Open House for Incoming Students

Incoming students, please join us for the Comparative Literature Program Open House during First-Year Orientation. The event will be held on September 9, 2021, 2:30 pm, Reed 107.

Comparative Literature is a challenging interdisciplinary program that gathers the best faculty from across campus in promoting the study of literatures in different languages as well as the relationship between literature and other spheres of human activity. It also embraces broader inquiry into the relationship between literature and other disciplines and practices, such as the visual and performing arts, philosophy, history, the social sciences, religion, and mathematics. The program provides students with ample opportunity to study literature and culture from a wide array of critical perspectives. Among these are rhetoric and poetics, translation and reception, film theory and media studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, theories of ethnic and national identities, gender and queer theory, and psychoanalysis.

Comparative Literature majors are expected to develop competence in at least one language other than their native language, and to work with original texts in more than one language. Students devise and pursue a rigorous program of study tailored to their particular interests and intellectual strengths in close consultation with one or more faculty mentors. We also offer a minor in translation.