Faculty News Item

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 literature as a multilingual and pluralistic space. Through forty-three chapters, it examines the continuities and divergences within Indian literary traditions, highlighting contact zones and interchanges across various languages and genres. The Handbook provides an overview of the current state of modern Indian writing and features a range of texts and approaches from across India's many languages and literary traditions.

Congratulations to Professors Anjaria and Nerlekar for their superb work!

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 culture, history, politics, and ecologies is especially welcome in her analysis of the creative works she studies.” — Craig Santos Perez, author of Navigating CHamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization.

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 published articles on sexuality, queer identities in Latino/a America, and melodrama.

Prof. Sifuentes-Jáuregui teaches a variety of undergraduate courses on Latin American and U.S. Latino/a literature, film, performance theory, and cultural practices. His graduate seminars include topics such as interrogating critical concepts in gender and queer theory as they relate to a broader American context; melodrama as hegemonic discourse in Latin American cultures; deconstruction and master narratives; representations of race, sexuality and gender in the cultural production of the nation; also, U.S. Latino/a identities and postcolonial theory.

His next two research project deals with the relationship between of melodrama and masochism in a series of Latino American novels, performances, films, and essays, as well as another project on the intersection between Latino literature and psychoanalysis.

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 Jungians on Myth (2002), Midlife Transformation in Literature and Film: Jungian and Eriksonian Perspectives (2012), and Cryptic Subtexts in Modern Literature and Film: Secret Messages and Buried Treasure (2018), all published by Routledge. 

Steven is survived by his wife, Janet Walker, who first met him in fall 1963. Together they pursued an intellectual journey to Harvard as graduate students and then to Rutgers as professors of Comparative Literature.

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 many publications is The Word Unheard: Legacies of Anti-Semitism in German Literature and Culture (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011).

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, documentary prose, and their relationship to the novel; in relationships between personality concepts and literary character; in the dual process of narrative creation and self-construction; as well as in the variety of literary responses to life’s ethical challenges, particularly in relation to twentieth-century historical catastrophes.

Her research interests include the prose of Lydia Ginzburg; narratives of the Gulag (especially Varlam Shalamov); representations of war and siege; Russian Formalism; gender and sexuality; the culture of the thaw, and of perestroika; memory and history; selfhood and ethics. In addition to prose, she is also interested in Russian and Soviet film, poetry, and twentieth-century Czech literature and film.