Our Majors

Why are you a Comp Lit major?

"My name is Aliza and I am a senior comp lit major with an allied field in art history. I am currently in the midst of writing my thesis on theories of visual perception. More specifically, I am interested in exploring the ways that optical encounters - in psychoanalytic, phenomenological and political theoretical frameworks - are articulated as central to both the constitution and destabilization of subjectivity.

I love comp lit first and foremost for its disciplinary insouciance, but also because the modes of analysis, abstract thinking, and creative interpretation encouraged by the literature classes I have taken at Reed have enabled me to contemplate the world (through the lens of great texts) with greater depth and diligent curiosity." –Aliza

"I’m studying Comp Lit because I realized I was lying to myself about wanting to do anything other than read books and talk about them. I can’t imagine studying literature without studying and thinking about language. I love the interdisciplinary focus of Comp Lit, and I love the language department faculty. I am interested in contemporary poetry and poetics and the overlap of creative and academic writing in work by writers including Fred Moten, Anne Carson, Maggie Nelson, Federico García Lorca, and Aimé Césaire." –Ben

"Hi! I’m Dylan (she/her and they/them) and I’m studying Comparative Literature with an allied field of History. I’m studying Comparative Literature because I’m really interested in the relationships between different world literatures, and the uses of storytelling in vastly different contexts, so the interdisciplinary nature of the field and the freedom to move beyond Anglophone literature is exciting to me. I’m particularly interested in studying storytelling as a productive response to individual and collective traumas in postcolonial societies." –Dylan

"i will be thesising on lesbian vampires. probably. " –Ellie

"Hiya! I'm Leila, and I've been a comp lit major since I got here. A big part of the reason I came to Reed was actually the comp lit department website. I remember that someone had written there that they loved comp lit because it let them study books while also studying everything else, which is exactly what I wanted (and have been able!) to do. I'm interested in questions of poetic translation, because every time a poem is translated the translator makes all sorts of decisions about what makes a poem good and what makes that particular poem that particular poem." –Leila

"Hello! I'm Owen and I am a Comparative Literature major because nothing is more fun than writing about, reading, and discussing books, art, and film. Also, I'm terrified of the existential void, and my best hope is that these things just might be able to fill it! I think artistic expression, in all its varied forms, is the most interesting human phenomenon—and so for my thesis I'll be reading Nietzsche's argument about how aesthetics might justify existence alongside works of poetry, literature, and film in order to test that claim. " –Owen

"I'm a Comparative Literature major because I believe it is the pure and beautiful opposite of being a Poli Sci major. I'm studying sensations of "removal," "alienation," and "fragmentation" as they pertain to the language of history. My specific focus is on 19th and 20th century German literature, Walter Benjamin, and owning the Libs." –Patrick, '21

"I'm a Comp Lit major because I find that it simultaneously allows for more structure and more wiggle room! I'm studying Great Britain and France in single era and comparing and contrasting how their two cultures handled class and gender dynamics in either the Renaissance or Middle Ages!" –Rikky

"Hello! I'm Scout (they/them) a Junior comp-lit major with an allied field in film/media studies! I'm comp-lit because my brain has been rotted by the internet and comp-lit is the only way I could bring my obsessions with pop culture, women in film, and psychoanalysis into one place! I'm hoping to theis on the portrayal of female hysteria in different mediums of media, including tabloid coverage of Britney Spears and *I Love Dick!*" –Scout

"Hi, I’m Sherry. I am studying literature because it is one of my "lifelines" (along with black tea and music). I became a Comparative Literature major because it seems that we can do everything as long as the central focus is on literature. The comparative lens has enabled me to see things that I could not have realized without it. For the senior thesis I am studying subject-object relations in Japanese and English literature from the 1920s to the '70s. Mishima Yukio and his The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is the writer/work that had the strongest influence on me." –Sherry

"My name is Soroa and I'm a senior studying comparative literature with a focus in dance/performance studies. I'm interested in the ways that performance and movement practices can create a language of bodily affects and emotions that can be used as a basis for relationality. Movement can allow the subject to be understood through the body's pleasures and sensations (as opposed to through traditional social inscriptions) which is socially and politically powerful but is also just more fun. I'm here for the groove!" –Soroa

"I am studying Comparative Literature to engage with a variety of art forms (writing, imagery etc.) in themselves as well as in relation to one another. To give an example, I am interested in writing, photography and film, and how they are related." –Tigris

Our Graduates

2022

AJ Adler
Thesis title: Questioning the Relationship Between Love and Expressions of Love Within Medieval Romance Stories of France and China

Scout Annes
Thesis title: No One Likes A Mad Woman: Explorations of Representations of Hysteria from Freud, Polanski and Beyond

Ellie Sharp
Thesis title: A picture’s worth what?! - the Cinepoetics of Man Ray and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Leila Sinclair
Thesis title: A Complete and Precious Thing: Virginia Woolf's Self-Other Encounter as an Entrance into Time

T.S. Wolff
Thesis title: "At this point the audience must no longer know what is happening": Postdramatic Memory and the Embodiment of Ambiguous Loss in Marguerite Duras’ Savannah Bay (1982-3)

2021

Ross Avery
Thesis title: Rhythm, texture, space : dimensions of sonic textuality

Owen Hart
Thesis title: For here there is no place that does not see you : an aesthetic escape from the abyss of nihilism

Sherry Huang
Thesis title: An alienated individual's journey of self-exploration : interpreting Mishima Yukio's Kinkakuji through the theory of the double

Tania Jaramillo
Thesis title: Islanded modernities : eco-poetics of the shore in Joyce, Walcott and Césaire

Dylan Kurzer-Ogul
Thesis title: Speaking Supernatural: Communalizing Trauma through the Fantastic in Louisiana and The Last Warner Woman

Soroa Lear
Thesis title: Assembled and undone : bodies beyond subjection

Alex Morgan
Thesis title: Mirages and mirrors : reflections on femininity, masculinity, and adolescence in two mid-Qing-Dynasty novels

Aliza Phillips
Thesis title: Between the eye and the "I"

Ben Read
Thesis title: Toward a poetics of study

Austin Serif
Thesis title: The portrait narratives of Gogol and Wilde

Katherine Smrha-Monroe
Thesis title: Senegalese women authors : universally individual

Sarah Wolfe
Thesis title: Putting the lai in layered : the relevance of postcolonial hybridity to the work of Marie de France

Keziah Wong
Thesis title: In your dreams

Patrick Woodard
Thesis title: "Durch's Gebirg" : unity, fragmentation, and Stimmung in Büchner's Lenz

Ana Zhvania
Thesis title: Overperforming the mainstream : zaniness as a disruptive practice

2020

Luna Albertini
Thesis title: Acted Bodies: Doubling and Redoubling Self in L'enfant de sable and La mucama de Omicunlé.

Maya Arigala
Thesis title: Postimperial Melancholia and Migrant Communities in The Lonely Londoners and The Buddha of Suburbia.

Io Blanchett
Thesis title: Who Looks? Reimagining Film as a Medium for Feminist Art.

Mary Brady
Thesis title: Open It Up: A Critical Exploration of the Globalization of Chinese and American Hip-Hop.

Kate Ehrenberg
Thesis title: Birds in Flight and Cresting Waves: Gesture in Olivier Messiaen and Virginia Woolf.

Leanna Gitter
Thesis title: Reviving echoes: Postmemory, Trauma, and the Archive in Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder and W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz.

Kelly Pau
Thesis title: The Message is in the Medium.

Tack Robinson
Thesis title: Apocalyptic Redux: Shifting Cinematic Depictions of the Vietnam War.

Shea Seary
Thesis title: A Rancièrean reading on contemporary art: Ai Weiwei's Life cycle (2018) and Kara Walker's Fons americanus.

Rugby Simon
Thesis title: Rupturing with the Past: Aesthetics and Politics in the Chilean Neo-Avant-Garde.

Kavi Subramanian
Thesis title: Worlds between Bits.

Teline Tran
Thesis title: Carry Over.

2019

Kevin Alarcon
Thesis title: Defining arrival : comparing spatial constructions in Mayra Santos-Febres' Boat people and Javier Zamora's Unaccompanied

Kyra Boisseree
Thesis title: Because you are innocent bystanders : Star Trek's utopianism on Bajor

Jeri Brand
Thesis title: Transgender bioterrorism : appropriating technologies of identification toward hormonal designification

Martha Cohn
Thesis title: Metaphors of translation : constructing an impossible unity

Lou Ellingson
Thesis title: Haptic how-to : touch, affect, embodiment

Coleman Gariety
Thesis title: Working through aporia : three case studies

David James
Thesis title: Breaking the mold : un-thinking ecocinema

Aditi Kumar
Thesis title: Memory's tongues : diasporic vertigo & poetic flow in Derek Walcott's Omeros

Nathan Modlin
Thesis title: "The ensuing despair became their inspiration" : three modern crises of Jewish literature in the works of Franz Kafka, Osip Mandelstam, and Orson Welles

Gatlin Newhouse
Thesis title: Network babel : Jorge Luis Borges and the cultural logic of digital networks

Emma Souders
Thesis title: Memory and identity in Aimé Césaire's Notebook of a return to the native land and Discourse on colonialism

Stephen Valeri
Thesis title: The thousand plateaus of Encyclopédie : a model of an anti-systematic system

Jack Witcher
Thesis title: Fault lines : cartographic narratives and the aesthetics of social difference

2018

Cisem Tigris Demirtas
Thesis title: Ode to Psyche

Malin Frazel
Thesis title: Nora's Translingual Lineage : Representing the Feminine in Modernist Chinese Literature

Thomas Maude-Griffin
Thesis title: The Unsettling Opacity of Beckett's The Unnamable and Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks

Zoe Senise
Thesis title: Radical Romantics : Feminist-Abolitionist Fiction in 19th Century Cuba and Brazil

Jessica Wolfsohn
Thesis title: Aesthetics and Asceticism : God, Self, and Nation in Mikhail Nesterov's Saint Sergius Cycle

Sebastian Zinn
Thesis title: Equivocal Signs : Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49

2017

Dylan Holmes
Thesis title: Seeing between the wander lines

Charles Nunziato
Thesis title: Lyric and revolution