TAU Department of Comparative Literature

TAU Department of Comparative Literature
Name	Department of Comparative Literature
University	Tel Aviv University
Established	1960s
Type	Academic department
City	Tel Aviv
Country	Israel

TAU Department of Comparative Literature is an academic unit within Tel Aviv University that offers undergraduate and graduate programs in comparative literary studies, translation, and cultural theory. The department engages with literary traditions across Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, connecting canonical figures and movements with contemporary debates in critical theory and translation studies. It maintains active research centers, international partnerships, and a diverse faculty whose work intersects with history, philosophy, and the arts.

History

The department emerged during a period of expansion in Israeli higher education alongside institutions such as Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Bar-Ilan University, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and Weizmann Institute of Science, reflecting broader intellectual currents linked to figures such as Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Theodor Adorno. Early faculty traced influences to the comparative enterprise of Ernst Robert Curtius, Friedrich Nietzsche, Giambattista Vico, Wilhelm Dilthey, Northrop Frye, and Tzvetan Todorov, while curricular development echoed conferences like the Modern Language Association meetings and exchanges with École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, University of Paris, Harvard University, University of Cambridge, and Columbia University. The department’s trajectory intersected with cultural campaigns and events such as the rise of postcolonialism, the debates surrounding structuralism, and the translation movements inspired by Walter Benjamin and Roman Jakobson.

Academic Programs

Programs span bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees and include coursework on authors and texts associated with William Shakespeare, Homer, Dante Alighieri, Miguel de Cervantes, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, Molière, Alexander Pushkin, Homer, Sappho, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Rabindranath Tagore, Lu Xun, Haruki Murakami, Naguib Mahfouz, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, Heinrich Heine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry, Italo Calvino, Italo Svevo, Cesare Pavese, Federico García Lorca, Lope de Vega, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, John Milton, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexandre Dumas, George Eliot, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Anne Brontë, Emily Brontë, Robert Browning, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth. Courses emphasize comparative analysis of texts, translation workshops, and seminars on Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Erich Auerbach, Hans Robert Jauss, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Homi K. Bhabha, and Frantz Fanon.

Research and Publications

Research output includes monographs, edited volumes, and journals engaging with debates traced to J. Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom, Northrop Frye, Georg Lukács, Benedetto Croce, Walter Benjamin, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Mikhail Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Seymour Chatman, Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, John Guillory, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Steiner, Susan Sontag, and Mikhail Epstein. Department-affiliated journals and series publish alongside presses and periodicals such as Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Princeton University Press, Yale University Press, Columbia University Press, The New York Review of Books, and London Review of Books. Faculty and students present at venues like Modern Language Association, American Comparative Literature Association, International Comparative Literature Association, Association for Jewish Studies, and conferences linked to European Society for Comparative Literature and Culture.

Faculty and Administration

The faculty roster combines scholars whose research centers on figures including Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Benedict Anderson, Clifford Geertz, Natalie Zemon Davis, Carlo Ginzburg, Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, Paul Fussell, Jacques Maritain, Leo Strauss, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Aharon Appelfeld, Amos Oz, S.Y. Agnon, A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, Ephraim Kishon, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Nissim Ezekiel, Odysseas Elytis, C.P. Cavafy, Eliot Weinberger, Adonis (poet), Nizar Qabbani, Mahmoud Darwish, and Tawfiq Ziad. Administrative links align with offices like Tel Aviv University Faculty of Humanities, Tel Aviv University Rectorate, Ministry of Education (Israel), Council for Higher Education (Israel), and international panels organized with European Research Council and National Endowment for the Humanities.

Student Life and Activities

Student organizations and activities reflect engagement with cultural figures and institutions such as Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Habima Theatre, Israeli Opera, Israel Museum, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Habima National Theater, Suzanne Dellal Center for Dance and Theatre, Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Keshet Broadcasting, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, The Marker, Yedioth Ahronoth, Maariv, Vice Media, Haokets, Times of Israel, Al Jazeera, BBC News, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, El País, Die Zeit, and Corriere della Sera. Extracurriculars include reading groups on Dante Alighieri, performance workshops inspired by Antonin Artaud, translation collectives addressing works by Pablo Neruda, Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Isaac Bashevis Singer, S.Y. Agnon, Sholem Aleichem, and field trips to sites like Old Jaffa, Neve Tzedek, Tel Aviv Port, Rothschild Boulevard, and Jaffa Port.

Collaborations and Partnerships

The department maintains collaborations with international departments and centers such as University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Yale University, Princeton University, Harvard University, Columbia University, New York University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago, King's College London, SOAS University of London, University of Edinburgh, Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, Max Planck Society, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Scuola Normale Superiore, European University Institute, University of Toronto, McGill University, Australian National University, National University of Singapore, Peking University, Tsinghua University, University of Tokyo, Seoul National University, and cultural institutions including British Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Library of Congress, and Vatican Library.

Facilities and Resources

Facilities include seminar rooms, translation labs, and archives housing manuscripts and collections related to authors like S.Y. Agnon, Ahad Ha'am, Sholem Aleichem, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Elie Wiesel, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, David Ben-Gurion, and documents connected to events such as Six-Day War, Yom Kippur War, Oslo Accords, Balfour Declaration, and Treaty of Versailles. Libraries and digital subscriptions link to resources including JSTOR, Project MUSE, MLA International Bibliography, WorldCat, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and institutional repositories maintained by Tel Aviv University Libraries and partner archives.

Category:Tel Aviv University Category:Comparative literature departments