uci comparative literature phd

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Application Deadline: January 5

Learning Outcomes for Comparative Literature Ph.D.

Plo 1. disciplinary knowledge.

• We train our students to understand diverse topics, approaches to literature and culture, bodies of literary and cultural work, and theories of reading and interpretation. They will train to become experts in a chosen area of specialization. They will also have a sense of interpretive questions and debates current in the profession. This is achieved in coursework, paper writing and revision, speaking at conferences (at UCI and nationally), and reading of professional literature.
• They will demonstrate reading knowledge of two foreign languages through exams or approved translation projects. (We offer five ways to satisfy the language requirement; for the full discussion see http://www.humanities.uci.edu/complit/graduate/ ).
• Students will demonstrate a competence in their field of specialty through course work, seminar papers, independent study, leading to a professional dissertation.
• Students will learn to develop and sustain essay- and book-length research projects. This is achieved by having them revise their MA papers, develop a prospectus and research program for their dissertation, and through work with their dissertation committees.
• Students present their work in fora across campus, organize a graduate student conference in their third year, participate in colloquia and talks on campus and at professional meetings, present their work at academic conferences, connect with scholars outside UCI in their disciplines, and send their work for publication in peer-reviewed professional journals.

PLO 2. Research Methods and Critical Analysis

• Students will gain an understanding of research at the graduate level. This work will be modeled in graduate seminars and in discussions of the student’s work. They also examine and discuss the published scholarship in the areas of their course work and in their own developing areas of interest. In their first year, students typically take nine courses toward their degree where they write seminar essays. One of these is our methodology course, CL200A, which reviews and engages different methodologies in the profession. In their second year, normally, they revise an essay for the MA. Students receive written comments on their work and meet with faculty to discuss their work. They also participate in colloquia and talks that reinforce and model professional constructions of comparative literature work.
• Students will need to develop new methodologies that move the field forward. This is encouraged through interdisciplinary work that draws on diverse disciplines and by bringing students into contact with emergent discourses in and in the periphery of the profession. Fostering a broad range of talks and courses in SOH will be crucial for that work.

PLO 3. Teaching

• Students learn to develop expertise as classroom teachers, to engage students in person, and to see learning as a developmental process. Teaching in Comparative Literature is not only about the delivery of information or content, but rather connects learning with personal engagement and develops ways of thinking, asking questions, and interacting with others. Students learn this work in their own graduate classes where they routinely participate in person and give presentations or lead class discussion. They also take the required pedagogy course E398 in English, where they attend regular staff meetings during the teaching of composition.
• Students need to learn how to develop new and untested curricula that move the profession forward. They need to be encouraged to take risks in class as well as to do what is tested and recognized.
• Our students will be able to: Design courses at the appropriate learning level and develop syllabi for the quarter; Select course materials; Shape writing assignments; Guide students in argumentative writing, teaching them to develop a thesis and to conduct research to support their work; Lecture in class and lead group discussion; Comment on student papers in a way that encourages student to learn and revise; Hold office hours on course content and writing assignments; Grade papers and exams constructively and consistently, and Direct underperforming and/or troubled students to UCI support resources including academic and personal counseling.
• Students learn and develop these skills in their own class experience, through the E28 workshop offered in English for students teaching composition, in 18 quarters of teaching or being a TA in courses taught by regular faculty.

PLO 4. Professionalization. 

Preparing for becoming faculty is part and parcel of the coursework and student activities, including teaching, in our program. Opportunities for professional development include participation in all department committees; representation at faculty meetings; mock interviews (in preparation for job interviews); mock job talks; presentation of dissertation research in a public, on-campus forum; a workshop on academic publishing; presentation of papers at professional conferences both at UCI and elsewhere; and opportunities to apply for fellowships at research libraries and elsewhere.

• Our students should be able to present their work to their peers and to discussion groups and fora. See above for the work we expect in this regard.
• Students will learn to distinguish their suitability for sustained work in the profession from enthusiasm for learning, literature, and culture. This is achieved through consistent engagement with the student at each stage of her or his work.
• Students will learn about the operation of departments and professional bodies; they also learn to organize symposia and events and to be constructive institutional citizens by helping identify and solve issues of concern to the department. Students will do this by participating in department governance and having representational members in all department committees.
• Students will learn to discuss their own and others’ work constructively and professionally. They learn to present their research in preparation for job interviews and professional work. The department offers ongoing workshops to help students transition to professional work environments.

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Recognizing the Biases in Academic Scholarship

In order to critically engage with scholarly discourse, researchers need to be aware of the inherent problems within the system of academic scholarship. Those problems could be anything from standards set by white hegemonic systems to subject terms with implicit biases. By acknowledging these inherent problems, all scholars can participate in improving the academic and public discourse.

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Conference Schedule

Humanities Gateway 1010 (from 9:30AM-7:00PM):

9:30AM-10:00AM Breakfast

10:00AM-10:15AM Introductory Remarks

10:15AM-11:15AM Panel I: “Fragmented Images”

Yeekwan “Vanessa” Wong, “Work in ‘Process’: Accumulation of Times in Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000)” 

Yue Xiaoyang, “Goodbye and Hello: Translocal Zainichi Identity in Matsue Tetsuaki’s Personal Documentary Annyong Kimchi ” 

Respondent: Serk-Bae Suh

11:15AM-11:30AM Break

11:30AM-12:45PM Panel II: “Sights, Songs, and Spoils”

Mo Brouwer, “The Spoils of the Ditch”

Mell Rivera Díaz, “Singing America Brown”

Dylan J. Taylor, “From Torridity to Territory: Visual Complicity, Cartographic Reason, and Spatial Representation after Wynter’s Bojador”

Respondent: Liron Mor

12:45PM-1:45PM Lunch

1:45PM-2:45PM Panel III: “Sensational Presents”

Anannya Mukherjee, “There’s Something About Larry: Canon, Conspiracy, and the Cosmic Cycle of the One Direction Fandom”

Haley Suh, “Sensational Little Women” 

Respondent: Jane O. Newman

2:45PM-3:00PM Break

3:00PM-4:15PM Panel IV: “Uses, Limits, and Scenes”

Jameson Austin Leopold, Introduction to “Man Over: Chrysippus, Oedipus, and the End of the Law of the Father”

Morgan Slade, “The Limits of Defense”

Respondent: Catherine Malabou 

4:15PM-4:30PM Break

4:30PM-6:00PM Keynote: Jackie Wang, “Thinking Extemporaneously" 

6:00PM-7:00PM Dinner

Speaker biographies here.

Verano Community Center (from 8:00PM onwards):

8:00PM Reception & Dance Party

Speaker Bios

Keynote speaker:.

Jackie Wang  is a poet, scholar, multimedia artist, and Assistant Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where she researches race, surveillance technology, and the political economy of prisons and police. She is the author of  Carceral Capitalism  (Semiotext(e), 2018), the poetry collection  The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void  (Nightboat Books, 2021, National Book Award Finalist), and the forthcoming experimental essay collection  Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun  (Semiotext(e), 2023).

Graduate Students:

Mo Brouwer is a grad student in the English department studying early modern representations of rural labour.

Boz Deseo Garden (they/them/it/its) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice works within the semiotic, cinematic, and psychoanalytical impasses articulated by Afropessimist thought. Through video, sculpture, photography, and writing Garden’s work studies the Slave as the unthought heuristic for signification, mattering, and the drive of the Subject.

Jameson Austin Leopold (they/them/he/him) is a PhD student in Culture and Theory studying psychoanalysis, sexual violence, and the limits of representation. They are a neurotic Freudian, a rhetorician of power, and a walking, talking scandal.

Anannya Mukherjee is a 6th year PhD candidate in the UCI Department of Comparative Literature. Her scholarly interests include popular entertainment, cross-platform internet culture, fandom, folklore and folk epistemology, unreality, and the production of the self and the other in narrative.

Mell Rivera Díaz is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of California, Irvine. His academic work explores the development of the ideology of mestizaje from the early XXth century to the present through a focus on Puerto Rican poetry––written on the island and the diaspora–– in Spanish, English, and Spanglish. You can find some of his work in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies and Diálogos: Revista del Departamento de Filosofía de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. He is the author of a book of poetry titled de ir sé que vine .

Morgan Slade is a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature with emphasis in Critical Theory.

Haley Suh is a PhD student in English at UC Irvine. Her current research focuses on Victorian literature and culture, novel theory and narrative theory, genre, and Marxist theory and Psychoanalysis.

Dylan J. Taylor is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. His current research engages critical philosophy of race, aesthetics, deconstruction, and media archeology to interrogate the often violent and ironic conditions by which putatively world-representational technologies become codified and mobilized as such—and thus how the world itself comes, in turn, to be understood as that which is internally available to its own representation by determinable, phenomenal means.

Yeekwan “Vanessa” Wong is a PhD student in the East Asian Studies department at University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include feminist theory, gender studies, postcolonial studies, modern and contemporary Chinese literature and film.

Yue Xiaoyang is a second-year PhD student in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. His research interest is the selfhood in Japanese personal documentary and Japanese I-novel. He graduated from Waseda University with an MA degree in film studies. His master thesis focuses on how the exploration of self in Kawase Naomi’s personal documentaries undermine conventional notions of family, women’s roles and locality in Japanese society.

2023 conference organizers: Diya Mathur, Carolin Huang, Chenglin Lee

Conference Artwork

The beautiful cyanotype images used for our conference are created by sarah hoenicke flores. (@blueshadowpainting on Instagram)

Call for Papers:

UCI Comparative Literature Graduate Conference 2023

“Work in Progress”

Instead of predetermining the parameters that will shape the day’s focus, the submissions are what will give it form.  Our work is shaped not just by us, but also by our colleagues with whom we read, learn, and study. The trajectory of the conference will thus be produced collaboratively. During the pandemic and the strike, we have been wholly yet unexpectedly afflicted by the shortage of time, space, and capacity to think together beyond the seminar setting. With this conference, our small attempt to atone for this shortage, we invite UCI graduate students to submit any project or ideas that currently interest them.

We are open to dissertations in progress, afterthoughts, preliminary notes, and annotations. Thought left in disarray, without end, or otherwise in need of unraveling are especially welcome. Whatever might be conventionally “out of place” is at ease here. This can take the form of an academic paper, a dissertation chapter, a creative piece, reflections on a topic, amongst others.

To submit, email c [email protected] a 150-300 word abstract, a title, a short bio, including your name and department, by M arch 28th, 2023. The event is set to take place on M ay, 5th 2023 and decisions are to be made at the start of April 2023. A ll disciplines are welcome to submit.

The conference is sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature, the International Center for Writing and Translation, the Humanities Center, the Culture and Theory Program, the Department of European Studies, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and UCI Critical Theory.

Department of Comparative Literature

Become part of our vibrant community..

Internationally renowned for leadership in the field of continental literary theory, Comparative Literature at UCI today is a place of openness and risk—a spacious department, good for thinking, collectivity, and contestation. Our current interests include the possibilities for engaging in politics broadly speaking, for rethinking the present and unmapping a world that seems to be already mapped through disciplinary structures such as area studies, and for interanimating scholarship, teaching, and activism. Faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates work together in our department to push vocabularies, to create new conceptual frames of reference, and to construct different genealogies. Psychoanalysis, phenomenology, subaltern studies, feminism and queer studies, materialism, critical race theory, de/post/neo/and X-coloniality, globalectics: these are a few of the analytic frames that inform our work. Translation broadly applied enables us to make moves: across languages, media, geographic borders, and political visions. While various faculty work with site-specific literatures and film--from Argentina and other Latin American nations, China and Hong Kong, Europe, Iran, Japan, Kenya, the U.S., and other locations--we don't offer these materials as geopolitically fixed archives. Rather, we place cultural practices within dynamic global exchanges, both historical and contemporary. Through courses, conferences, collaborative projects, and digital media, Comparative Literature at UCI advances critical cosmopolitanism—a kind of worldliness cultivated by creative engagements with power, peoples, and their symbolic practices. We invite you to explore our projects and programs, and hope you will find ways to join us in our ventures.

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Department of Comparative Literature University of California, Irvine Irvine CA 92697 United States

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Comparative Literature Graduate Conference

2022 Comparative Literature Graduate Conference

CONSUMMATUM EST DISCOURSES OF THE END

Keynote Prof. Donna Jones, UC Berkeley Friday, May 27, 4:30 PM Dinner and Reception to follow both events

Closing Remarks Prof. Horacio Legras, UCI Saturday, May 28, 4:15 PM Location: HIB 135

Contact: [email protected]

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2023-24 edition, comparative literature, b.a..

Comparative Literature is the study of the world through its literatures and cultures. Critical theory and translation provide frameworks for making moves: across languages, media, geographic borders, and political visions.  In the Department of Comparative Literature, graduate and undergraduate students immerse themselves in national and regional literatures—of Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, and Europe—while simultaneously placing those cultural practices within dynamic global exchanges, both historical and contemporary. Through courses, conferences, collaborative projects, and digital media, Comparative Literature at UCI advances critical cosmopolitanism—a kind of worldliness cultivated by creative engagements with power, peoples, and their symbolic practices. From novel to poetry, drama to film, monuments to political protest, comics to audio, urban space to visual culture—Comparative Literature introduces students to global cultures in the widest sense, and to the theoretical lenses essential for putting them in perspective. Writing, speaking, visualizing, blogging, social networking: through multiple media Comparative Literature students at every level interpret and engage with other academics and publics outside the academy. Together, students of Comparative Literature strive for a continually evolving practice of critical awareness and political action: a global literacy and citizenship through which to face the challenges of life and work in the 21st century.

The Department seeks to foster and maintain a lively community that includes undergraduates, graduates, and faculty, and to that end holds a variety of meetings and activities so that majors can get to know one another and other members of the Department.

Planning a Program of Study

The Department offers close consultation for academic planning. All students should plan courses of study with faculty advisors. Students who wish to pursue double majors, special programs, or study abroad are urged to seek advising as early as possible.

All students must meet the University Requirements .

All students must meet the school requirements ., department requirements for the major.

Residence Requirement for the Comparative Literature Major: COM LIT 190W and four additional upper-division courses in Comparative Literature or other upper-division courses offered in the School of Humanities must be completed successfully at UCI. By petition, two of the four may be taken through the UC Education Abroad Program, providing course content is approved by the appropriate program advisor or chair.

Courses in Comparative Literature train students to read critically, to think and write analytically in a variety of genres and media, to learn languages, and to do independent research, always in a global context. This course of study helps qualify majors for careers in education, international relations, law, government, technology, communications and media, nonprofit organizations, and publishing. In recent years graduates from the Department of Comparative Literature have won Fulbrights, gone on to law school, nursing school, and master’s programs in social work or psychology, and found jobs in public relations firms, done editorial work, and conducted clinical research in pharmaceutical firms. The Comparative Literature major is also excellent preparation for an academic career. Graduates have gone on to Ph.D. programs at Michigan, Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, UCLA, UC Berkeley, and other schools. Many also teach English, world literature, and modern foreign languages at the high-school level.

• Comparative Literature, M.A.
• Comparative Literature, Minor
• Comparative Literature, Ph.D.

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2023-2024 Catalogue

A PDF of the entire 2023-2024 catalogue.

Catherine Malabou

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Graduate Student Spotlight: Emily Waller Singeisen

Learn more about Singeisen’s research interests below:

“My current research examines privately printed illustrated English translations of banned literature from Greco-Roman antiquity, including titles such as The Golden Ass, Mimes of the Courtesans, and Daphnis and Chloe. By studying the transmission of these texts, I intend to highlight the way in which the publications stage an alternate dialogue on sexuality—and the history of sexuality. In so doing, they also facilitate an alternate discursive community in the first part of the twentieth century amongst those who saw nonnormative and taboo sexual expression reflected in the canon of ancient literature.

“Two illustrators from the 1920s that have been particularly inspiring in my work are Clara Tice and the little-known Charles Cullen. Known as the ‘Queen of Greenwich Village,’ Tice illustrated a number of privately published erotic books, including Pierre Louys’ lesbian poetry, ‘Songs of Bilitis,’ Voltaire’s Candide, and Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin. She was targeted insistently by Anthony Comstock for the so-called obscenity of her work, but she responded to threats of censorship with a playful defiance that has made her a particular favorite in my research. I have also been captivated by Charles Cullen’s illustrations for Mimes of the Courtesans. Cullen worked with translator A.L. Hillman on the project, and, both queer men in New York in the 1920s, they used the edition as an opportunity to insist on the beauty of “natural” sexual desires and the prevalence of queer love in the ancient world.

“As a queer woman, the research I do is not only intellectual but also deeply personal—feminist and queer theory is about a liberatory politics that extends beyond the ivory tower, and I intend to contribute to that liberation with all of my research and writing. While my research straddles both literary studies and the visual arts, I am always drawn to creating projects that span these disciplines and mobilize my research in the communities I am a part of. Last year, through a microgrant from the Society for Classical Studies, I had the privilege of working with my sister, who is an artist and activist against sexual violence, on the project ‘Mythic Women, Modern Incarnations.’ The project was a guerilla art installation combining sculptures inspired by mythic women with feminist receptions of the myths to raise awareness of the emancipatory potential of classical imagery.”