About Us

Internationally renowned for leadership in the field of continental literary theory, Comparative Literature at UCI today is a place of openness and risk—a spacious department, good for thinking, collectivity, and contestation. Our current interests include the possibilities for engaging in politics broadly speaking, for rethinking the present and unmapping a world that seems to be already mapped through disciplinary structures such as area studies, and for interanimating scholarship, teaching, and activism. Faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates work together in our department to push vocabularies, to create new conceptual frames of reference, and to construct different genealogies. Psychoanalysis, phenomenology, subaltern studies, feminism and queer studies, materialism, critical race theory, de/post/neo/and X-coloniality, globalectics: these are a few of the analytic frames that inform our work. Translation broadly applied enables us to make moves: across languages, media, geographic borders, and political visions. While various faculty work with site-specific literatures and film--from Argentina and other Latin American nations, China and Hong Kong, Europe, Iran, Japan, Kenya, the U.S., and other locations--we don't offer these materials as geopolitically fixed archives. Rather, we place cultural practices within dynamic global exchanges, both historical and contemporary. Through courses, conferences, collaborative projects, and digital media, Comparative Literature at UCI advances critical cosmopolitanism—a kind of worldliness cultivated by creative engagements with power, peoples, and their symbolic practices. We invite you to explore our projects and programs, and hope you will find ways to join us in our ventures.