent, proof of which can be found on our Photo Album page.)

Professor Mikhail Iampolski has recieved the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize in Literature. The award, Russia's first independent literary prize, has been awarded his new book, The Return of the Leviathan: Political Theology, Representation of Power & the End of the Old Regime, published by the New Literary Review in Moscow.

Professor Richard Sieburth's new translation of Georg Büchner's Lenz has just been published, in a lovely edition, by Archipelago Books. Harold Bloom has called the volume "both a superb version and a startling interpretation of a great and vital work"; Michael Palmer writes that, "for the first time, thanks to Richard Sieburth's astonishing skills, we have a version in English that respects and communicates the radical inventiveness and stylistic singularity of the original."

Professor Nancy Ruttenburg has been invited to deliver the prestigious Ian Watt Lecture on the History and Theory of the Novel at Stanford University. The lecture, entitled "Simplifying the Novel," will be given on January 18th at the Center for the Study of the Novel, which has recently fallen under the direction of Professor Margaret Cohen.

Professor Nancy Ruttenburg will deliver one of two keynote addresses at a reception for the Fales Library Graduate Student Exhibit "Circles and Circulations in the Revolutionary Atlantic World." Professor Ruttenburg's lecture, entitled "Carwin the Inalienable Alien," will be followed by another, "Fever," given by Professor Samuel Otter of the English Department at Berkeley; the two lectures will be followed in turn by the reception. The event, to be held in the Fales Library Reading Room, begins at 4:00 on Friday, October 22.

Ifeona Fulani and Rosamond S. King, both of whom received their Ph.D.s from the Department, are participants in a conference entitled "Yari Yari Pamberi: Black Women Writers Dissecting Globalization" to be held October 12-16. "The goal of this conference," its organizers state, "is to expand and intensify debates around globalization, explore possibilities and contradictions, continue strengthening ties among women of African descent, promote their literature, create a platform for young emerging writers and raise public awareness about global developments." Fulani will be among those addressing the question of "the impact of new technologies and globalization on Literature, Publishing and Distribution"; King will take part in a reading and discussion at the Poets' House. Other speakers include Professor Manthia Diawara, Maya Angelou, Lucille Clifton, Octavia Butler, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, and Edwidge Danticat.

Professors Andrew Ross and Kristin Ross are the editors of Anti-Americanism, a collection of essays published in October by NYU Press. The volume, whose contributors include, in addition to its editors, Professor Ana Maria Dopico and CompLit associated faculty member Mary Louise Pratt, offers considerations of anti-American opinion and sentiment in Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, East Asia, and the United States, and provides what Neil Smith calls "the best, most comprehensive and most critical survey of anti-Americanism available."

2004-2005 Graduate Honors and Awards:

Haytham Bahoora
Recipient of a FLAS Fellowship to be used in the 04-05 AY.

Elizabeth Beardon
Awarded the 2004-05 Anais Nin Memorial Fellowship in the Department of Comparative Literature.

Jieun Chang
Awarded the American Association of University Women International Fellowship.

Beth Coleman
Awarded the Ford Foundation Fellowship for research to be used in the 04-05 AY.

Anna Brigido-Corachan
Awarded Fellowship at the Summer School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University.

Alberto Gabriele
Awarded the Penfield Fellowship.

Birgit Kaiser
For the 04-05 AY, she is the recipient of a DFG Research Scholarship, to be in residence at European University Viadrina in Frankfurt Oder.

Jessie Labov
Awarded a Post Doctoral Fellowship in the Stanford Humanities Program.

Francesca Momplaisir
Awarded Fulbright Fellowship to work on her novel in Ghana.

Mike Norton
Awarded the Dean's Dissertation Fellowship for the 04-05 Academic Year.

Mariano Siskind
Awarded the American Comparative Literature Association's A. Owen Aldridge Prize for his paper "Captain Cook and the discovery of Antarctica's modern specificity: towards a genealogy of globalization," to be published in Comparative Literature Studies (Penn State University Press).

2003-2004 Job News:

Beth Coleman
Offered position at UC Irvine, Film and NewMedia Program, Assistant Professor. Offered position at MIT, Writing and New Media, Assistant Professor.

Christopher Johnson (PhD '01)
Harvard University, Comparative Literature Department, Assistant Professor.

Rosa King (PhD '01)
Long Island University, African Studies, Assistant Professor.

Mary Helen McMurran
University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, English Dept., Assistant Professor. University of Chicago, Harper-Schmidt Fellow.

Zoltan Markus (PhD '02)
Vassar College, Dept. of English.

Bronwyn Mills
Beykent \niversitesi Istambul Turkey, Dept. of Language and Literature, Assistant Professor.

Chris Winks (PhD '02)
Queens College/CUNY, Dept. of Comp Lit, Assistant Professor.