Faculty News and Updates
faculty updates 2022-2023
Below are core and affiliated faculty updates. A full list of Comparative Literary Studies Program faculty can be found here.
César Braga-Pinto (SpanPort)
Book chapters: “What’s all the fuzz about? Masculinities, Women and the Paraguayan War in Joaquim Manuel de Macedo’s fiction.” Drag King. Ed. Javier Guerrero and Nathalie Bouzaglo. Metales Pesados. Santiago, Chile, 2023. ♦ “A Europa e o corpo extravagante de João do Rio”. João do Rio Plural: centenário de um acervo luso-brasileiro. Organização Orna Levin e Gilda Santos. Rio de Janeiro: Editora 7Letras, 2022. pp. 211-236. 978-65-5905-563-0. ♦ “A sexualidade de Mário de Andrade: a prova dos nove”. Modernismos: 1922-2022. Ed. Jorge Schwartz and Gênese Andrade. Companhia das Letras, 2022, pp. 507-545. ♦ “Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Brazil.” Latin American Literature in Transition: 1899-1870. Ed. Ana Peluffo and Ronald Briggs. Cambridge U.P., 2022. ♦ “Recifessexualizando José Lins: um roteiro para Moleque Ricardo.” As cidades de Zé Lins - um passeio crítico pela geografia sentimental do autor paraibano. CEPE: Recife, 2022, pp. 95-147. ♦ “Nestor Vítor: um escritor anfíbio”. Foreword to: Sapo. Uberlândia: O Sexo da Palavra, 2022, pp. 17-32.
Laura Brueck (ALC)
Laura Brueck was promoted to Full Professor. She continued to co-lead the Race, Caste, and Colorism Project with Ivy Wilson in the Department of English. This last year they brought a range of scholars, poets, and activists to campus and hosted a seminar on Race and Caste at the American Comparative Literature Association annual conference in Chicago. They also partnered with the Chicago-based arts collective, SpaceShift, to create and host a six-week pop-up artists’ workshop and gallery on Devon Avenue in Chicago. Called “Starlight,” it was a public space for events, teach-ins, concerts, art-making classes, film screenings, and literary readings, all built around the theme of race and caste.
Chris Bush (FRIT)
With the support of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Christopher Bush was on leave most of the academic year, working on a book project on the modernist haiku. He published articles in Esprit créateur and The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual, as well as a book review in Comparative Literature Studies. He also presented work on Proust at the symposium “Fugitive Proust” at the Maison Française, New York University, and on Eisenstein for a seminar on “Cinematic Internationalism” at the American Comparative Literature Association conference. He recently served as the invited moderator for a book event at the Seminary Co-op on Adhira Mangalagiri’s States of Disconnect: The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 2023).
Clare Cavanagh (Slavic) [from admin Mike Tabatowski]
Clare Cavanagh’s recent book of translated poetry by Adam Zagajewski came out this spring: True Life: Poems; and she wrote about it for the Washington Post.
Jorge Coronado (SpanPort)
Peer-reviewed Books and Dossiers: Anarquismos y marxismos en Bolivia, Ecuador y Perú. Textos esenciales. Co-edited with Stephen McNabb. Lima: Ediciones Achawata, in press, June 2023. ♦ Archaeology and Its Avatars. Co-edited with Alexander Herrera Wassilowski. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Contracted, submitted and under review. Expected publication date: 2023. ♦ Arqueología y sus avatares. Co-edited with Alexander Herrera Wassilowski. Bogotá: Editorial UniAndes. Invited for submission and contract. Expected publication date: 2023.
Peer-reviewed Articles, Book Chapters, and Essays: “Indigenismo,” Cambridge History of Peruvian Literature. Eds. Francesca Denegri and Efraín Kristal. New York: Cambridge University Press. Invited and in preparation. ♦ “Escritura e indigeneidad: Mariátegui, recepción y tergiversación,” Leer a Mariátegui en el siglo xxi. Eds. Martín Bergel, Claudio Lomnitz, and Víctor Vich. Submitted, reviewed and accepted for publication. ♦ “Introducción. Discursos críticos anarquistas y marxistas en Bolivia, Ecuador y Perú, 1900-1980.” Anarquismos y marxismos en Bolivia, Ecuador y Perú. Textos esenciales. Lima: Ediciones Achawata, in press. ♦ “Photography in Latin America.” A Companion to Latin American Literature, 2nd Edition. Ed. Sara Castro-Klarén. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2022. 555-71. ♦ "Sara Castro Klarén y la formación de los estudios literarios latinoamericanistas." MLN 137.2 (2022): 378-82. Dossier "Sara Castro-Klarén y su legado crítico." ♦ “Indigenismos.” Cambridge Transitions in Latin American Literature, Vol III: 1870-1930. Ed. Fernando Degiovanni and Javier Uriarte. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 194-207.
Essays, Op-Eds, Reviews, Translations, Entries, Podcasts: “O que acontece no Peru? Lima, a neoliberal,” Revista Rosa 7 hors-série, invited essay in special dossier on current events in Peru, translated by Paulo Victor Ferrari Nakano, May 16, 2023, https://revistarosa.com/7/levantes/lima-a-neoliberal
Invited Lectures: “Conflict, Commodity and Lo andino: On Elena Izcue’s Work in Light of Recent Events in Peru,” Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Emory University, February 2023 ♦ “Indigeneity and Writing: Rethinking Indigenismo in Early 20th Century Latin America," Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, September 2023 (postponed due to weather). ♦ “Escritura e indigeneidad: Mariátegui, recepción y tergiversación," Posgrado en Literatura, Facultad de Letras y Ciencias Humanas, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, July 2022
Conference Participation, Roundtables and Symposia: “¿Un nuevo latinoamericanismo? Algunas reflexiones sobre Los ríos profundos, la planetaridad y una formación disciplinaria,” XLIV Congreso del Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, Athens, July 2023. ♦ “Climate Change and Planetary Humanism,” DePaul Philosophy Circle, DePaul University, Chicago, April 2023. ♦ “Indigeneity and Writing in the Andes 1890-1940,” Thinking Andean Studies, Haverford College, Philadelphia, March 2023.
Northwestern Events: The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature — A Conversation with Lesley Wylie, Illuminations: Conversations on Latin American Literary & Cultural Studies Today, Interview, Latin American & Caribbean Studies/ Spanish & Portuguese/ University of Pittsburgh Press, June 2022. ♦ Defiant Geographies: Race & Urban Space in 1920s Rio de Janeiro — A Conversation with Lorraine Leu, Illuminations: Conversations on Latin American Literary & Cultural Studies Today, Interview, Latin American & Caribbean Studies/ Spanish & Portuguese/ University of Pittsburgh Press, May 2022
Penelope Deutcher (Philosophy)
Penny Deutscher has been awarded a research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University for the academic year 2023-2024.
Hannah Feldman (Art History)
Hannah Feldman enjoyed a busy year on campus and off, with research travel to Los Angeles, Madrid, Sharjah, Barcelona, Hamburg, Paris, London, and Beirut. In the fall, she taught “Modernism in the time of Decolonization,” with Rebecca Johnson, which gave rise to a Myers conference in January, “Forms of Liberation.” She is growing ever more excited for [Huguette Caland: Shape and Form in Four Languages] (working title) at the Reina Sofia in the fall of 2024, and working hard to that end. Work for books about Algerian abstract painting in the 1960s and about Walid Raad advanced as did a co-edited volume (with Rachel Haidu) about art writing, currently titled [Things we are not yet writing]. She was thrilled to see the special issue of Regards about mysticism and faith in Southwest Asia that she co-edited (with Kirsten Scheid) published, and even happier to have been able to include writing by Hamed Yousefi and Ruslana Lichtizer in the dossier. Articles appeared about temporality, love, and grammar in contemporary art, an interview with Hito Steyerl (in an exciting volume co-edited by Antawan Byrd!), and a text about Ahlam Shibli will be published by October in summer. Feldman shared her research at the Core Program, Harvard, UPenn, L’ École nationale supérieure de la photographie, Arles, The Block, and at AUB. She is proud of her former PhD mentees, Thomas Love (2023) and Azadeh Safaieian (2023), both of whom defended brilliant dissertations and took positions at the University of Missouri and the University of Illinois at Chicago, respectively.
Peter Fenves (German)
Over the course of the last several years, two of Professor Fenves’ books (Late Kant and The Messianic Reduction) were translated into Spanish and will appear this coming fall; one of the translators, Mauricio Oportus Preller, is an advanced graduate student in our CLS program, while another, Rudy Pradenas, was a visiting scholar at Northwestern and is currently finishing his doctoral degree at the University of Michigan. One of Professor Fenves’ essays, “Democracias, según Benjamin y Derrida,” recently appeared in a volume titled Jacques Derrida (Buenos Aires and Madrid). Another of his essays, “Benjamin, Studying, China,” translated by Li Sha, who was also a visiting scholar at Northwestern, recently appeared in an issue of the Guangzhou University Journal. Professor Fenves’ follow-up reflections on Benjamin’s relation to Chinese thought, “Detour and Dao: Benjamin, with Jullien, contra the Ontology of the Event,” was published this spring in Theory, Culture& Society.
Marianne Hopman (Classics)
After stepping down from her role as department chair in August 2022, Marianne Hopman spent the 2022-23 academic year working on her ongoing monograph on the fifth-century BCE tragedy, [Prometheus Bound], as well as related projects. She wrote chapters on violence, embodiment, and politics in the play; gave a talk (in French) on “Prometheus as spectacle” at the University of Montreal; and workshopped a chapter entitled “Emplotting Cosmography” forthcoming in a volume on [Cosmographies of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition], edited by R. Gagné and A. Kachuck. In her capacity as director of the Graduate Classics Cluster, she organized a series of well-attended events and lectures, culminating with an outing to see [Gospel at Colonus] at the Court Theatre in June 2023.
Jörg Kreienbrock (German)
Professor Jörg Kreienbrock was on leave during the 2022-23 academic year. He spent his time abroad as a Visiting Scholar at the Erich Auerbach Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Cologne, the Institute of Media Studies at the University of Bochum, and at La Sapienza University, Rome doing research on a new book project investigating representations of poverty in literature, art, and philosophy. While abroad he gave talks and held workshops at several German universities and published articles on the idea of repair work in Alexander Kluge, the relation of poetry to philosophical conceptualizations of property, and the precarious status of opening sentences in novelistic writing.
Neil Verma (RTVF)
Assistant Professor Neil Verma served as conference director and chair of the third Radio Preservation Task Force meeting at the Library of Congress and Smithsonian in Washington DC in April. The largest event of its kind, the four day conference had 80 panels and workshops and more than 350 speakers and panelists. In attendance were keynote speakers The Kitchen Sisters, Jad Abumrad of Radiolab, archivist Rick Prelinger and the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden. The conference brought together academics, broadcasters, government agencies, archivists and others to explore ways to preserve radio and podcasting recordings for posterity, and to launch new projects, including the Black Women in Radio historic initiative.
Sam Weber (German)
Professor Sam Weber, who is currently into the second year of a four-year “phased retirement” program with a reduced teaching schedule, followed up his spring 2022 undergraduate seminar on “Kafka’s Uncanny Animals” with a spring 2023 course, attended by both undergraduates and graduate students, on “The Uncanny in Theory and Literature” — the theory being that of Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger, and the literature being that of the German Romantic author, E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose story, “The Sandmann” exemplifies the Uncanny for Freud; whereas Heidegger chooses the Greek tragedy, Sophocles’ Antigone, as his exemplary uncanny text. Otherwise, Professor Weber published a book-length, Preexisting Conditions— Recounting the Plague (Zone Books)which examines how plagues have been narrated in literary, dramatic, and other forms. He also gave a series of lectures for Shanghai University on “Literature as Compassion.”
Jennifer Weintritt (Classics)
The highlight of Jennifer Weintritt’s teaching this year was reading the entire [Aeneid] not once, but twice with her advanced Latin class and first year seminar. The poem also made a brief appearance in her third course, "Women of the Trojan War: Ancient and Modern Adaptations." The fun with the [Aeneid] carried right on through to the end of the spring quarter, with a visit from Professor Erika Valdivieso (Yale) to speak on Vergil’s reception in South America. Reading the same text with different students and emphases all year long while working on her book project was delightful.
As for research, Jennifer held a successful manuscript workshop with senior colleagues from UPenn, UChicago, and Urbana-Champaign in November. She also presented her work, freshly updated from the workshop, at the Society for Classical Studies in New Orleans. Her article “More Useful and More Trustworthy: The Reception of the Greek Epic Cycle in Scholia to Homer, Pindar and Euripides” is set to appear in the American Journal of Philology in summer 2023.