Comparative Literature and Thought

About Our Department

Comparative Literature and Thought (CLT) immerses students in modern and contemporary literary and intellectual cultures and in the textual and philosophical traditions that animate those cultures.  Our curriculum attends to the emergence of a global textual and media culture as well as to the ways in which nations, subcultures, and individuals embrace and resist that global emergence. Our faculty and students have wide-ranging interests – intellectual history, translation, arts practice, comparative arts, digital humanities, media studies and book history, political and legal thought. In addition, many of our students are both scholars and makers, bringing their intellectual interests to bear on creative projects and vice-versa.

We have built our undergraduate major and minor upon a foundational curriculum for the humanities, which focuses on a set of themes and problems that have long preoccupied students and scholars: the nature of textual culture, the philosophical and ethical engagements of literature and the arts, the impact of politics on literature and thought, the reciprocal impact of literature and thought on politics, the specific role of language and rhetoric in intellectual life, and the transformations and provocations that arise when texts are translated to another language or to another medium. Students who wish to combine the creative and the critical have the opportunity to enroll in courses in translation practice, in multilingual creative writing, and in arts journalism. Some of our students do traditional scholarly work for their capstones in the major; others do creative final projects. Our digital humanities group offers students opportunities to participate in collaborative research projects comparable to those offered to students in the natural and social sciences. 

On the graduate level, we offer a PhD program in Comparative Literature as well as three graduate certificates, one in translation, one in early modern studies, and one in data science in the humanities. We also support joint PhD degrees with five different literature and culture programs and departments. 

The graduate program is home to an international group of students whose diverse intellectual commitments provide multiple points of contact for collaborative scholarly research and creative work. PhD students home-based in Comparative Literature and Thought choose between two related options: a research-focused course of study and an international writers’ track. The former is organized around a curriculum in comparative theoretically informed critical and historical inquiry, usually in at least two literary cultures, whereas the latter involves a uniquely calibrated combination of translation or creative writing and critical and historical inquiry. A broad range of affiliate faculty from across literature and culture studies in Arts & Sciences facilitates work that crosses boundaries, makes connections, and strives for the stereoscopic view of the local and the global. 

Comparative Literature and Thought is also the administrative home for the Program in Germanic Languages and Literatures, which offers a major and minor in German, an MA in German and Higher Education Administration, and a PhD with a focus in German Literature and Culture with a special option for international writers.