The Comparative Literature department is a place where rigorous, multilingual study meets innovative theory and close reading. Our faculty’s expertise spans diverse literary traditions, fostering a unique blend of historical insight and critical analysis in literature, film, and media. The Comparative Literature major at Tulane promotes the study of cultural expression across linguistic, national, and cultural boundaries, as well as the interactions between literature and other forms of human activity and creative work in the arts and sciences. The community of comparatists in the School of Liberal Arts includes faculty and students who share a commitment to transnational, interdisciplinary, and multilingual study. This community includes scholars of literature, thought, and culture across the departments and programs devoted to literary studies at Tulane. Areas of focus include philosophy and literature, classical reception, post-colonial literature, environmental humanities, literary theory, the digital humanities, and translation studies.
Although these groupings may suggest segregated interests, the Department’s hallmark is inclusiveness and collaboration. Our courses are not confined to a single national literature but rather engage many different traditions, genres, and languages across the globe. Faculty and students work in several areas, several literatures, and often several disciplines. Department offerings and research set literature in juxtaposition to art, film, philosophy, linguistics, music, history, law, political science, medicine, and other fields that provide context and comparison.
What is Comp Lit?
Comparative Literature is a historically anti-fascist discipline, a field created by refugees after WWII. In its first generation, it explored the literary “diplomacy” between Europe and the US: comparing the literature through history, philosophy and theory to think through the encounter of literatures with forms of modernity (photographic, cinematographic, architectural, art historical, musicological, mass cultural, etc.). The field of Comparative Literature developed into a more inclusive field in the 1980s in response to global politics, wars, and migrations. It opened to critiques of colonialism and cultural power, and in the generations since its inception, has focused on the global circulation and comparative politics of texts of all kinds, along with the translation and digitization of cultural products. It remains a formal, theoretical and practical inquiry focused on including diversity of forms, disciplines, and languages, and on exploring a breadth of perspectives of writers and readers.
Our Faculty
The members of the Comparative Literature faculty at Tulane are scholars whose work involves several literatures and cultures as well as the premise of cross-cultural literary study itself, seen as both a theoretical and a practical matter. Joined by the shared condition of teaching and writing across nations, languages, and cultures, rather than any single a national, linguistic, or methodological investment held in common, our faculty draw on diverse formations and language backgrounds, old and new kinds of texts, and a variety of disciplines. Most members of the faculty have joint appointments across at least two departments or programs. We study some of the most popular texts in the history of the world, and some of the most powerful: foundational metaphors and stereotypes, inspiring mass following and revolutionary ideas. We also draw radical comparisons across disciplines and cultures, fields and forms.
We work on literatures and cultures from different perspectives. We decode the state logics of war, the shape of resistance to violence; we pay attention to the materiality of the texts and images in graphic novels, travelogues, performances, texts of philosophy, medicine, performance, etc.
Our students
If you are an undergraduate with creative transnational interests, you will find an inviting intellectual home in the Department of Comparative Literature at Tulane. The department invites students to read texts closely and to think about the nature, function, and value of literature within a broad context. Comp Lit students bring their transdisciplinary interests and curiosity, their language backgrounds and aspirations to the study of literary texts in the original and in translation, comparing literatures and other art forms to consider what they teach us about history, art, environment, technologies, local and global identities. Students have considerable freedom to construct their own course programs within the guidelines set by the Department, and to use courses from other disciplines as part of the major. We support students’ language learning, study abroad, and integrating those courses into their Tulane curriculum. Come join our local community of professors, students, and staff as we pursue a global vision of literary and cultural study.