Department of Comparative Literature Kudos 2024-2025
Congratulations to Comp Lit Undergraduates!
Comparative Literature Majors
Ruthie Dignan graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature with honors and completed minors in Education for Empowerment and Linguistics.
Sydney Lyle graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature, with honors, and in International Studies, and completed a minor in Creative Writing.
Shao-Chi Ou graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies, with honors, and completed a minor in Environment.
Olga Yatsenka served as one of the department's Undergraduate Peer Mentors. In November 2024, Olga's translations of the poem "Memorial" by Taya Naydenko, a poem by Mikhail Son, and a poem by Anna Streminskaya (both untitled pieces), were published in Plume Poetry in a project edited by Ilya Kaminsky titled Odesa Poets Portfolio.
Translation Studies Minors
Echo Bennett completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Echo graduated with a BA in Communication and Media.
Ava Ferrante completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Ava graduated with a BA in Asian Studies.
Aeris Gruber completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Aeris graduated with a BA in Spanish and in Linguistics.
Mia Hedman completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Mia graduated with a BA in German and in International Studies, and completed a second minor in History.
Sarah Jin completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Sarah graduated with a BA in Asian Studies and completed a second minor in Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies.
Min Kwon completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Min graduated with a BA in Economics and completed a second minor in Creative Writing.
Rita Lin completed the Minor in Translation Studies and graduated with a BS in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology.
Vivika Mathews completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Vivika graduated with a BA in Linguistics, and completed a second minor in Asian Studies.
Eli Merren completed the Minor in Translation Studies and graduated with a BA in Spanish and International Studies.
Victoria Simeran completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Victoria graduated with a BS in Ecology, Evolution, and Biodiversity.
Aya Sharabi served as one of the department’s Undergraduate Peer Mentors.
2025 Comparative Literature First Year Writing Prize
Stanford Jusuf was awarded the 2025 Comparative Literature First Year Writing Prize for the essay “Evaluating Authenticity: Cloud Gate Dance Theater’s Use of the Graham Technique to Reimagine of a More Unifying Chinese Identity.”
Julia Kwan received a First Year Writing Prize honorable mention for the essay “Were Cinderella’s Slippers Glass or Gold?”
2025 Senior Prize in Literary Translation
Victoria Simeran was awarded the 2025 Senior Prize in Literary Translation for her translation from Spanish of Árboles petrificados by Amparo Dávila.
Eli Merren was awarded the 2025 Senior Prize in Literary Translation for his translation from Spanish of Nerea, ausencia, amor, olvido by Raquel Ilombe.
Congratulations to Comp Lit Graduate Students!
Arianna Afsari received a Rackham Humanities Research Fellowship for a semester of dissertation research.
Ciara Barrick was named an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor by the Rackham Graduate School.
Amanda Kubic successfully defended her dissertation, Animating Antiquity: Classical (Dis) Embodiments by Modern Women.
Júlia Irion Martins edited issue 30 of Absinthe, "Brazil With an 'S'", which came out in December 2024 and includes two of her own translations. She has an article ("Bottled Up: Index, Capture, and the Case for Perfume as Media") forthcoming in a special issue of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Júlia successfully defended her dissertation, Posting Hole or Posting Soul: Women's Truth and Fiction in a Post-Internet Age. She has accepted a position as the Global Perspectives in Society Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at NYU Shanghai this coming fall.
Olan Munson successfully defended her dissertation “Zero Ground” Poetics and Translation in (Post-)Authoritarian South Korea, Chile, and their Diasporas (1979-2024).
Jaideep Pandey received a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship.
Ivan Parra Garcia received a Rackham Humanities Research Fellowship for a semester of dissertation research.
A student from Berkay Uluç’s Fall Comp Lit 122 section has been selected as one of two winners of Sweetland’s Matt Kelley Award for Excellence in First-Year Writing. Berkay’s thoughtful and creative teaching made possible Julia Kwan’s prizewinning multimodal project, "Were Cinderella's Slippers Glass or Gold?"
Ben Woodworth received a Rackham Humanities Research Fellowship for a semester of dissertation research.
Qingyi Zeng received a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship.
Congratulations to the Comp Lit Faculty!
Ali Bolcakan and Christi Merrill’s UROP students, Amy Shi, Kaeshav Krishna, Yuna Miyoshi, and Ziqiao Wang, won two Blue Ribbon Certificates at the UROP Research Symposium on April 23, 2025, with their project "Multilingual Computational Analysis of Historical Texts: A Case Study of Robinson Crusoe Translations.”
Catherine Brown's book "Remember the Hand" won the MLA's Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish on Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures.
Aaron Coleman's translation of Nicolás Guillén, "The Great Zoo", was short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize.
As an Emeritus Professor, Vassilis Lambropoulos continues to lead an active scholarly life both in the U.S. and Greece. He publishes papers in English and Greek; has participated in panels, roundtables, and book launches, and gave an endowed lecture. He serves on advisory boards and collaborates with colleagues. Vassilis directs a website where he commissions original essays on contemporary Greek poetics, and he comments on drafts of new Greek poetry.
Benjamin Paloff had two books published in 2025: Worlds Apart: Genre and the Ethics of Representing Camps, Ghettos, and Besieged Cities and Bakhtin’s Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning.
A newly opened exhibition at the Met takes its title and -- according to curator Iris Moon -- much of its inspiration from David Porter's work. Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie will be on view through August 17.
Will Stroebel's book, "Literature's Refuge", was published by Princeton University Press (Translation-Transnation series) in March 2025.
