Since 1998, faculty and graduate
students in Comparative Literature at UMass have benefitted
from a collaborative
research exchange relation with their
counterparts in Romance
Languages at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, one of Europe's leading universities.
Comparative Literature graduate students and faculty have
traveled to Belgium to deliver papers at an international
conference, and UCL faculty and graduate students have traveled
to Amherst to do the same. Individual faculty from UCL have
come to UMass to give lectures, and faculty from UMass have
gone to Paris and Louvain to deliver lectures in both venues.
Three volumes of Cahiers or Notebooks of the Exchange have
been published in Belgium, and a collection of essays by
faculty and graduate students at both institutions is forthcoming
from l'Harmattan in Paris.
Joining in this collaboration
have been faculty from History and Communications at UMass,
and faculty from Smith College,
the University of Paris XIII and the University of Québec
at Montréal.
On November 2, 2006, Comparative Literature
will send three Ph.D. candidates (Antonia Carcelan, Nikolina
Dobreva, Enrique
Garcia) and two faculty (Professors Couch and Moebius)
to Montreal to participate in the fourth international
conference
organized under the auspices of this exchange.
We gratefully
acknowledge the initial support of then Graduate Dean Fred
Byron and of then Dean of the College
of Humanities
and Fine Arts, Lee Edwards, as well as that of then
Dean of Erasmus College at Louvain, Georges Jacques, and
the
late Professor Pierre Massart. Professors Jean-Louis
Tilleuil and Myriam Watthee-Delmotte of the UCL , Jean
Perrot of
Paris
XIII and William Moebius at UMass have played exceedingly
important roles in giving the exchange its focus and
its energy.
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