This summer, Smaran Dayal defended his dissertation, "Afrofutures, Atlantic Pasts: Decolonial Revisions in 20th Century African American Science Fiction," and is graduating into a tenure track professorship at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Completed under the supervision of Prof. Sonya Posmentier, his dissertation is a comparative study of the African American authors Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany with a view to the post- and decolonial theoretical work carried out by their science fiction. A scholar of Global Anglophone and American literature, Dayal has previously held fellowships funded by the Mellon Foundation, the European Council, and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. He is the co-editor, with Univ. Prof. Ulrich Baer, of an anthology of American literature, Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts (2020), and maintains an active translation practice. His scholarly work has appeared in the journals American Studies, Citizenship Studies, and Social Text, among other venues.

Wendy Lotterman graduated from NYU's department of Comparative Literature in September, 2022. She completed a dissertation titled "Lyric Interference: Possessive Individualism in American Case Law and Contemporary Poetry" under the supervision of Jay Garcia, Emily Apter, Fred Moten, and Hentyle Yapp. The project posits a link between lyric and liberal individualism through their shared naturalization of Lockean personhood in both Romantic poetry and British common law. Tracing the intellectual exportation of personhood-as-property through these two archives—US case law and contemporary poetry—it argues that a diverse group of politically engaged contemporary American lyric poets trouble the genre’s complicity with classical liberalism by performing a public rather than private subject, replacing individuation with socialization. The dissertation also engages with institutional critique through a focus on the co-emergence of postmodernism and ethnic studies in the late 20th century, a divide which consigns difference to a liberal framework of identity and inclusion. It argues that a similar rift exists in US poetry between conceptualism and the lyric, ultimately relegating difference to be expressed in a grammar of personal injury. The poets surveyed in the dissertation reprise the lyric in order to revise its alignment with individuation, freeing difference to be explored as both material and relational, rather than as the content of an identity that seeks recognition. 

Wendy is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Core Curriculum at NYU. She is an associate editor of Parapraxis, a new psychoanalytic magazine for which she also co-organizes a biweekly seminar. Her first full-length collection of poetry, A Reaction to Someone Coming In, will be published by Futurepoem in 2023.

Giancarlo joined the NYU Comparative Literature Phd program in 2015 after receiving his Masters in Comparative Literature at Paris 3 (Sorbonne Nouvelle). This fall, he will be starting a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Translation Theory and Translation Studies at the French and Italian department of the University of California Santa Barbara. His dissertation, entitled “Dialectal Dante: The Politics of Translation in Risorgimento Italy” and co-advised by Emily Apter and Jane Tylus, explored the phenomenon of dialectal translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy in nineteenth-century Italy with a view to understanding the complex language politics of this period, during which not only the nation but the language was being unified.

Tatiana received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, with emphasis in Slavic Studies, at New York University in 2022 and is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. Her research centers on the relationship between cultural memory and embodiment in post-Soviet film, television, fashion, and performance art. Her dissertation, "Beyond Nostalgia: Remediating the Soviet Body in Russian Culture under Putin," puts the scholarship on post-Soviet nostalgia in dialogue with the discourses of embodiment that take place within visual and film studies, gender studies, and performance studies in order to rethink the significance of repetition lying at the core of nostalgic appeal. Approaching repetition as a constitutive element of the production of gender, the project asks how contemporary fascination with the past generates the concept of the post-Soviet body. Her other teaching and research interests include history of global feminisms, Soviet and contemporary film genres, aesthetics of melodrama, fashion studies, the 1990s, social media and cultural consumption.