The Department of Comparative Literature is actively engaged in defining new paradigms and problems within the discipline. The relationship between translation and transnationalism, theory and media, the future of national literatures in the era of globalization, gender and cultural formation across time, literary history and psychoanalysis, east-west cultural encounters, human rights and global censorship, postcolonial and diaspora studies, the aesthetics of late modernity--these are among the conceptual fields strongly emphasized within the graduate curriculum. The location of UCLA in a major metropolis has also meant that on the graduate and undergraduate levels alike we are fortunate in attracting a singularly international, culturally varied student body whose perspectives have been crucial to fostering significant new directions in the comparative literary field. The high incidence of students with multiple native languages or a serious commitment to the study of foreign languages in their program of study, has encouraged experimental, multilingual approaches to literature, culture and critical theory.

Since its inception thirty years ago the Department of Comparative Literature has embraced western and non-western traditions. The original proposal for the department was written in 1968 by Arnold Band, who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard with an emphasis on Classical Greek and modern Hebrew. He was joined in founding the department by Ross Shideler, a scholar of Scandinavian literature, and PierMaria Pasinetti, a recognized novelist and Italian specialist who studied with Rene Wellek at Yale.

The Department has grown considerably since then to become a top-rated graduate program, enhanced by strong student and faculty recruitment, and cooperative appointments with other departments on campus. The core faculty, representing a wide range of languages, literatures, critical and research interests, includes Arnold Band (Near Eastern literature, Bible and Holocaust studies); Ali Behdad (Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Literary and Cultural Theory, European Representation of the Middle East, Victorian Novel and Travel Literature, US Immigration History, 19th Century Photography of/in the Middle East); Massimo Ciavolella (Italian, Renaissance studies, medical and social history); Michelle Clayton (Latin American literature and poetry); Nouri Gana (Modern Arabic Literature and Culture, Literary Theory); Stathis Gourgouris (Secular Criticism, Modern Greece, Literary Theory); Gil Hochberg (Transnational and Diaspora Studies, politics of language, Trauma Studies, nationalism, immigration, exile); Eleanor Kaufman (20th century French Philosophy, Modern Jewish Thought, literature of Jewish Diaspora, Maghrebi Literature, Modern American Literature); Katherine King (Classics, gender and sexuality in the ancient and contemporary worlds); Kathleen Komar (German, Feminism, Literary Theory); Efrain Kristal (Spanish, literature of the Americas, Translation Theory); Francoise Lionnet (19th and 20th century French Literature, Francophone Literature, Gender Studies, Autobiography, Creolization, African Diaspora); Kirstie McClure(Victorian Literature and Culture, Cultural Studies, Political theory, History, Feminism); Aamir Mufti (India, colonial and postcolonial); Ken Reinhard (Modern English Literature, psychoanalysis, Biblical hermeneutics); Ross Shideler (Scandinavian and Swedish Literatures, symbolism, Darwinism & Gender Studies); and Shu-mei Shih (East Asian and Asian American, Postcolonial Theory, Transnational Studies, the critique of modernity). Associated faculty share appointments with departments such as English (Saree Makdisi, Jenny Sharpe), Film and Television (Teshome Gabriel), French & Francophone Studies (Dominic Thomas), Germanic Languages (Andrew Hewitt), Slavic Languages and Cultures (Michael Heim). We are also committed to regular course offerings in classical Chinese literature (taught by East Asian Studies Professor David Scaberg) and contemporary and classical Arabic literature (taught by Near Eastern Studies Professor Michael Cooperson). Planning is actively underway for future curricular collaborations with History, Art, Art History, Architecture, Music, World Arts and Cultures, Afro-Caribbean and African Studies, Southeast Asian Studies, and Women's Studies.

Although the Core faculty plays a central role in advising students, the Comparative Literature Department draws on many departments in its sponsorship of cross-literary and interdisciplinary work. Faculty from throughout the university actively participate in teaching, advising and examining degree candidates. Courses in Comparative Literature at UCLA cover a wide range of primary texts and critical theories. What distinguishes our discipline from other fields in the humanities is the emphasis on reading and working in original languages; theoretical perspectives that question the premises of national canons or what constitutes communities of readers and texts; constructs that allow for the comparative study of literary movements, genres and aesthetic formalisms that transcend national or chronological boundaries, and a deep concern with a logic of the humanities that questions universalist foundationalism while attending to particulars of language, meaning and local knowledge, and which investigates the grounds of comparability itself.