When President Donald Trump takes a meeting with a foreign dignitary, like his recent summits with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jung Un, the leaders need professional interpreters to communicate and understand each other. What exactly does it take to become a professional interpreter? Cristiano Mazzei, Director of Interpreter training at UMass Amherst, joins Carrie Saldo to discuss what goes into this career path.

Reif Larsen, author of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (2010) and I Am Radar: A Novel (2015), visited Comp Lit graduate student Shastri Akella's classroom to meet and discuss his writing. Later in the evening, the author gave a talk at Amherst Books about the adaptation of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet into the film The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (2013) directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. 

Career opportunities with a degree in Comparative Literature are diverse and may include Advertising, Branding, Business, Copy Editing, Corporate Communications, Consulting, Education, the Film and Television Industry, Graduate School, Human Resources, Interpreter, IT Journalism, Law Librarian, Literary Agent, Marketing, Medicine, Multi-media Production, Online Market Research, Proofreader, Paralegal, Publishing, Public Health, Translator, Theater, Freelance Writing, or Speech.

The study of literary texts (writing judged by a culture to be important for its aesthetic, content or contextual qualities) is an ancient discipline practiced for more than a millennium in cultures around the globe. By collaborating with other departments and institutions, employing media and communications technologies, and thinking beyond the bounds of the conventional classroom, Comparative Literature is continuously developing and improving this study through creativity and innovation.

The Comparative Literature faculty have strengths in film and digital media, translation and interpreting, colonial and post-colonial, and medieval and modern. With them, students explore, compare, and contrast different languages, a variety of cultural traditions, in multiple forms of media.

Faculty pictured are, from left to right, back row: Bill Moebius, Cathy Portuges, Chris Couch, Jessica Barr, Edwin Gentzler, and Jim Hicks;  front row: Don Levine, Marisol Barbón, Maria Tymoczko, Moira Inghilleri, Annette Damayanti Lienau, and Kathryn Lachman.