Edited by Eyal Amiran, PMC is the leading electronic journal of interdisciplinary thought on contemporary cultures. In 2012-13, PMC published three issues, including a special issue on the subject-citizen. In addition to editing the journal, Professor Amiran gave a keynote address at the English Language and Literature Association of Korea’s December 2012 conference in Busan, Korea. He also published “The Shadow of the Object in Peter Pan” (ESC: English Studies in Canada 38.3-4, 2013) and “Beckett’s Lucky Chance: Speculation in Waiting for Godot” (In Dialogue with Godot: Waiting and Other Thoughts, ed. Ranjan Ghosh, Rowman and Littlefield, 2013).
David Theo Goldberg, Comparative Literature and Anthropology, was named World Technology Network Educator of the Year (with Cathy Davidson) in November 2012. He was recognized publicly by President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative, America, May 2013, for work with the MacArthur and Mozilla Foundations on digitial media and learning.
Susan C. Jarratt, professor and chair of Comparative Literature, led a week-long seminar on Historiography and the Archives at the Rhetoric Society of America’s Summer Institute at the University of Kansas in June. She has been awarded a Borchard Foundation Scholar-in-Residency Grant for Fall 2013 and Winter 2014 at the Chateau de la Bretesche, France, to study French critical approaches to post-classical Greek rhetoric.
J. Hillis Miller, Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature and English, was named Dickson Emeritus Professor this spring. A recent issue of the journal Comparative Literature Studies (50.2 2013) published a forum on his scholarship.
Jane O. Newman, Comparative Literature and European Languages and Studies, was awarded Honorable Mention for the Modern Language Association Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures for her new book Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (Cornell, 2011). Newman's translation of essays by Erich Auerbach will be published in Fall 2013 by Princeton. She’s lectured this year at Buffalo, UC Berkeley, Toulouse, and Utrecht.
Two new faculty join Comp Lit
The department welcomes Georges Van Den Abbeele as the new Dean of UCI's School of Humanities as of January 2013 and a faculty member of Comparative Literature and English. An eminent scholar of French literature, travel narrative, and critical theory, Professor Van Den Abbeele contributes to long-standing interests of the department. We also welcome Beryl Schlossman, most recently a professor of English at Northeastern University in Boston. Professor Schlossman has degrees from Université de Paris VII and Johns Hopkins. She publishes widely on French poetry, comparative French/Irish/English literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, art, film, and other topics. A warm welcome to our new colleagues!
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Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and English, will be awarded the UCI Medal for 2013 in recognition of extraordinary international influence. The second volume of his memoir, In the House of the Interpreter, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (2009) was selected as the 2012 Common Text by Howard University.
Nasrin Rahimieh, professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Center for Persian Studies and Culture, has published several essays and book chapters, including a collaboration with recent Ph.D. graduate Sharareh Frouzesh: “Articulations of Resistance in Modern Persian Literature” (in Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Cultures, Routledge 2013). Other titles include “Reflections of the Cold War in Modern Persian Literature” (in Global Cold War Literature, ed. Hammond, Routledge 2012) and “Translating Taghi Modarressi’s Writing with an Accent” (Iranian Languages and Culture, ed. Aghaei and Ghanoonparvar, Mazda, 2012).
Gabriele Schwab, Chancellor’s Professor of Comparative Literature, has been serving as a year-long International Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Theory at the University of Constance (Germany). The International Association of Philosophy and Literature (IAPL) organized a close encounter on her books Haunting Legacies and Imaginary Ethnographies in Singapore and invited her to be a respondent. She’s lectured this year in Hong Kong, Delhi, Helsinki and at various universities in Germany.