CONGRATULATIONS TO COMP LIT UNDERGRADUATES!

Comparative Literature Majors

Davis Boos won the Sweetland Upper-Level Writing Prize in the Humanities for his essay A Second Exile: Mario Benedetti's Absence in English.
Christina Capodanno graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature and Latin American & Caribbean Studies.
Amira Malik graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature and a minor in Gender & Health.
Hannah Parton graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature, Spanish, and Russian and minor in Translation Studies.
Madeleine Schneider graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature and International Studies.
Lily Talmers graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature and a minor in General Philosophy and Portuguese.

Translation Studies Minors

Alycia Bird graduated with a BA in Linguistics and a Minor in Translation Studies.
Samantha Dunlap graduated with a BA in International Studies and Spanish and a Minor in Translation Studies.
Ashley Duong graduated with a BA in International Studies and Psychology and a Minor in Translation Studies.
Lauren Levitt graduated with a BA in International Studies and Spanish and a Minor in Translation Studies.
Arthur Mengozzi graduated with a BA in International Studies and Russian and a Minor in Translation Studies.
Hannah Parton graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature, Russian, and Spanish and a Minor in Translation Studies.
Ryan Sahijdak graduated with a BA in German and a Minor in Translation Studies and a Minor in Music.
Kaitlen Sawyer graduated with a BA in International Studies and a Minor in Translation Studies and a Minor in Asian Language and Culture.

2020 Senior Prize in Literary Translation

Lauren Levitt (International Studies and Spanish major, Translation Studies minor) was awarded the Senior Prize in Literary Translation for her translation of “Las cartas de Gerardo,” a short story within the collection, La isla de los conejos, by Elvira Navarro.
 

CONGRATULATIONS TO COMP LIT GRADUATE STUDENTS!

Sahin Acikgoz has accepted the University of California, Riverside’s Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in Religious Studies.
Alexander Aguayo was granted the Institute for Research on Women and Gender’s Community of Scholars Fellowship for spring/summer.
Maximillian Alvarez has been approached by O/R Books about putting together a collection of interviews with workers during the Covid-19 crisis. They are still finalizing the timeline/contract, but the plan is to fast track the book for the fall.
Megan Berkobien was interviewed in an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education on reimagining the doctoral dissertation.
Srdjan Cvjeticanin was awarded a Rackham Humanities Research Fellowship.
Luiza Duarte Caetano participated in a Critical Theory Workshop in Paris, July 2019 and presented a paper at the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era in Tallahassee, FL in February 2020. She also co-organized the 2020 CLIFF conference, "(Counter) Narratives of Migration." Luiza was going to present at ACLA 2020 (cancelled...) and The Great Transition (postponed...)
Duygu Ergun was awarded a Rackham Humanities Research Fellowship.
Elisabeth Fertig gave a paper titled "Radio Silence: Notes on Walter Benjamin’s Radio Archive" at the GLASS (Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies) conference in October, based on a Comp-Lit-funded research trip to the Benjamin archives in Berlin in Summer 2019. Lis received the Fulbright-IFK Junior Fellowship for 9 months in Vienna starting September 2020 to research radio plays written by Austrian women poets after 1945. She also began hosting a weekly radio show "Lunch Poems" on WCBN-FM Ann Arbor in January, and made it through fully 8 episodes before the station shut down for COVID (links to archived shows available on request!).
Adrienne Jacaruso successfully defended her doctoral dissertation in Comparative Literature, The Encyclopedic Form in the Modern French Novel, in July 2019.
Shalmali Jadhav was awarded a Rackham Humanities Research Fellowship.
Yael Kenan was awarded the 2020-2021 Sylvia 'Duffy' Engle Graduate Fellowship by the Institute for the Humanities Fellows.
Amanda Kubic gave a paper entitled “Cripping Venus: How the Creative Classical Receptions of Mary Duffy and Kinetic Light Disable Western Beauty Myths” at the Agency Through the Ancients: Reception as Empowerment, Classics Graduate Conference at Boston University in November 2019. She also had a paper entitled “Classical Reception in Disability Studies: Mary Duffy Imagining Alternative Futures” accepted to the seminar “Reception Studies: State of the Discipline and New Directions” for the 2020 America Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) in Chicago, but this was, unfortunately, canceled due to Covid-19. Amanda was one of the co-organizers for the CLIFF 2020 conference, "(Counter) Narratives of Migration," which was also unfortunately canceled due to Covid-19, but was nonetheless a pleasure to organize with her cohort. Amanda will be working as one of the CompLit GSA's for the MICHHERS program this summer!
Julia Irion Martins accepted and participated in CRIT, a Brooklyn based two month intensive fiction workshop with Tony Tulathimutte. She received the Institute for Humanities' grad student grant to attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, BC (received a grad student grant DHSI itself as well, all of this postponed due to COVID). Julia co-organized the 2020 CLIFF conference, "(Counter) Narratives of Migration", and a panel for the Latin American Studies Conference (postponed due to COVID).
Marina Mayorski co-organized the 2020 CLIFF conference, "(Counter) Narratives of Migration."
Genta Nishku’s article, “The Wretched on the Walls: A Fanonian Reading of a Revolutionary Albanian Orphanage," was published in Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies.
Dylan Ogden co-organized the 2020 CLIFF conference, "(Counter) Narratives of Migration."
Shira Schwartz was awarded the Association for Jewish Studies Dissertation Completion Fellowship and the IRWG/Rackham Community of Scholars fellowship. Shira was also awarded the Jim Joseph Postdoc in Jewish Education at Stanford University, where she will be in residence in 2021-22. Publications include “In Terms of OTD,” in Off the Derech: Leaving Orthodox Judaism (April 2020, SUNY University Press). In addition, Shira organized “Undisciplined Jews: From Jewish Anthropology to Anthropology in Jewish Studies” at the Association for Jewish Studies in 2019 and is organizing “Comparative eX-Religion: Religious and Gendered Transitions,” American Academy of Religion in 2020. Shira has accepted a job offer from Syracuse University for a tenure track position in the Department of Religion as the Phyllis Backer Professor of Jewish Studies.
Grace Zanotti was awarded a Rackham Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award.
Xiaoxi Zhang was awarded a 2020-2021 Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship.

 

CONGRATULATIONS TO COMP LIT FACULTY!

Frieda Ekotto’s book Don't Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella, translated into English by Comp Lit alum Corine Tachtiris, made the LitHub list of "The Best of the University Presses: 100 Books to Escape the News."
Daniel Herwitz gave the inaugural lecture associated with his Fredrick G.L. Huetwell Professorship in February. His book, Cosmopolitan Aesthetics: Art in a Global World, was published by Bloomsbury in 2019. It is his third book in three years.
Artemis Leontis’ book Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins was named one of the "Books of the Year 2019" in the TLS and the Wall Street Journal. She published “George Economou’s Invented Greek American Ethnicity” in a special section, “George Economou: Four Tributes,” in Ergon: Greek/American Arts & Letters; a book review of Euthalia Papadaki, Πίσω από το πέπλο της ωραιότητας: Ο μυστικός κόσμος της Εύας και του Άγγελου Σικελιανου (Athens: Benaki Museum, 2018), in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies (May 2019); and the interview “Rethinking Greece: Artemis Leontis on the cultural biography of Eva Palmer Sikelianos and the modern reception of Classical Greece” in the “Rethinking Greece” series of Greece News Agenda. She participated in the “Fair Use: Free Speech in Action” Rackham Workshop organized by Melissa Levine. She completed her third year as Chair of Classical Studies.
Yopie Prins traveled to Crete in May 2019 to participate, together with Artemis Leontis, in a joint panel discussion about their respective books, Ladies' Greek (Princeton 2017) and Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins (Princeton 2019). In January 2020 she gave a lecture and seminar in the Poetics|history|Theory series at UC Irvine. She also collaborated with Silke Weineck to organize a seminar on "Translating the Midwest" at ACLA in March 2020. Although the ACLA seminar was cancelled due to COVID-19, she is now working with UM colleagues to launch a two-year Sawyer Seminar funded by the Mellon Foundation, "Sites of Translation in the Multilingual Midwest."
Marlon James Sales has finished writing two books chapters: "Translation is the Language of Hispanofilipino Literature," included in the edited volume Transnational Philippines: Cultural Encounters in Philippine Literature in Spanish (R. Ortuño and A. Gasquet, eds.); and "Language, Translation and Missionary Catholicism in the Spanish Philippines," which will appear in an interdisciplinary volume on religions in the Philippines (A. Herman, D. de la Cruz and G. Maltese, eds.). He is also finishing an invited book chapter for The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism (S. Kellman and N. Lvovich, eds.), tentatively entitled "Translingual Literature and National Language Policy: Historicising Hispanofilipino Literature in a Multilingual Philippines." He has written two journal articles: "Traducción misionera en la producción y recepción literaria de la Filipinas del s. XVII: un sermón inédito de fray Francisco Blancas de San José" for a thematic issue on the early modern Philippines of Guaraguao, the journal of Latin American Studies of the U of Barcelona; and "Language Teaching at the Empire's End: The Cátedra of Tagalog at the Universidad Central de Madrid (1870-1873)" for a special commemorative issue of Philippine Studies on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the Magellan voyage in 2021. He was one of the invited translators in the collected anthology Llama de Amor Viva (A. Pérez Alencart, ed.), published in Salamanca by EdifSa for the XXII Encuentro Internacional de Poetas Iberoamericanos. He was the discussant and resource person in the book discussion organized by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies on Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, the 2020 Washtenaw Reads book of choice, written by Pulitzer-winning Fil-Am author and migrant rights activist Jose Antonio Vargas. Marlon delivered a talk entitled Towards an Alternative Hispanism: Translation and the Worlding of Hispanofilipino Literature at the Department of Romance Languages in November 2019. He presented his work on mapping translators and interpreters in the Spanish Philippines at the MLA Annual Convention in Seattle in January 2020. Finally, two of his CompLit 322 students in Fall 2019 have won prizes: Davis Boos was awarded the Sweetland Upper-Level Writing Award for the Humanities, and Lauren Levitt, the Senior Prize in Literary Translation.
Niloofar Sarlati published her latest article, “Between Polite Economy and the Gift” in Philological Encounters in March 2020. She was invited to a roundtable discussion at Northwestern University on “Provincializing Romanticism” and to the International Conference of Europeanists at the University of Iceland for her paper “the Other’s Gift.” She was also planning to present at ACLA’s “Poetics of Sovereignty” panel. All three events have been postponed due to the pandemic. She is now collaborating with Michigan Theatre for post-screening discussions on some of Abbas Kiarostami’s films, a forum which has moved online.
Antoine Traisnel spent the year revising his book, Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition, which is scheduled to come out in September with University of Minnesota Press. He also co-wrote an essay with Ingrid Diran on the concept of "Geopower" forthcoming in July with Diacritics, and has another essay on Thoreau's plants scheduled to come out in December 2020.
Ruth Tsoffar was promoted to Professor in 2020. Her book, Life in Citations: Biblical Narratives and Contemporary Hebrew Culture, was published by Routledge in September 2019.
Silke-Maria Weineck had a busy year -- she served as both Interim Chair of Comparative Literature in Winter 2020, as CompLit's Translation Advisor over the year, and as Director of Graduate Studies in the German Department. Yopie Prins, Marlon Sales and she were the principal investigators of a successful grant application for a Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar, which will run for two years, starting in Winter 2021: “Sites of Translation in the Multilingual Midwest.” In fall 2019, Silke finished a book manuscript for The New Press, called City of Champions: A History of Triumph and Defeat in Detroit, co-written with Stefan Szymanski and out in Fall 2020. She's co-organizing an exhibit on the history of Detroit's Doomed Olympic Bids, which was to have taken place in the Detroit Public Library in summer 2020, but, like the Olympics themselves, will have to be deferred by a year.