Biennial Graduate Conference

The Rutgers Program in Comparative Literature presented its 2025 biennial graduate conference with the theme “Body in Excess,” turning to the entanglement between body and text already implicit in the etymology of “corpus” as well as the paradoxical condition in which the body exists inasmuch as it exceeds its own physical and discursive boundaries.

What is ecocriticism and how does it enable a different imagination of the earth as well as of literature?

Hélène Mouchard-Zay is the daughter of Jean Zay (1904–1944), Education Minister in the 1936 Front Populaire government, imprisoned by the Vichy regime in 1940, and murdered by the “Milice” four years later. She has been involved in the establishment of her father’s archives and in the publication of his writings.

What are Postcolonial and Decolonial thought? Do they emerge out of a shared anti-colonial struggle, reflect unique valences of an encounter with empire, or constitute wholly unique epistemological orientations?

The conference invites participants to think about (de)coloniality beyond the geographical limit of the Americas, the temporal constraint of modernity, and the monolingualism of hegemonic languages and dominant disciplinary frameworks.

Jackson is the author of 'South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation', which she will discuss before sharing some of her exciting new work on the literatures of post-democracy. 

Please join us for what will be a memorable discussion of film, justice, historical change, and "racial modernity."

This presentation will highlight the role that translation and multilingualism played in opening up discussions and theories of modernism within the South Asian literary canons of Bengali, Hindi, and English in the early to mid-20th century.

This conference explores how books have shaped human lives and how people have shaped books, from the history of the book to the future of reading, from authorship to readership, from the materiality of books to the immateriality of texts.

The novel has come to dominate our understanding of South Asian writing in English and even of aspects of world literary relations as such. This lecture moves away from that terrain in order to examine the problems of poetic expression in contemporary South Asian Anglophone writing, especially the ghazal, and its place in the long history of vernacular commitment—the vast cultures of poetic expression in the Indian languages.

Professor Hayot will be discussing issues that are central to comparative literary study today: literary “worldedness,” the possibilities of global history, and the kind of data that literature is or may aspire to be.

New Feelings: Power and Aesthetics Today” is a lecture and roundtable exploring Steven Shaviro’s analysis of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and its implications for 21st-century aesthetics

This panel explores evolving frameworks in Caribbean studies, moving beyond traditional concepts of creolization and créolité. The speakers will present new critical directions that challenge and expand the boundaries of Caribbean cultural and intellectual discourse.

This talk explores Vladimir Nabokov’s famous “Conradical” switch from writing in Russian to writing exclusively in English. Dr. Maria Kager analyzes how Nabokov’s multilingual background shaped the development of his fictional characters, arguing that their linguistic complexity would have been unimaginable without his own experience of language transition.