News

Ilse Meiler, Comparative Literature Ph.D. student, was recently announced as World Literature Today 2026 Student Translation Prize Winner. Her winning submission is the dystopian short story “Raining out there,” by Polesian writer Alexandra Senkevich. 

Mohammad Alanazi, Comparative Literature Ph.D student, published by ArabLit, a leading platform dedicated to bringing Arabic literature to English-speaking readers, Abu Shalakh, the Chameleon is an English translation excerpt from a novel by the Saudi Arabian writer, poet, and politician Ghazi Algosaibi (1940–2010)

Emeritus Professor of Polish and Comparative Literature Bob Rothstein is publishing a new book, A Final Dose of Words to the Wise, to be released on May 15, 2026.

Since 2004, Professor Rothstein has been writing about Polish language, literature, and folklore for the Boston-based biweekly Biały Orzeł/White Eagle. Inspired by the calendar, by items in the Polish press, by his experience learning and teaching the Polish language, by new acquisitions for his home library, by questions from readers, and by serendipity, he has explored, among other things, the origins of words and expressions, the

Comparative Literature major Kylie Chamberlin (class of 2028) is one of UMass's two winners of the 2026 Five College Poetry & Prose Award. This juried award is presented annually to two students from six institutions: the Five Colleges and the Care Center at Bard Microcollege Holyoke.

Kylie and the other UMass winner, English major Sebastian Fuentes-Roberts ('27), were honored at a reading and reception in the Old Chapel on April 14. Congratulations, Kylie!

Failure Narratives Beyond Redemption: Twentieth Century Literature and Film (Routledge 2026) focuses on the concept of non-redemptive failure, a type of failure that is not part of a larger narrative of success or narrative redemption, with attention to how the concept functions between literature, performance, politics, and other fields. Examining literature and film from mid- twentieth- century Poland, Italy, and the United States, the book traces productive effects of failure which cannot survive into the future, yet have an important, transformative impact in the moment in which they occur

The Program in Comparative Literature invites you to Crossroads VIII: Alterity and the Comparative Imagination, an in-person graduate conference to be held on April 10–11, 2026. Centered on the question of alterity, the conference explores how comparative literature, as both method and discipline, engages with forms of difference (social, cultural, geopolitical, and so on). Bringing together emerging scholars, the conference examines how texts stage encounters with the “other,” and how comparative reading practices can illuminate the ethical, political, and epistemological stakes of such

In her new book, Medieval Holy Women and the Desire for Death, Professor Jessica Barr questions the hagiographic commonplace that devout Christian women yearned for death as the quickest way of reaching their beloved, Christ. Placing medieval women’s religious writings (spiritual treatises, visionary narratives, autobiographical reflections) in dialogue with theology and hagiography, Barr seeks to elucidate the ways in which medieval people anticipated or experienced biological death on a personal level. In narrating their spiritual lives within the framework of deeply held Christian beliefs