Sayan Bhattacharyya defended his doctoral dissertation in Comparative Literature in August 2010: “Reading Rabindranath Tagore and C.L.R. James Politically.”

Efrat Bloom was awarded a 2011-2012 Fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities, for writing her dissertation, “Writing and Dislocation: The Poetics of the Mother Tongue.”
Christopher Davis received a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship to teach Classics at Kalamazoo College in 2011-2012.  

Sebastian Ferrari received a Mellon Dissertation Seminar Fellowship for summer 2011. 

Nahako Fukushima successfully defended her doctoral dissertation in Comparative Literature in August 2011. "‘Sharebon’ and the courtesans:  A Phase Edo Aestheticism as the Potlatch/Splash of Idelology." 

Olga Greco presented a paper at the 2011 American Comparative Literature Association in Vancouver: “Catiline vs. the Roman Bourgeoisie: A Russian Symbolist Take on Ancient History.”  She was awarded a Comparative Literature Study Abroad Fellowship to study in Italy in 2012.

Maria Gonzalez defended her doctoral dissertation in Comparative Literature in September 2010: “Translating Quechua Poetic Expression in the Andes: Literature, the Social Body, and Quechumara Movements.”

Maria Hadjipolycarpou presented conference papers in Cyprus (“Literature As a Source of Memory Beyond National Heritage,” November 2010), at the UM Center for European Studies (“Hellenism and Derek Walcott, April 2011), and at the European Society of Modern Greek Studies in Granada, Spain (“Memory and History in Costas Montis’s Afentis Batistas and Other Matters”).  In April 2011 she co-organized the “Mediterranean Topographies” Symposium at the University of Michigan, co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature’s 2010-2011 “Year of Comparison.”

Sara Hakeem presented a paper at the 2011 American Comparative Literature Association in Vancouver: “Ghazal as ‘Lyric’: Toward a History of ‘Lyric’ in India.”  In February 2011 she co-organized “Asian Literatures: Comparisons from Calcutta to Kyoto,” a roundtable co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature’s 2010-2011 “Year of Comparison.”  

Marcelo Hamam defended his doctoral dissertation in Comparative Literature in September 2010: “Freedom, Speech, and Inequality in Rousseau’s Political Rhetoric.”  

Spencer Hawkins was awarded a Comparative Literature Study Abroad Fellowship to spend a semester in Berlin, where he is affiliated with the Center for “Transformationen der Antike.” He also received a Rackham Humanities Research Candidacy Fellowship for one semester of dissertation research.  

Alexandra Hoffman presented a paper at the 2011 American Comparative Literature Association in Vancouver: “Round-Trip: Diasporic Literature in the Making.”  She was selected to participate in the Sweetland Summer Dissertation Writing Institute during the summer of 2011, and she was awarded a Rackham One Term Dissertation Fellowship.  

Alan Itkin defended his doctoral dissertation in Comparative Literature in March 2011: “Bringing the Past Back to Life: Classical Motifs and the Representation of History in the Works of W. G. Sebald.”

Amr Kamal was awarded a 2011-2012 Fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities, for writing his dissertation, “Out of Place: Tales Inside and Outside Department Stores.”  He also received a Mellon Dissertation Seminar Fellowship for summer 2011. In April 2011 he co-organized “Mediterranean Topographies,” a symposium co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature’s 2010-2011 “Year of Comparison.”

Corina Kesler  successfully completed her work for her doctoral degree in August 2011 in Comparative Literature. "From Utopia to Heterotopia: Outgrowing Culturally-Specific Utopian and National Models." 

Corina also presented a paper at the 2011 American Comparative Literature Association in Vancouver: “Re-Imagining ‘Brave New Worlds’: Caliban’s Take.”  She was selected by the Teaching Committee of the Society for Utopian Studies in fall 2010 as one of two winners for the first annual Kenneth M. Roemer Innovative Course Design Competition.  The course she designed and taught as GSI at Michigan was Comparative Literature 241: Build Your Own Utopia.

Michael Kicey (PhD 2010) received Honorable Mention in the Rackham ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Awards. He is co-author with Dean Hammer of “Simone Weil’s Iliad: The Power of Words” (published in The Review of Politics 72) and he accepted 2011-2012 postdoctoral fellowship awarded by “Classics in Contemporary Perspectives” at the University of South Carolina.  

Monica Lopez-Lerma defended her doctoral dissertation in Comparative Literature in May 2010:  “Re-Imagining Justice: A Study of Ethics, Politics and Law in Spanish Contemporary Fiction.” She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki.

Chris Meade presented a paper at the 2011 American Comparative Literature Association in Vancouver: “One River, Many Currents: Thresholds of Time in Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos.”

Liansu Meng defended her doctoral dissertation in Comparative Literature in September 2010: “The Inferno Tango: Gender, Politics, and Poetry in China 1919-1980.”  She has been appointed Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Ancient and Modern Languages at the University of Connecticut (Storrs).

Rostom Mesli was awarded a Comparative Literature Study Abroad Fellowship to pursue research in France in fall of 2011.  In October 2010, he co-organized “Doing Queer Studies Now,” an international conference at the University of Michigan, and he coordinates a Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop on this topic as well.

Cassie Miura received a graduate prize in the annual “Contexts for Classics” Classical Translations Contest for her translation from Latin of Robert Burton’s “Philosophaster.”   

Mei-Chen Pan was selected to participate in the 2011 summer Institute for World Literature, hosted by Peking University in Beijing, China.
Richard Pierre was awarded a Comparative Literature Study Abroad Fellowship to pursue research in Germany (Berlin) in 2011-2012.      

Matthew Pfaff was awarded a Rackham Humanities Research Candidacy Fellowship for one semester of dissertation research.  

Michael Pifer was awarded a 2011 Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fellowship by Rackham Graduate School for three years of doctoral research.  

Michael Rinaldo presented a paper at the 2011 American Comparative Literature Association in Vancouver: “Mallarmés Typography: Framed Oblivion and Folded Sonnets.” He received a 2011-2012 Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship for writing his dissertation on the relation between word and image in avant-garde poetics.  

Will Stroebel received a 2011-12 Academic-Year FLAS fellowship for Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian Studies.  He also received summer 2011 funding to study Turkish from FLAS, the American Research Institute in Turkey and the American Association of Turkish Teachers.  

Corine Tachtiris presented a paper at the 2011 American Comparative Literature Association in Vancouver: “Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the Global-Local Dilemma for Postcolonial Writers.” She also presented papers  at “Shifting Paradigms: How Translation Transforms the Humanities”  (University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, October 2010) and at Doctoriales du 51ème Congrès de la Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur (Paris. May 2011). In November 2011 she published an article entitled “Translation as Peaceable Resistance” (Norwich Papers: Studies in Translation 18) and in March 2011 she was invited to speak for the translation lecture series at Université Paris Vincennes-Saint-Denis, on the topic “Traduction et circulation opportuniste de la littérature mondiale.”  She was selected to participate in the 2011 summer Institute for World Literature, hosted by Peking University in Beijing, China.          

Nicholas Theisen (PhD 2009) has been appointed Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese in the Department of Slavic and Asian Languages at the University of Iowa.
Patrick Tonks was awarded a Rackham One Term Dissertation Fellowship.

Shannon Winston presented a paper at the 2011 American Comparative Literature Association in Vancouver and at the Mediterranean Topographies Symposium: “From Anna Maria Ortese’s Naples to Assia Djebar’s Oran: Estrangement Across Imperialist and National Divides.”  She published a collection of poetry, Threads Give Way (Cold Press, 2010) and was one of ten semi-finalists for her poetry manuscript "Outside" in the Hopwood Roethke Prize. She was awarded a Rackham Humanities Research Candidacy Fellowship for one semester of dissertation research.  

Orian Zakai presented a paper at the 2011 American Comparative Literature Association in Vancouver: “Talk Like a Turk: Three Languages in Dvora Baron’s Turkim.”  She received a summer 2011 fellowship from the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and a 2011-2012 Barbour Scholarship from Rackham Graduate School.  She also published a collection of short stories in Hebrew, Fill in the Blanks (Jerusalem: Keter Books, 2011).