The Comparative Literature Newsletter
Spring 2003
Faculty news
|
Robert Henke was honored by the Graduate Student Senate at their fourth annual awards ceremony. At a reception on April 8, he was named an Outstanding Faculty Mentor for 2002-2003. He's keeping the tradition alive; former chair Robert Hegel was awarded the same honor in 2000-2001. |
| Emma Kafalenos has been elected to a three-year term on the Executive Council of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, the organization that sponsors the annual Narrative Conference and the journal Narrative. Her article "The Power of Double Coding to Represent New Forms of Representation: The Truman Show, Dorian Grey, Blow-Up, and Whistler's Caprice in Purple and Gold" has just been published as the lead essay in Poetics Today 24:1 (Spring 2003). |
| Robert Hegel has received a WU Faculty Research Grant for the summer of 2003. His project is a continuation of his previous work on narrative structures and techniques in crime case reports from China’s last imperial dynasty. Before SARS came along, he planned to travel to China as a lecturer for a Washington University Alumni Tour in May, and then to stay on in Beijing for research after the tour group returned to the US. There he hoped to retrieve more cases, and more data about them, from the Imperial Archives. In the meantime, he will continue to work on a volume of translated testimony from those cases, tentatively titled Tales for the Emperor, and prepare a paper for an international conference on Writing and Law in Late Imperial China he is convening at Washington University early in the fall. That workshop will involve scholars in literature, history, law, and religious studies from Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore in addition to others from the United States. Hegel will travel to Taiwan this summer to present his sixth paper based on this research project. For a week in June he will be the guest of the Institute of Literature and Philosophy of the Academia Sinica, located outside Taipei. |
|
OUT THE DOOR! | |
|
Cynthia Richards successfully defended her dissertation on April 7, which makes her the first ever to earn the joint Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Drama!! Her new goals: turn her dissertation into a book, and do some job hunting for a teaching position. |
Mary Linxweiler will graduate with her Master's degree on May 16, relax for a few hours, then get married the next day! (And what will she do on the 18th - climb Mt. Everest?) Congrats to Mary and soon-to-be-husband Christopher Jackson! |
| Curtiss Short will finish his Master's degree in May too, and as far as we know, has no plans to get married the next day. But he is sticking around here to work on his Ph.D. | |
What some of our grad students are up to now
| Zhang Jing and Vicki Rapti, who are team-teaching "Haunting Stories: the Ghost in East and West" this semester, have received the Arts and Sciences Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence for 2002-03. This award recognizes superb performances by graduate teaching assistants and was presented at the Graduate Council meeting on April 24. |
| Anastasia Lakhtikova, Sif Rikhardsdottir and Giorgio Mobili have all achieved ABD status. |
| And they all started at the same time too - what a coincidence! |
| Mei Chun presented "Reading Commentaries on Fiction: The Politics of Pleasure and Anxiety as Reading Habits in Seventeenth-Century China" at the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in March. |
| Kamaal Haque has been given a full year scholarship from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) to conduct dissertation research in Munich next year. |
| Daniel Medin will present a guest lecture at the JFK Institute for North American Studies (Free University Berlin) in May on "Trials and Errors in the recent fiction of Philip Roth and J. M. Coetzee", and has two articles coming out - a review of W.G. Sebald’s “Unerzählt” and the paper he presented on Kafka’s Judaism at the INST conference in Vienna last December. |
New destinations from our web page
|
A page about Our Graduate Students |
Something to submit for next time around? Send it to complit@artsci.wustl.edu
link to the Comp Lit Home Page