The Department of Comparative Literature provides a broad range of courses in European and non-European literatures, offering a full, rich, global view of world literature and cultures. In cooperation with related departments in the humanities, the departmental offerings reflect current interdisciplinary approaches to literary study, such as hermeneutics, semiotics, deconstruction, cultural criticism, Marxism, reception aesthetics, feminism and psychoanalysis.
The department benefits from close ties with Cornell's Society for the Humanities, a center of teaching, research and lectures that provides a unique, historic catalyst for critical and theoretical reflection on campus. The department also has vital connections to the School of Criticism and Theory, a six-week summer program based at Cornell that features leading figures in critical thought, as well as to the Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM), a Cornell research institute dedicated to reflection on the global and plural nature of modernities.
Department websiteJunting Huang
Graduate Student
Education
M.A. Cornell University, US
M.St. University of Oxford, UK
B.A. Tsinghua University, China
Departments and programs
Jonathan Davenport
Graduate Student
Hannah Cole
Graduate Student
Jorge Cartaya
Graduate Student
Elias Beltran
Graduate Student, ELSO Writing and Presenting Tutor
Education
BA, Liberal Arts & the Humanities, Bard College/BPI '17
Departments and programs
Oliver Aas
Graduate Student
Parisa Vaziri
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Studies
Publications
"Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery" University of Minnesota Press, 2023.
"False Differends: Racial Slavery and the Genocidal Example." Philosophy Today, Feb. 2022
"No One's Memory: Blackness at the Limits of Comparative Slavery." Project on Middle East Political Science 44: Racial Formations in Africa and the Middle East: A Transregional Approach, Sept. 2021
"Thaumaturgic, Cartoon Blackface." Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, "Cultural Constructions of Race and Racism in the Middle East and North Africa," issue 10, no.1, Spring 2021
“Arb’ain and Bakhshu’s Lament: African Slavery in the Persian Gulf and the Violence of Cultural Form.” Antropologia: Racial Questions: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Dynamics in Africa and the Middle East, vol. 7, no. 1, April 2020
“On ‘Saidiya’: Indian Ocean World Slavery and Blackness Beyond Horizon.” Qui Parle, vol. 28, no. 2, Dec. 2019
“Pneumatics of Blackness: Nasir Taqvai’s Bad-i Jin and Modernism’s Anthropological Drive.” Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception. Edited by Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari. Routledge, 2018
“Windridden: On the Nonvalue of Nonidentification.” Liquid Blackness, vol. 3, no. 6, 2017, pp. 66-79.
“Blackness and the Metaethics of the Object.” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, no. 29, 2016.
Education
Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine