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Doctoral candidate Max Rayneard has been appointed as the only graduate student member of the search committee for the next president of the University of Oregon. Rayneard will be serving on the most important University committee of the last fifteen years.
 
Drawing on post-colonial theory, critical pedagogy, performance studies, and literary texts, Rayneard’s research engages higher education literary pedagogy in developing nations, with a particular interest in the historical relationship between the literary academy and the broader community within which it operates. He argues for the classroom / lecture hall as a site in which the literary academy can, potentially, enact its social utility.
 
On his appointment to the university committee, Rayneard states “I feel truly privileged to have been asked to sit on the University of Oregon President Search Committee. It is, furthermore, an honor to represent the interests of the University's graduate student community. It is a responsibility I do not take lightly.”


Graduate Program

Our graduate program in Comparative Literature is the oldest on the West Coast, and Oregon has been home to the world's leading journal in the field -- Comparative Literature -- ever since the journal's 1949 inaugural issue.

Just a few years after that first issue, one of the founding members of the journal, René Wellek, addressed what he called "the crisis of Comparative Literature." For Wellek, the “crisis” was one of identity, and a matter of not a little concern: to work across canons and disciplines was to find one’s self without a methodology or a subject matter that is uniquely one’s own.

At Oregon, however, we have long considered this "crisis" not a sign of our discipline's woes, but rather the source of its continued energy and relevance. Thanks to the recurring agon of our self-definition, ours is a discipline perfectly placed to interrogate the meaning and contexts of cultural production.

Indeed, at Oregon this interrogative spirit underlies one of the nation's most flexible and innovative programs in comparative study. We view the discipline of Comparative Literature as a site for the reinvigoration of the humanities in general. Our students and faculty work across cultural boundaries of all kinds; our program is designed to accommodate a broad range of comparative projects.

Many of our students choose "traditional" courses of study, focusing on specific genres, cultural movements and/or thematic elements analyzed across (or contained within) geographical boundaries and historical periods. Just as frequently, however, Oregon students design less "traditional" research programs, focusing on disciplinary boundaries in lieu of geo-political ones. Where "traditional" courses of study begin with the question of national literature, such non-"traditional" projects often begin with the question of academic discipline itself. Nonetheless, linguistic proficiency and a firm grasp of central issues in philology (the history of languages) and in bibliography (the history of literary production) are crucial and required for all our students. In our view, linguistic training remains the sine qua non of Comparative Literature.

We also offer a humane, supportive setting for graduate education. All of our students are guaranteed funding to support their graduate training, and all receive state- of-the-art teacher training. Furthermore, thanks to a curriculum that emphasizes collaboration and mentorship, our graduate students receive unparalleled opportunities to design and teach their own undergraduate literature classes and tutorials.

We have one of the most intellectually diverse faculties in the country, with strengths ranging from antiquity and the early modern, to contemporary globalization studies and minority literatures. Our students are uncommonly strong as well: in recent years, our Ph.D.s have received tenure-track offers from the University of Arizona, Catholic University of America, Emory University, Georgia College and State University, Oberlin College, the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, the University of Manitoba, McGill University, and Arizona State University.

For more information, please review our website and graduate handbook (http://complit.uoregon.edu/grad/handbook.htm). We also welcome you to give us a call (541-346-0934) or to drop by our offices on the third floor of Villard Hall, amid the dogwood and fir trees of the UO campus. Information about our application process is also available online (http://complit.uoregon.edu/grad/admissions.htm).

We hope to see you soon.

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Lisa Myobun Freinkel

Graduate and Program Director, Comparative Literature
Associate Professor, English Department