Because Comparative Literature is a transnational and interdisciplinary field of study, students in our undergraduate and graduate programs regularly work with faculty from across the university. Students take courses in departments throughout the university as appropriate to their individual course of study, and faculty throughout the university serve as undergraduate B.A. thesis advisors and as graduate orals and dissertation committee members. Normally a graduate student will have at least one Comparative Literature faculty member on his/her oral and dissertation committees; the other members of these committees, however, can be drawn from inside or outside the Department.
Prospective and current students should therefore consider all of the University of Chicago's distinguished faculty as potential mentors and advisors when considering their program of study.
To give some idea of the range of faculty with whom students may work, the list of resource faculty below includes faculty members with comparative interests, many of whom have worked on a regular basis with our students in recent years:
Bill Brown
Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture, Dept. English, Committee of History & Culture, and the College. 19th and 20th-Century American Literature; Popular Genres; Marxist Theory and Gender Theory; Naturalism; Modern Poetry.
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College. Modern Indian social and political history; Asian studies; philosophical discourses of modernity; Marxism; poststructuralism; deconstruction and postmodernism; postcolonial theory
James Chandler
Director, Franke Institute for the Humanities; Barbara E. & Richard J. Franke Professor, English, Committee on Cinema and Media Studies, Committee on the History of Culture, and the College. The Romantic Movement in England; 18th- and 19th-Century Poetry; the Historical Novel; Relations between Politics and Literature, History and Criticism.
Jas' Elsner
Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago.
Ghenwa Hayek
Assistant Professor of Modern Arabic Literature, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Modern Arabic Literature, 19th C - the present; literary nationalisms and transnationalisms; space, place, and identity; conflict and post-conflict literature; Arab diaspora.
Agnes Lugo-Ortiz
Associate Professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. 19th-century Latin American literature; 19th- and 20th- century Caribbean cultural history; relationships between cultural production and the formation of modern socio-political identities, especially those involving queer sexualities and gender.
Armando Maggi
Professor, Italian Literature and the College, and Committee on History of Culture. Renaissance and baroque culture, literature and philosophy with particular focus on love treatises, emblem books, and religious texts.
W.J.T. Mitchell
Gaylord Donnelly Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History, Committee on Art and Design, and the College. Romanticism; Critical and Aesthetic Theory; Marxist Criticism; 18th Century; Postmodernism; Comparative Studies in Visual and Verbal Art; Visual Culture; Media Theory.
Glenn W. Most
Professor (Social Thought and Classics). The Western classical tradition; comparative Romanticism; the history of literary scholarship; the history and theory of Comparative Literature.
Larry Norman
Frank L. Sulzberger Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures, Theater and Performance Studies, and the College; Chair, Department of Roman Languages and Literatures. French and European literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth century and theater across the ages; theater history; book history; intellectual and cultural history; literary criticism and theory; relation between the visual arts and literature.
Robert Pippin
Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought and of Philosophy and in the College. The modern German philosophical tradition (Kant to the present); contemporary Continental philosophy in general; moral theory; social and political philosophy; theories of modernity; various topics in ancient philosophy; philosophical issues in literature, art history and film.
Robert Richards
Professor in the Departments of History, Philosophy, Psychology, and in the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. History and philosophy of psychology and biology, with particular interest in evolutionary biopsychology, ethology, and sociobiology; history and philosophy of evolutionary theory in Britain, America, and Germany; the German Romantic movement's impact on philosophy and science in the age of Goethe.
Rocco Rubini
Assistant Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures, and the College. Renaissance literature, theater, and thought; Autobiography; Vico; Rhetoric vs. Philosophy; Humanism vs. Antihumanism; Textual and Philosophical Hermeneutics, German Historicism; 20th-century Intellectual History.
Bozena Shallcross
Associate Professor of Polish Literature. Representation of objects in contemporary Polish literature; Polish women and their artistic production; Polish literature in English translation; Russian/Polish encounters and relations.