News & Events

Bella Chavez is a recent graduate ... from the University of California, Berkeley where she double majored in Comparative Literature and Latin American Languages & Cultures. She is a recipient of the competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship. During her undergraduate career, she studied abroad in Brazil, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. She also volunteered in Medellin, Colombia where she completed her education minor practicum. She is currently interning with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence through a Virtual Student Federal Service program.

"The Borderlands of Culture in Election-Urgency: Charla/Conversation with Ramón Saldívar (Stanford University)"--Responses from Ivonne del Valle (UC Berkeley) and Alejandra Decker (UC Berkeley), followed by discussion with the audience

Monday, October 26, 5-7 pm Webinar (webcast hosted by the University of California, Berkeley)

Co-Sponsors: Department of Spanish & Portuguese; Department of Comparative Literature

Congratulations to...

Angel's passion towards her major, Comparative Literature, lies in how she embraces the intersection of literature, history, and philosophy. Her Filipino background and culture cultivated her interests in Slavic classics, postcolonial theory, theology, and the revolutionary past. 

Comp Lit Sophomore, Ava Ratcliff, (’26, also AGRS/Greek & Latin) won the Department of State Critical Language Scholarship to dive into the study of the Russian language. Ava looks forward to deepening her understanding of Russian this summer in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Ava began studying Russian, alongside Ancient Greek and Latin, as a freshman at Berkeley. She plans to use the skills she develops this summer to read nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature in its original language.

Dani Offline is a singer and producer as well as a Comparative Literature graduate student! You can listen to the interview and hear her incredible song "I Believe You" here. 

The Modern Language Association of America awarded its eleventh Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies for an outstanding translation of a Yiddish literary work to UC Berkeley alumna, Allison Schachter (and co-author, Jordan Finkin). Established in 2000 by the family of Fenia and Yaakov Leviant, the award honors writers who have published an English translation of Yiddish literary works and scholars who have written a cultural study or critical biography in the field of Yiddish or edited a work on Yiddish folklore or linguistics.

Selby Wynn Schwartz's debut novel...  After Sappho has been longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize! The judges write: "A poetic patchwork of fragments of literary history that together take shape as an intergenerational tale of the Lesbian family. An ancestry eruditely, playfully recovered." 

Third year Comparative Literature ... student at Cal Kayla Cohen is studying English, Hebrew, Arabic literatures. Drawing from her travels and the interviews that she conducted with Jewish Diaspora leaders in 2017 and 2018, her new book (titled "The Full Severity of Our Connection") carefully examines the Jewish people’s links to the non-Jewish world and how these links have impacted different conceptions of Jewishness.