Congratulations to Comp Lit Undergraduates!
Comparative Literature Majors
Neha Chava is graduating with a BS in Comparative Literature and in Biology, Health & Society. She was awarded the 2022 Senior Prize in Literary Translation for her translation of an excerpt from Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Sadie Quinn is graduating with a BS in Comparative Literature, in Biomolecular Science, and in French.
Sundus Al Ameen was awarded one of the prizes from the 2022 Contexts for Classics Classical Translations Contest for her translation from Arabic of "He is Unfaithful in What He Promised" by al-Walīd ibn `Ubayd Allāh al-Buhturī.
Avery Sandstrum is graduating with a BA in Comparative Literature and International Studies.
Translation Studies Minors
Laurel Baker completed her minor in Translation Studies. She is also graduating with a BMusA in Voice Performance and a BA in Russian.
Jessica Czapla completed her minor in Translation Studies. She is graduating with a BS in Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology and in Spanish.
Hayden Page Dahlvik Graves completed her minor in Translation Studies. He is graduating with a BA in Romance Languages & Literatures and in International Studies.
Hannah Miller completed her minor in Translation Studies. She is graduating with a BA in Asian Studies.
Emmanuel Orozco Castellanos was awarded the 2022 International Human Rights Fellowship offered by the Donia Human Rights Center. He will intern at Perseus Strategies during the summer.
2022 Comparative Literature First Year Writing Prize
Tyler Berndt was awarded a Comparative Literature First Year Writing Prize for his essay, "The City of Mereux."
Kelly Nugent was awarded a Comparative Literature First Year Writing Prize for her essay, "The Murals of Phingbodhipakkiya and the #StopAsianHate movement."
2022 Senior Prize in Literary Translation
Neha Chava (BS Biology, Health & Society and Comparative Literature) was awarded the 2022 Senior Prize in Literary Translation for her translation of an excerpt from Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Congratulations to Comp Lit Graduate Students!
Current PhD students
Razieh Araghi was awarded a Rackham summer language training grant.
Ciara Barrick was awarded one of the prizes from the 2022 Contexts for Classics Classical Translations Contest for her translation from Modern Greek of "In Karpasia, 15th August 2009" by Niki Marangou.
Srdjan Cvjeticanin was awarded a Rackham predoctoral fellowship.
Duygu Ergun was awarded the Berlin Program for German and European Studies Dissertation Fellowship. She was also awarded a Rackham predoctoral fellowship.
Elisabeth Fertig traveled to Berlin in March as an invited guest juror of the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden, the annual literary prize for German-language audio drama. She also created and taught a podcasting course for Comp Lit 241 in winter 2022, called Adventures in Audio Storytelling, which lives on as a website featuring student-produced audio work.
Benjamin Figueroa Lackington was awarded a Rackham summer language training grant.
Graham Liddell co-organized a symposium, “Translation and the Making of Arab American Community,” as a part of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar series “Sites of Translation for the Multilingual Midwest.” He was awarded a Rackham Humanities Research Candidacy Fellowship for Spring/Summer and Fall 2022. Graham also translated two stories from Emile Habiby's Sextet of the Six Day War. His introduction and one of the stories were published in Banipal 73 - Fiction Past and Present (Spring 2022).
Amanda Kubic was a recipient of a 2022 Rackham Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award and of the Susan Lipschutz Award through Rackham. She has a forthcoming chapter publication “Cripping Venus: Intersections of Classics and Disability Studies in Contemporary Receptions of the Venus de Milo” in Reception Studies: New Challenges in a Changing World (Ed. Anastasia Bakogianni and Luis Unceta. De Gruyter.). Amanda had the honor to serve as one of the department's 2021-2022 grad student DEI allies along with Berkay Uluc, and as a coordinator for the Topics in Classical Intersectionalities (TiCI) RIW with Chandrica Barua. She was accepted as an Associate Student Member at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (ASCSA) from January to May 2022. Finally, Amanda has had to opportunity to present papers at various conferences this year: the 2021 Annual Meeting for Postgraduates in the Reception of the Ancient World (AMPRAW) at Columbia, the 2022 Annual Graduate Student Conference at Brandeis, and for the ASCSA and British School at Athens.
Júlia Irion Martins was awarded the Rackham Humanities Research Fellowship for her work on fiction in the era of "posts" (post-internet, post-feminism, post-truth, and posting itself), a Digital Studies Institute Summer Writing Award, and was selected as a Humanities Without Walls Career Diversity Workshop Fellow. This summer, Júlia will participate in HWW, intern with the podcast High Theory, continue her work as an editor for Absinthe, and present her paper–"Death of the Author 2.0: Online Verification, the Auto, and Contemporary Women's Writing"–at ACLA.
Sam McCracken received a Critical Language Scholarship to study Portuguese at the Universidade do Sul de Santa Catarina (UNISUL) in Florianópolis, Brazil.
Olan Munson translated a poetry book together with her translation partner Oh Eunkyung. The book, called Grotesque Weather and Good People by Lim Solah, is published by Black Ocean Press.
Dylan Ogden presented a paper at the Natalia Olshanskaya Symposium, and is scheduled to present at ACLA in June. He also wrote a chapter for the recently published Companion to Victor Pelevin (Academic Studies Press, 2022).
Jaideep Pandey was awarded a Rackham summer language training grant. He also received a junior fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS).
Mari Stanev served as DAAS-MSP gallery intern in Spring/Summer 2021 and curated a digital public-facing art gallery called "Art Looks Back: 715 Haven Street." The gallery commemorates the history of intellectual and artistic work from students and faculty in DAAS over its 50 year history, highlighting the role of public art in the creation of a space for Africana Studies at the University. Mari was awarded the Fellowship for Doctoral Research in Museums from Museum Studies at U-M to support further work on the gallery. Mari did the primary historical research, data management, and gallery design, and document and object interpretation work for it in collaboration with DAAS Librarian Elizabeth James. Mari's student Dane Page (CL141, Fall 2021) was one of the winners of the Matt Kelley Award for Excellence in First Year Writing Prize. His paper's title is "Captive Audiences: The Effects of Performance on the Institutionalized."
Katherine Tapia was awarded a FLAS grant to study Arabic during summer 2022.
Berkay Uluc published an article based on his M.A. thesis: "Vüs’at O. Bener: A Political Author." He presented his research on the origins of "aesthetics" as an epistemological framework in Turkish at CLIFF 2021, CGC Istanbul Webinar Series, and MESA 2021, all held virtually. He recently received a Rackham Language Training Award and will be taking online private classes at Qasid Arabic Institute during Spring/Summer 2022. He served as a Graduate Student Diversity Ally along with Amanda Kubic during the 2021-22 academic year and is working with Lena, Sam, Olan, Jaideep, and Kathi to organize CLIFF 2022.
Qingyi Zeng received a Rackham Language Training Award, a Rackham Graduate Student Research Grant, and a Summer Language Fellowship from the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies.
Congratulations to Comp Lit Faculty!
Catherine Brown published an essay: “A Manuscript Present: Translation and Remediation in Early Medieval Latin Iberia” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 14:1 (2022): 28-40. Her book, Remember the Hand. Manuscription in Early Medieval Iberia, is in production at Fordham for a summer or fall 2022 publication.
Aaron Coleman This was Aaron’s first year at the University of Michigan! Aaron’s second full-length poetry collection, Red Wilderness, was accepted for publication by Four Way Books. He also began a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. The “Aaron Coleman Papers” were purchased by the Washington University in St. Louis Library Julian Edison Department of Special Collections. Aaron published poems “The Bright River We Keep” and “the idea of water” in Four Way Review; “Kéloїde” in Under a Warm Green Linden; “The Forest’s Edge (Summer, 1864)” in wildness; and “Ruin in the Era of Rain” and “The Mapmaker Scouts a Border” in Columbia Journal (forthcoming). “The Bright River We Keep” was nominated by Four Way Review for a Pushcart Prize. Aaron presented at the 2022 MLA Conference on the panel “The Politics and Poetics of Translation in the Global Hispanophone.” His paper was titled “Literary Translation as Afrodiasporic Witness: Neglected Legacies of Black USAmerican Poets Translating AfroCuban Poets.” Aaron joined Mary Jo Bang for a public discussion of her recent translation of Dante’s Purgatorio for the Washington University in St. Louis International Writers Series. Aaron presented at the 2022 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference to celebrate the Chicago Quarterly Review Anthology of Black American Literature, edited by Charles Johnson (which featured four new poems by Aaron published in the anthology). Aaron visited Prof. Yopie Prins’ course, Comp Lit 780: “The Translation of Poetry, The Poetry of Translation” to discuss the introduction/translator’s note to his translation of Nicolás Guillén’s El gran zoo. Aaron joined the “Cubanistas” Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop and the NCID Review Committee for Anti-Racism Graduate Research Grants. He also co-directed two Helen Zell Writers’ Program MFA theses with Assoc. Prof. Tung Hui-Hui. Aaron judged the George Mason University Virginia Downs Poetry Award, the Saint Louis University High School William George Prize in Poetry, and is currently judging the Columbia Journal Spring Translation Contest.
Frieda Ekotto Nimrod: Selected Writings, edited by Frieda Ekotto was featured in The Atlantic.
Vassilis Lambropoulos co-authored, with Jennifer Wallace (Cambridge), a comprehensive review essay, "Hellenism, philhellenism and classical reception: commemorating the 1821 revolution," Classical Receptions Journal 13:4, October 2021, Pages 571–596. He writes a monthly column, “In the Constellation of Left Melancholy,” on 21st century Greek poetry, in the Greek electronic literary magazine O Hartis. In January 2022, he completed a five-year term on the board of the Classical and Modern Forum of the MLA. He has also accepted an invitation to join the international advisory board of a new scholarly initiative, Decolonize Hellas (2021), which explores the ambivalent and reciprocal relations between the Greek nation-state and Europe’s colonial genealogies.
Christi Merrill was promoted from Associate Professor to Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Languages and Cultures.
Yopie Prins published “An Essay on ‘An Essay on Irony’” in Anne Carson / Antiquity (edited by Laura Jansen, Bloomsbury 2021). As part of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar series on Translation in the Multilingual Midwest, she led a series of events on “Translation for the Community,” and she collaborated with Kristin Dickinson on the launch of a new public-facing site, translatingmichigan.org.
David Porter The Detroit River Story Lab, led by David Porter, received grant funding in support of its community engagement projects from the National Center for Institutional Diversity, the Graham Sustainability Institute, and the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan.
Renee Ragin Randall completed her final year of her LSA Collegiate postdoc and will be transitioning to tenure-track faculty with CompLit and MES this summer. She has an article forthcoming in Cultural Critique on the aesthetic of the irresolute in postwar Lebanon, and has been at work on two additional articles on the supernatural in contemporary Lebanese fiction and the representation of a collective postwar political amnesia. Throughout the year she co-organized a series of events on literary mediation in and through the Global South, and worked with CompLit's undergraduate committee to create a new course (CL 323: Adaptations in World Literature) which she will teach in Winter 23. She won a Summer Writing Grant from LSA and will also be traveling to Mainz, Germany to participate in Harvard's Institute of World Literature in July. Finally, as a board member of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI-Washtenaw County), she has been working with her organization and faculty and staff at U-M, EMU and WCC to introduce a peer support group for students of color in Fall 23.
Niloofar Sarlati has been on maternity leave this academic year. Before giving birth to her baby boy, she completed an essay "Suspicious Gifts, Skeptical Words, and Speculative Translations: Colonial and Semicolonial Encounters Between English and Persian," which is forthcoming with Comparative Literature. As she was enjoying the first months of motherhood, she wrote a catalog piece for the Exhibition Troubled Garden: Study for Migratory Roots at the Grantham Foundation (May 7 to June 26, 2022). These days, as her baby is trying to crawl, Niloofar is working on writing a piece for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature.
William Stroebel won the MLA's William Riley Parker Prize for an outstanding article in PMLA for “Longhand Lines of Flight: Cataloging Displacement in a Karamanli Refugee’s Commonplace Book” (PMLA, March 2021).
Antoine Traisnel published on essay on Thoreau's plant politics in a volume of essays co-edited by Branka Arsić and Vesna Kuiken; co-authored an essay on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with Thangam Ravindranathan (forthcoming in Substance); wrote a review of Tim Sweet's Extinction and the Human (forthcoming in American Literary History); gave invited lectures at Université Paris 7 and Avignon University; gave the keynote lecture for the MUSE conference here at UM; launched a new interdisciplinary research group, Critical Futures, in collaboration with Prof. Anna Fisher (American Culture); participated in a panel on Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower at the Institute for the Humanities; and began researching a new project on the cryopolitics of Climate Arks.
Silke-Maria Weineck was awarded a collegiate professorship and now goes by Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies. Her general orneriness also earned her a Faculty Governance Award from SACUA. She spent much of fall translating Cyanide (Zyankali), Friedrich Wolff's 1929 drama on behalf of abortion rights and working class politics more broadly. The English world premiere was staged in April at the Kahn auditorium here at UM. She's published a number of essays on university shenanigans at UM and elsewhere, taking up DeSantis' strong-arming the University of Florida, UM's "Work Connections" practices, and the erasure of the word Palestine in our social media accounts. She got to talk about her current obsession, Joe Louis, on Freakonomics and various other public venues.
