Our Comp Lit Department will host the 2014 ACLA conference this coming March!
Professor Emily Apter and Professor Jacques Lezra's translation of Barbara Cassin's Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon is out now from Princeton University Press! This is an encyclopedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy--or any--translation from one language and culture to another. Drawn from more than a dozen languages, terms such as Dasein (German), pravda (Russian), saudade (Portuguese), and stato (Italian) are thoroughly examined in all their cross-linguistic and cross-cultural complexities. Spanning the classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary periods, these are terms that influence thinking across the humanities.
Professor Richard Sieburth's translation of Nostradamus' Prophecies is out now from Penguin!
Professor Kristin Ross' book was translated into French. Rimbaud, la commune de Paris et l'invention de l'histoire spatiale is published by Les Prairies Ordinaires.
Professor Hala Halim was promoted to the position of associate professor with tenure, effective 1/15/2014. Congratulations, Hala!
Professor Cristina Vatulescu was promoted to the position of associate professor with tenure, effective 9/1/2013. Congratulations, Cristina!
Emily Apter's Book Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability is out now from Verso Books! The book argues for a rethinking of comparative literature focusing on the problems that emerge when large-scale paradigms of literary studies ignore the politics of the “Untranslatable”—the realm of those words that are continually retranslated, mistranslated, transferred from language to language, or especially resistant to substitution.
Hala Halim's Book Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. Interrogating how Alexandria became enshrined as the exemplary cosmopolitan space in the Middle East, this book mounts a radical critique of Eurocentric conceptions of cosmopolitanism. The dominant account of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism elevates things European in the city's culture and simultaneously places things Egyptian under the sign of decline. The book goes beyond this civilization/barbarism binary to trace other modes of intercultural solidarity.
Visiting Scholars for 2013-2014
Alice Blackhurst is in the second year of her PhD in the French department at the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation centers around ideas of luxury in contemporary French thought, art and film. Her MPhil thesis, completed in 2012, looked at the question of corporeality and the logic of the limit with regards to the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy and Gilles Deleuze.
Felipe Charbel received his PhD in History from Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and is currently a Professor in the Institute of History at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He is completing research on a project titled Figurations of History and the Knowledges of Literature: a Study of Contemporary Historical Novels.
Cherrie Lalnunziri Chhangte received her PhD in African American Fiction from North Eastern Hill University, India. She belongs to the Mizo tribe of northeast India, and is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Mizoram University, India. She is joining the Comp. Lit. department at NYU this fall as a Fulbright Postdoctoral Research Fellow to work on "Aspects of Minority Literature; A Comparative Study of Select Native American and Mizo Narratives.
Sagi Cohen is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Ottawa, supervised by Dr. Dalie Giroux. His Dissertation - Homo Perfidus: An Antipathology - tries to construct a "responsible" concept of betrayal; a methodology. His guide through this Inferno is an appropriately unholy matrimony between Nietzsche and Levinas, which helps approach the accusation of 'traitor' in a trans-valuative/affirmative manner; not a persecution of prejudgment, but a phenomenological erring toward its trace(s) (as an ethics, as philosophia prima).