As the semester ends quietly, and with more than a touch of rain on this the 20th of December, I am reminded of how much in New England the weather teaches us not to believe too much in the permanence and stability of any formation or cumulation the skies may present. Our present political climate, both national and state, suggests a similar message, speaking of funds we may not count on, of an expensive war, of compromised leadership. This seems to be a time when, following the phrase of Stendhal, echoed by Nathalie Sarraute, "le soupçon est entré au monde," suspicion is now at large.

It has always been part of our academic mission as comparatists to remain skeptical of the truth claims of a nation or a faith, recognizing as we do the betrayals of language and of translation. Our mission is to interrogate cultural difference through the medium of multiple representations, literary primarily, but visual and musical as well. If this should seem to be too broad a mission, we have only to begin to check off our own distinct contributions to the discipline to recognize how interrogative our approach to knowledge is. Despite the federalizing of our relationship to our language and literature department partners, we retain a very distinct identity, which it will be important for us in the next year to articulate, to declare, and to continue to foster and affirm, both through our continued research and its attendant theorizing and mapping, and through more pragmatic enunciations. If there is a whiff of suspicion about dangerous aliens abroad in this country, and there is, there should be a countervailing interrogation of who we are, what matters to us, and how the University is enriched by our presence, alien as it may seem to the rank and file.

I have at this semester’s end to thank so many for pitching in extra hard to make sure that there would be room for students who wanted to enroll in our courses, and to offer those students, more than 1,000 of them, learning opportunities not available through courses offered elsewhere in the university. I want to pay special tribute to Alix Paschkowiak, whose devotion to the Junior Year Writing Course made the end of semester conference (two days long this year) one of the most memorable ever, both for those like myself and several others who observed the proceedings and for the participants. I also want to mention the efforts of Prateeti Ballal in making the October conference "Texte, Image, Imaginaire/Imaginary, Image, Word" such an unbridled success, earning accolades from colleagues from Paris, Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve as well as from Smith and Amherst Colleges, and graduate students from Columbia University and the University of Hawaii. Thanks too, in addition to Dianne Sears and Don Maddox from French and Italian, and Ann Ciecko from Communications, to Lucien Miller, Cathy Portuges, Laszlo Dienes, Bob Rothstein and Jim Hicks, and to Lilian Feitosa, Lan Dong, Meriem Pagès and Craig Sinclair for their participation, and Nikolina Dobreva, BK Tuon and Corinne Oster for valued assistance at the conference.

Our students, both undergraduate and graduate, continue to earn honors and distinction, as some items in this newsletter may report. Elizabeth Petroff won the Outstanding Advisor Award, the first ever awarded, last May, and David Lenson’s nomination for this year’s award stands a excellent chance. Maria Tymoczko and Craig Sinclair are both nominees for the Distinguished Teaching Award this year. Prateeti Ballal has been awarded a European Field Studies Program Fellowship for research at the British Museum and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France related to her dissertation; Anita Mannur (Ph.D., 2002) is in the middle of her post-doctoral Fellowship at the University of Illinois, while Jana Braziel (Ph.D., 2001) on leave from a tenure-track position in Wisconsin is the Five College Fellow for this year, based at Amherst College. Chantal Zabus (Ph.D., 1988), Professor of the Universities of Paris, returns this spring to offer a Five College Faculty Seminar in April, 2003. We should count our blessings, and pray for better weather.