Department of English and Comparative Literature

Department of English and Comparative Literature is an academic unit that brings together study of English literature, world literatures, and comparative literary theory. It connects the work of scholars engaged with figures such as William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf while also engaging with traditions linked to Homer, Dante Alighieri, Molière, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Gabriel García Márquez. The department situates literary study in relation to intellectual currents represented by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon.

History

Founded amid curricular reforms of the 19th century, the department evolved alongside institutions such as Oxford University, Harvard University, Columbia University, University of Cambridge and Sorbonne University. Early faculty drew on philological methods associated with Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Jacob Grimm while later scholars integrated criticism influenced by New Criticism, Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Marxism and the work of Raymond Williams. Professionalization linked the department to organizations like the Modern Language Association, the American Comparative Literature Association and the British Academy. Major curricular shifts paralleled debates following events such as the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the World War I and the Civil Rights Movement.

Academic Programs

Undergraduate offerings range from introductory surveys of authors like Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Robert Frost to advanced seminars on poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney. Graduate tracks include comparative studies engaging literatures from India, China, Japan, Russia and Latin America with coursework informed by theorists like Antonio Gramsci, Roland Barthes, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha. Professional development links to career networks associated with The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Penguin Random House and Oxford University Press. Interdisciplinary collaborations often involve departments such as History, Philosophy, Film Studies, Political Science and Women's Studies.

Faculty and Research

Faculty research profiles span medievalists working on texts tied to Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales and The Divine Comedy; specialists in early modern drama connected to Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe; nineteenth-century scholars focused on Mary Shelley, Leo Tolstoy, Gustave Flaubert and Honoré de Balzac; and modernists researching James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda and W. B. Yeats. Researchers publish in journals affiliated with Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Routledge and organizations like the Modern Language Association. Grants and fellowships have been awarded by foundations such as the Guggenheim Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and societies like the British Academy. Visiting scholars have included names associated with Princeton University, Yale University, Stanford University, Brown University and University of California, Berkeley.

Student Life and Organizations

Student groups include reading and writing collectives inspired by magazines such as Poetry (magazine), Granta, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Paris Review. Honor societies and professional associations connect students with national bodies like Phi Beta Kappa, the Modern Language Association and the American Comparative Literature Association. Student-run journals and presses publish work in the tradition of London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, ACL Studies and small presses like Faber and Faber, New Directions Publishing and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Extracurricular programming frequently features public readings and panels with authors linked to awards such as the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Man Booker Prize, the National Book Award and the Costa Book Awards.

Facilities and Resources

Facilities include seminar rooms named for figures like Harold Bloom, Edward Said, Elaine Showalter and Gayatri Spivak; specialized libraries holding collections on Shakespeare, Romanticism, Victorian literature, Modernism and Postcolonial literature; and archives of manuscripts associated with writers such as Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. Digital humanities labs collaborate with centers modeled on initiatives at Digital Humanities Lab, HathiTrust, Project Gutenberg and JSTOR to support projects on text encoding, mapping, and visualization. Career services coordinate internships with institutions like The New York Review of Books, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, BBC and The Guardian.

Category:Departments of English