Faculty News

Prof. Nerlekar the co-winner of the 2025 Wellek Prize!

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures, co-edited by Ulka Anjaria and our own Anjali Nerlekar, has been awarded the 2025 René Wellek Prize for Best Edited Essay Collection by the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). This prestigious prize recognizes outstanding books in comparative literature that cross national, linguistic, geographic, or disciplinary borders. The handbook, published by Oxford University Press in 2024, offers a comprehensive exploration of Indian litera...

Prof. Maurer publishes The Ocean on Fire

We congratulate our colleague Professor Anaïs Maurer on the publication of her powerful and timely book The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists (Duke University Press, 2024). “In The Ocean on Fire, Anaïs Maurer brings together an impressive archive of primary and secondary sources to highlight the underexamined field of Pacific literature through two of the most urgent and profound issues: nuclearism and climate change. Maurer’s deep knowledge of Pacific c...

Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui our new Comp Lit chair!

We are very pleased to announce that Prof. Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui has agreed to chair the Program in Comparative Literature. His research interests include Latino/a Literature and Culture, XXth-Century Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies, gender theory and sexuality studies, and psychoanalysis. He is author of Transvestism, Masculinity, and Latin American Literature (Palgrave, 2002), and The Avowal of Difference: Queer Latino American Narratives (SUNY Press, 2014). He has also publis...

In Memorium Prof. Steven F. Walker

Our beloved colleague Prof. Steven F. Walker passed away quietly in his sleep at the age of 80 on December 12, 2024. He retired from Rutgers in 2021 after decades of service to Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and the SAS Honors program. Prof. Walker introduced generations of Rutgers students to the study of myth, ancient and modern. He is the author of many books and articles on classical Greek and South Asian writing and on Jungian criticism, among them Jung and the Jungia...

Prof. Martha Helfer wins SAS Teaching Award

Congratulations to our colleague MARTHA HELFER, winner of the 2019 SAS Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Teaching (Professor Category). Martha is a Professor of German and core member of the Comparative Literature faculty. Her interests include literature of the Age of Goethe, Romantic aesthetic and philosophical theories, German intellectual history (18th-20th century), gender and subjectivity, philosophical approaches to literature, and German Jewish Studies. Among her man...

Professor van Buskirk wins the AATSEEL Best Book Prize

Congratulations to our colleague Emily van Buskirk, whose Lydia Ginzburg's Prose: Reality in Search of Literature (Princeton UP 2016) has won the 2018 prize for the best book in literary studies from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages. Professor Van Buskirk specializes in Russian prose of the Soviet period. Much of her research focuses on questions of self-writing, genre, and concepts of the self. She is interested in diaries, autobiographies, memoir, d...