Graduate News Item

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.

Organized into seven interrelated panels – Body Undone; Sex and Queer Corporeality; The Fragmented, the Fugitive; Obscene Bodies; “Law” and Disorder; (Re)Reading Corpus; Monstrous Excess – the participants of "Body in Excess" discussed the body’s infinite unfolding, its emergence and disappearance, across literature, art, film, performance, environment, infrastructure, court cases, and archival documents.

See the Photo Galley tab under News & Events for the program and photos from the well-attended conference.

Sneha defended her dissertation "Multilingual Assamese: Literature, Identity, and Resistance in the Indo-Bangladesh Borderlands" this spring, and will begin teaching in September as an Assistant Professor of English at Fordham University. We wish you the best, Sneha! 

Yuanqiu defended his dissertation "Reading the Voices in and of New Songs from a Jade Terrace" this past June, and will now take up a position as University Lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. We're proud of and excited for you! 

Congratulations to Xingming Wang, who has been awarded a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, and to Sneha Khaund, the winner of a Bevier Dissertation Fellowship. They will hold these fellowships during the 2024-25 academic year.

Xingming and Sneha follow in the footsteps of Thato Magano (Bevier Dissertation Fellowship in 2022-23), Yuanqiu Jiang (Bevier Dissertation Fellowship for 2023-24), and Milan Reynolds (CCA Fellowship for 2023-24). Comp Lit is justly proud of our students' recognition!

Comp Lit congratulates our latest PhDs on the successful defense of their dissertations:

• Rudrani Gangopadhyay for "The Spectral Urban: Visualizing the Indian Metropolis";
• María Elizabeth Rodríguez Beltrán for "Below the Surface of Blackness: Negrura and Communality in the Spanish-, French-, and English-Speaking Caribbean";  and
• Mònica Tomàs White for "Literature and the Cosmopolitical Imagination: Reading with Others for Ecological Justice."

Exceptional work by exceptional students!

The Program in Comparative Literature is pleased to announce that Milan Reynolds is this year's recipient of the Gnarra Family Fellowship in Comparative Literature. The award,  generously established by Comparative Literature alumna Dr. Irene E. Gnarra, is awarded to one or more doctoral candidates in Comparative Literature at Rutgers who are "preparing a dissertation that involves translating a literary work [or literary materials] into English." This year, the faculty committee recognizes the work of Milan Reynolds, who is writing a dissertation on "Decomposing the Voice: Tape Poetics and the Biopolitics of Listening." The committee recognizes the fundamental contributions that translation from both Italian and Spanish makes to the project; the integrity, skill, and beauty of Milan's translations; and honors the sure and exciting contributions his scholarship will make to both Translation Studies and literary studies more broadly.  

Congratulations to Coco on successfully defending her doctoral dissertation "Post-Socialist Modernization in 1980s Chinese Radio Dramas"! And also for her selection as a 2023-24 Barthelomae Fellow in the Rutgers Writing Program. That's two kinds of excellent news!

Comparative Literature is pleased to announce that our doctoral candidates Penny Yeung and Sneha Khaund are the inaugural recipients of the Gnarra Family Fellowship in Translation.

The Gnarra Family Fellowship, established by alumna Dr. Irene E. Gnarra, is awarded to one or more graduate students pursuing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Rutgers and “preparing a dissertation that involves translating a literary work [or literary materials] into English.” Each year, a faculty committee will select a recipient from its cohort after “they have passed all qualifying examinations and are actively preparing [their] dissertation.” 

Of Pain and Passion: Selected Stories of Homen Borgohain, trans. from the Assamese by Sneha Khaund et al.

The Comparative Literature Program celebrates Joseph on the defense of his doctoral dissertation "A Related Island: Afro-Queerness in Haitian and Dominican Literature," and on his new tenure-track position at St. Olaf's College in Northfield, Minnesota.

Best wishes to you, Joseph!

Joseph with his director Prof. Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui at SGS Commencement.

Congratulations to Paulina Barrios, selected as a Dissertation Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis; to Thato Magano, who received a University and Bevier Dissertation Fellowship; and to Yuanqiu Jiang, the winner of a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange--Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. They will hold these awards during the 2022-23 academic year.

Comp Lit celebrates Gabriel Bámgbóṣé on the successful defense of his dissertation "In My Mother's House: African Women Poets and the Radical Translation of Negritude," and on beginning a new tenure-track position in African literature at UC-San Diego.

Good luck, Gabriel!

Gabriel being "hooded" at SGS Commencement.

Congratulations to all!

Virginia L. Conn

Dissertation: The Body Politic: Socialist Science Fiction and the Embodied State

Committee: Anindita Banerjee (Cornell), *Andrew Parker, Song Weijie, Wang Xiaojue

Lidia Levkovitch

Dissertation: Blurred Boundaries: Negotiating Normativity in Late Soviet and Early Post-Soviet Narratives about Alcohol

Committee: Edyta Bojanowska (Yale), Mark Lipovetsky (Columbia), Andrew Parker, *Emily Van Buskirk

Qingfeng Nie

Dissertation: Ordering Urban Space in Luoyang, 600-1000 CE

Committee: Sukhee Lee, Song Weijie, *Wendy Swartz, Wang Xiaojue

Josue Rodriguez

Dissertation: The Spontaneous Afterlife: Surrealism as Translation in Latin American Vanguard Poetry

Committee: Nicola Behrmann, *Karen Bishop, Ignacio Infante (Washington U in St Louis), Marcy Schwartz

Our 2020-2021 PhDs will soon be teaching on three continents! Congratulations to ...

Gabriele Lazzari
Lecturer in Contemporary Literature
University of Surrey (UK)

Qingfeng Nie
Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Literature
New Era University College University (Malaysia)

Jeong Eun "Annabel" We
Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures
Northwestern University

Gabriel Bámgbóṣé has won an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Fellowship for 2021-2022;

Paulina Barrios will hold a Rutgers Graduate Public Humanities Internship for Summer 2021;

Rudrani Gangopadhyay received a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship for 2021-2022;

Thato Magano has begun a dual-doctorate ("cotutelle") program at Leiden University;

Bernie Mendoza will be a Postdoctoral Research Associate for 2021-2022 at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University;

Mònica Tomàs was selected as a Fellow for the Institute for Research on Women’s 2021-2022 seminar;

Ke “Coco” Xu has won a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Doctoral Fellowship for 2021-22.

The Program in Comparative Literature and the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies sponsored a student-led event on February 5th, 2021, under the title “Teaching Practices in the Era of BLM.” The event, organized by María Elizabeth Rodríguez Beltrán, Paulina Barrios, Mònica Tomás, Milan Reynolds, and Amanda González Izquierdo was attended by more than 100 people. We were honored to have Dr. Carolyn Ureña, a Comparative Literature alumnus and now Assistant Dean for Advising at University of Pennsylvania. Along with Dr. Jonathan Daniel Rosa and Dr. Angel Jones, Dr. Ureña spoke on the importance of incorporating pedagogy that addresses systemic racism and white supremacy in educational spaces.

See the grad student blog at https://comparative-lit.blogs.rutgers.edu/ for a video recording of the workshop and follow-up questions and answers.