Resource Faculty
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:
Kelly Austin. Assistant Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures, and the College. Literature of the Americas; Translation Studies; 20th-century U.S. and Latin American poetry; literature and dictatorship; the visual arts and poetry.
Bill Brown. George M. Pullman University Professor, 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.
Robert Buch. Assistant Professor, Germanic Studies, and the College. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and French literature, especially representations of violence and suffering and philosophical prose and aphorism; literary realism; genre theory; aesthetics.
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.
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. Associate 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. Associate Professor, French Literature; Master of Humanities Collegiate Division; Associate Dean of the Division of the Humanities and the College. 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.
Thomas Pavel. Professor (Romance Languages and Literatures). 17th-century French Literature; the novel; 20th-century French literature and intellectual history; interactions between literary criticism, linguistics, and philosophy.
Sanja Perovic. Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities Division. Eighteenth and nineteenth century French and German literature and philosophy; the French Revolution; theories and practice of revolutionary time; and the philosophy and history of aesthetics.
Robert Pippin. Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner 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.
Boz'ena 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.
Lina Steiner. Assistant Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures and the College.
History and theory of the novel; the Russian novel from 1830s to 1860s in relation to "nation-state" ideology; the "long 18th-century" and realist movements in England, France, Russia, and Ukraine; semiotics; Russian opera.
Rebecca West. William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the College and Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Committee on Cinema and Media Studies; Director, The Center for Gender Studies. Modern and contemporary Italian literature and culture, especially lyric poetry and narrative; Italian and Italian-American cinema; and gender studies, particularly feminist theory and practice, and constructions of masculinity.