Department of Comparative Literature Kudos 2025-26
Congratulations to Comp Lit Undergraduates!
Comparative Literature, Arts and Media Majors
Pedro Alfonso graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature.
Nicolas Eisenberg graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature and International Studies, and completed a minor in Asian Languages and Cultures.
Angy El-Badry graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies, and completed a minor in Arab & Muslim American Studies.
Ruoning Fang graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature, Arts, and Media, with honors, and in Economics.
Connor Lewis graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature and in Philosophy, with honors, and in Spanish.
Allison Penski graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature, Arts, and media, with honors, and in Creative Writing, with honors, and completed a minor in Spanish Language, Literature, and Culture, and served as one of the department’s Undergraduate Peer Mentors.
Maximilian Resch graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature, with honors, and in English, with honors, and in French, and completed a minor in International Studies.
Laiyla Santillan graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature, Arts, and Media.
Tina Shina graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature, with honors, and in History, and completed a minor in Writing. In April 2026, Tina won the prestigious Virginia L. Voss Memorial Award for excellence in writing by senior Honors women, for her thesis “For When Translation Isn't Cutting It Anymore: Enter ‘Translanguaging’.”
Olga Yatsenka graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature, with honors, and in Polish, and completed a minor in Ukrainian Language, Literature, and Culture, and served as one of the department's Undergraduate Peer Mentors.
Translation Majors
Cecilia Ledezma Herrera graduated with a BA in Translation, and in English, with honors, and in German, and completed a minor in Digital Studies.
Ariel Litwak graduated with a BA in Translation and English, with honors, and completed a minor in Linguistics.
Kristen Pikaart graduated with a BA in Translation, and in International Studies, and in Asian Studies, with honors.
Translation Studies Minors
Kai Carter completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Kai graduated with a BA in German and in Linguistics, with honors.
Xixi Jiang completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Xixi graduated with a BBA in Business Administration, and completed a second minor in Asian Languages & Cultures.
Brandon Lee completed the Minor in Translation Studies. Brandon graduated with a BA in Linguistics and International Studies.
2026 Comparative Literature First Year Writing Prize
Selene Freudenberg was awarded the 2026 Comparative Literature First Year Writing Prize for the essay “Learning Greeklish”.
Sara Stuckman received a First Year Writing Prize honorable mention for the essay “What the Forest Saw: Poems of Sita and Shurpanakha”.
2026 Senior Prize in Literary Translation
Juno Nedumaran was awarded the 2026 Senior Prize in Literary Translation for her translation from French of Life: A User's Manual by George Perec.
Patrick Phang Del Pozo was awarded the 2026 Senior Prize in Literary Translation for his translation from Quechua of Selections from Karu Ñankunapi: Five Quechua Stories from Usi (Cusco, Peru) by César Itier, Agustín Thupa Pacco, Samuel Pacco Thupa, and Santos Pacco Ccama.
Congratulations to Comp Lit Graduate Students!
Arianna Afsari was awarded a Graduate Student Fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities next year. In October 2025, Arianna published an article entitled, “TOWARD A THIRD POETRY: Notes on Juan Gelman’s Counterpoetry of Liberation and Anticolonial Resistance,” in a special issue on decolonization and literature of the Global South for the academic journal, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory. She will also publish a bilingual edition (Spanish and English) of Notes (Notas) by the Argentine poet, Juan Gelman. This bilingual volume, set to be released in July 2026 by the UK publisher the87press, makes Gelman’s hauntingly beautiful exilic poetry collection, Notas (Notes), available to English-speaking audiences in its entirety for the first time. Notas (Notes) also received the PBS Autumn 2026 TRANSLATION CHOICE award from the Poetry Book Society in the UK.
Razieh (Seyedeh) Araghi successfully defended her dissertation Contested Feminisms: Translating and Redefining Modernity in Iranian and Turkish Women’s Writings.
Luiza Duarte Caetano successfully defended her dissertation The Uses of Literature in Times of Crisis: Germaine de Staël, Louise Michel, Peter Weiss.
Tomi Drucker received a 2026-27 Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship Award. Tomi also wrote, produced and directed the film Blood Ties (2025). The film has been screened at film festivals around the world and has won several awards, including Best Actress in a Student Short Film (All that Moves International Film Festival, São Paulo, Brazil, 2026), Best Student Screenplay Award (Montreal International Film Festival, Montreal, Canada, 2025), Best Screenplay in a Women’s Short Film (Short Way International Short Film Festival, São Paulo, Brazil, 2025), and an Honorable Mention (17th International Film Festival of Larissa, Larissa, Greece, 2025).
Benjamín Figueroa Lackington advanced his research profile through several publications, presentations, fellowships, and international research activities. He published a book chapter on the moral ontology of Wang Yangming (d. 1529) in Lecturas contemporáneas sobre filosofía china; his first English-language article, on Arabic philosophical universalism and the Umayyad administrative reforms, in the Journal of Islamic Philosophy; and the first Spanish translation of a work by Zhu Xi (d. 1200) in Estudios de Asia y África. He also presented at the conferences of the International Society for Chinese Philosophy and the Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios de Asia y África (ALADAA), completed an internship with the Mexican think tank Dynamics Disequilibrium Economics Research Group, and held visiting researcher appointments at the Università di Pisa and National Taiwan University to conduct dissertation-related research. His work was supported by the Rackham One-Term Dissertation Fellowship, Rackham Doctoral Intern Fellowship, Rackham Conference Travel Grant, and the Lieberthal-Rogel Travel and Research Grant. Benjamín successfully defended his dissertation Nonplaces: A Critique of Comparative Philosophy.
Lena Grimm successfully defended her dissertation, Si(gh)ting Language: Anne Carson and Barbara Köhler's Translational Poetics.
Srimati Ghosal received a Rackham Humanities Research Fellowship for a semester of dissertation research.
A student from Srimati Ghosal’s Fall Comp Lit 122 section was selected as the winner of Sweetland’s Matt Kelley Award for Excellence in First-Year Writing. Srimati’s thoughtful and creative teaching helped make possible Ruotong Zhao's winning essay, The Cultural Interaction between Refined Cuisine and Aesthetic Space in the Jiangnan Region from the Mid-Qing to the Republican Era: An Archival Study of Suzhou Gardens, Huizhou Architecture, and Regional Cuisines.
Caroline Sullivan received a Rackham Humanities Research Fellowship for a semester of dissertation research.
Sam McCracken successfully defended his dissertation Virtually Disposable: A Theory and History of Digital Trash.
Qingyi Zeng received a Rackham Humanities Research Fellowship for a semester of dissertation research.
Congratulations to the Comp Lit Faculty!
Gavin Arnall officially began his courtesy appointment with the department! With his team at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, they successfully renewed the Tinker Field Research Collaborative Grants for 2025-2030. These grants support master’s, doctoral, and professional school students conducting preliminary fieldwork in Spanish- and Portuguese speaking countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as Indigenous and Creole language study in the region. In collaboration with the International Institute, the Ford School of Public Policy, and the School of Nursing, Gavin co-wrote and received a Global Michigan Education Abroad Resource Grant to launch a Global Migration Hub and develop a study abroad and internship program in the San Diego/Tijuana border region. He also gave a keynote lecture and an invited talk - both on translation theory in Latin America - at the University of Utah and the University of Toronto.
Aaron Coleman was selected as a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities for the 2026-2027 academic year.
Frieda Ekotto finished her third documentary, MWEM FO, My Queen Mothers Shadow in 2025.
Will Stroebel was recommended for promotion to associate professor of classical studies, with tenure, and associate professor of comparative literature, with tenure.
