CONGRATULATIONS TO COMP LIT UNDERGRADUATES!
Comparative Literature Majors
Sundus Al Ameen is graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature and in History with honors. She is also graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Education.
Peter Matarweh is graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature and in International Studies, and with a minor in Translation Studies.
Julia Raguckas is graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature, Communication and Media, and with a minor in Creative Writing.
Julian Wray is graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature.
Tyler Berndt is graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature with honors.
Translation Studies Minors
Kara Kozma completed the Minor in Translation Studies and is graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English with honors and in Latin Language & Literature.
Peter Matarweh completed the Minor in Translation Studies.
Emmanuel Orozco Castellanos completed the Minor in Translation Studies and is graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies BA and with a minor in Latin American & Caribbean Studies. Emmanuel received the Central Campus Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Spirit Award for his work with immigrant communities, asylum seekers, and underserved high schools in Southeast Michigan.
Momoka (Emma) Saito completed the Minor in Translation Studies and is graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology.
Shuchen Wen completed the Minor in Translation Studies and is graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Cognitive Science.
2023 Comparative Literature First Year Writing Prize
Maya Bonevich was awarded a Comparative Literature First Year Writing Prize for the "Give Me Your Answer, Do: To Speak as a Robot."
Sara Wong was awarded a Comparative Literature First Year Writing Prize for the essay "Little Shop of Horrors and the Consequence of Choice."
Alex Zhang was awarded a Comparative Literature First Year Writing Prize for the essay "Calculator Kid to Kung-Fu Guy: An Address to Asian Tokenism in Media."
2023 Senior Prize in Literary Translation
Fiona Caughey was awarded the Senior Prize in Literary Translation for her translation of selections from the prefaces and notes for the Dictionary of the Fine Arts by Eugène Delacroix.
William McClelland was awarded the Senior Prize in Literary Translation for his translation of Bacchae lines 912–976 by Euripides.
Jada Lin received an honorable mention for her translation of Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge.
Peter Matarweh received an honorable mention for his translation of Hayat Mu‘allabah by Haifa Zangana.
CONGRATULATIONS TO COMP LIT GRADUATE STUDENTS!
Tomi Drucker won The Kasdan Scholarship for Creative Writing 2023 for her screenplay "Lia's Lens" through the Hopwood Program Writing Contest. She is proud to have stood in solidarity with the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO 3550) during this year's contract negotiations and campaign for a living wage.
Luiza Duarte Caetano, Dylan Ogden, and Berkay Uluç are the recipients of Rackham Humanities Research Fellowships. Luiza also received a Chateaubriand Fellowship to conduct research in France next year. This prestigious fellowship will allow her to spend four months in Paris working under the guidance of Prof. Jean-Marie Roulin.
Lis Fertig was awarded both a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship and a Humanities Institute Graduate Student Fellowship for AY '23-'24, based on her in-progress dissertation Radiopoetics: On Sound as Literary, Critical and Pedagogical Practice, and looks forward to beginning her residence at the Humanities Institute in the fall. She also developed and taught a FYWR course in audio composition, CL122: Writing With Sound, in which students learned to plan and produce an original audio piece. In March, she received a Rackham Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award in recognition of her work teaching first-year writing and multimodal composition. Along with the aforementioned accomplishments, Lis is also proud to have stood in solidarity with the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO 3550) during this year’s contract negotiations and campaign for a living wage.
Amanda Kubic presented papers at the Modern Greek Studies Association 2022 Symposium and the 2023 Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting. In the Winter 2023 term, Amanda interned at Monument Lab (a nonprofit public art and history studio based in PA) through the Comparative Literature Academic Term Internship Fellowship Program. She was offered a Rackham Predoc Fellowship and a Graduate Student Fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities for the 2023-24 academic year, the latter of which she has happily accepted. She has also had the honor of serving as a graduate representative for the CompLit department this year. Along with the aforementioned accomplishments, Amanda is also proud to have stood in solidarity with the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO 3550) during this year’s contract negotiations and campaign for a living wage.
Sam McCracken received a Critical Language Scholarship from the US Department of State to study Portuguese in Florianópolis, Brazil between June and August 2022, was nominated for Outstanding GSI (Winter 2023), and was awarded a State Department Student Internship for Fall 2023. One of Sam's Winter 2022 COMPLIT 122 students (Kyr Bonevich) won Comparative Literature First-Year Writing Prize. Sam also participated in CompLit Ph.D. program interviews. Sam had an article published in Spectator Journal Special Issue “Waste” 2022 titled “Waste Not, Want Not: Notes on Digital Hoarding.” His encyclopedia entry, “Ryane Leão • Onde Jazz Meu Coração,” for Latin American Digital Poetics, edited by Luis Correa-Díaz and Scott Weintraub, is forthcoming in July 2023. Sam also had two book reviews published: A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes by Kyle Parry in Film Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 3, and metaverse By Luis Correa-Díaz in Latin American Literature Today. He organized (with Ben Woodworth, others) department participation in GEO’s 2023 work stoppage. Along with the aforementioned accomplishments, Sam is also proud to have stood in solidarity with the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO 3550) during this year’s contract negotiations and campaign for a living wage.
Genta Nishku has accepted a 2023-24 fellowship at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Genta's proposed project is “Silenced Histories: Remembering the Roma Holocaust in Albania and Kosovo.”
Júlia Irion Martins was awarded the 2023 Rackham Public Scholarship Grant for her project “Detroit’s Other Rosa Parks: Teaching the Civil Rights Legacy of Sarah E. Ray.” Júlia will partner with the Sarah E. Ray Project, whose objective is to document and bring awareness to the long-forgotten story of Detroit Civil Rights activist Sarah E. Ray (later known as Lizz Haskell). This project makes Ray’s life and work known in a variety of media accessible to diverse audiences, including a creative non-fiction book, a short documentary, and an interactive website. The guides will discuss a variety of topics, ranging from Ray’s role in desegregating Detroit’s Boblo Boat as a 24-year-old to her later work establishing the community center Action House in Detroit’s Airport Community region.
CONGRATULATIONS TO COMP LIT FACULTY!
Catherine Brown published Remember the Hand: Manuscription in Early Medieval Iberia. Anybody can read it for free, as it's available via Open Access. It's full of beautiful pictures and a lot of weird Latin.
Aaron Coleman had the pleasure of co-organizing with Renée Ragin Randall and Giulia Riccó a three-part series in the fall titled, “Race and Racism, Comparatively,” participated in the Helen Zell MFA Writers’ Program Faculty Flash Reading, and shared a hybrid presentation/performance titled, ““Poetics of Black Inheritance: Writing Other Americas Between History, Genealogy, & Imagination” at the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (A2RU) National Conference at the University of Michigan. Aaron also organized a roundtable, “Blackness in Translation” as part of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Sites of Translation in the Multilingual Midwest (cosponsored by DAAS and NCID). He joined a panel on “The Future of Black Studies” organized by the Institute for the Humanities as part of the Humanities Afrofutures month-long series. Aaron also presented at the Association for Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference on a panel sponsored by the American Literary Translators Association titled, “Translation 101: How to Become a Translator.” He was invited by CUNY’s Center for Humanities for “Colloquy: Translating the Caribbean” with Kaiama Glover and Urayoán Noel Aaron was deeply honored to return to Washington University in Saint Louis for a series of events celebrating the opening of an exhibition on his work by the Julian Edison Special Collections, titled “Wherein I Am: Highlights from the Aaron Coleman Papers.” Aaron published “South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred Hills” in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, “The Flag Eater” in The Rumpus, “Glitch Miracles Here” in Indiana Review (forthcoming), several of his poems will be featured in The Missouri Review, and his poem-sequence, “Stained Glass Speaks,” was featured in a special issue on Diasporic Poetry in ERGON: Greek/American Letters. At the start of winter term, Aaron joined the National Center for Institutional Diversity as the Anti-Racism Collaborative Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Translation Studies. He also co-directed three Helen Zell Writers’ Program MFA theses with Prof. Khaled Mattawa. Aaron designed and taught a new meet-together translation workshop/translation studies seminar titled “Poetic Methods of Translation” (COMPLIT580/ENGL630). He also joined the Cave Canem Faculty & Fellow Advisory Committee after becoming a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow in summer 2022.
Daniel Herwitz published "Negotiating Offence of Fallist Proportion: Cecil Rhodes and the Removal of University of Cape Town’s Statue" in Third Text.
Vassilios Lambropoulos gave a lecture called “The Tragedy of Autonomy in the Modern Theater of Liberation,” for the 2022-23 seminar series Politics of Liberation in October 2022. He also gave a lecture called “The Melancholic Pursuit of Freedom in the 21st Century” at The American College of Greece in November 2022. He presented a paper, “Post-colonial Tragic Theatre,” at the online symposium In the Event of Antigone: Crossings, Translations, Restagings in December 2022. He participated in two literary panels, one on the Greek Poetry Generation of the 2000s (Thessaloniki) and one on relations between new Greek poetry and criticism (Athens) in May 2023 and he joined the Advisory Board of the Greek Chamber Music Project, based in San Francisco (Fall 2022).
Yopie Prins participated in a Symposium at Northwestern University in January 2023, on “Translation Across Institutional Boundaries: From the Scholar to the Public.”
Renée Ragin Randall won an Institute for the Humanities summer fellowship where she will work on the final chapter of her monograph. She also won an LSA summer research program award to travel to Istanbul, Gaziantep and Beirut for a collaborative research project with a scholar at Sabanci University on the combined impact of man-made and environmental traumas. She also launched a tri-campus mental health support group for students of color at EMU, UM and WCC through her work as a board member with NAMI-Washtenaw County.
Will Stroebel, along with Kristina Gedgaudaite, guest-edited a special issue of The Journal of Modern Greek Studies, titled 1922–2022: A Century of Border Making and Refugeehood. Graham Liddell contributed an amazing article to the issue, and Michigan Comp Lit alumna Aslı Iğsız (NYU) also shared an article. It was a kickass project with lots of Michigan Comp Lit in the mix!
Niloofar Sarlati wrote an essay for the forthcoming Keyword issue of Victorian Literature and Culture. She also wrote a chapter entitled "Sweet and Salty: A Taste of (Semi)translating Colonial Modernity in Iran" for Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature, coedited by Laura Brueck and Praseeda Gopinath.
