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The Signs of War

We in the Department of Comparative Literature are, like everyone, shaken by the ongoing assault on the people of Ukraine and their democracy. That we have numbered among our students both Ukrainians and Russians attunes us perhaps more intimately to the emotional as well as physical devastation wrought by Putin’s actions. At the same time, as we watch the torrent of troubling images that today flood our screens, our focus widens to encompass the myriad threats that, though concentrated in these same actions, have multiplied across the globe—threats not only to civil and democratic society everywhere but also to the planet and to life itself.  We offer the following poem, by Ludmila Khersonsky, as a buttress to our anxious sense of this moment. The translator is Valzhyna Mort:

A country in the shape of a puddle, on the map.

Any country is an easy target in March,
in June, July, August, September, October,
as long as it rains
and maps litter the street.

Stop, who goes there, General Oaken Knees.
Red Square of his naked chest shines the way.
And behind him, a half-shadow, half-man,
half-orphan, half-exile, whose mouth is as coarse
as his land –
double-land where every cave is at war.

Do you say there won’t be a war? I say nothing.

A small gray person cancels
this twenty first century,
adjusts his country’s clocks
for the winter war.


Michael Allan Presents his Work-in-Progress with OHC

February 2, 2024

12:00pm-1:00pm

OHC Conference Room (159 PLC)

“A Micro-History of World Cinema: The Global Routes of the Lumière Brothers” Michael Allan, Comparative Literature and 2023–24 OHC Ernest G. Moll Research Fellow in Literary Studies. 

Between 1896–1903, the Lumière Brothers commissioned camera operators to traverse the globe with their newly invented cinematograph. My project tracks the voyage of one of these operators, Alexandre Promio, who traveled across North Africa and the Middle East. Drawing from histories of colonialism, race, and visual culture, I connect formal

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Leah Middlebrook’s Forthcoming Book

COLT Associate Professor Leah Middlebrook’s new book, Amphion: Lyre, Poiesis, and Politics in Modernity, is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press.  Anchored in Renaissance Humanist interpretations of the myth of Amphion, King of Thebes, this book recovers an overlooked poetic tradition. In Amphionic poetry, the lyre figures the human power to stir action, creation, and destruction by means of language. Amphion raises states and razes civilizations, and he builds new cities from the rubble of communities and polities his lyre lays to waste. Through readings of poetry and

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Ahmad Nadalizadeh

Ahmad Nadalizadeh, who received his Ph.D. in our department in the Summer of 2021, has accepted the offer of an assistant professorship in the Honors College at the University of Wyoming. The courses he will be teaching in Laramie include “Cinema of the Middle East,” “The Politics of Cinema and Literature in Modern Iran,” and “Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema of the Middle East.”

Ahmad is also the recipient of the ACLA’s Charles M. Bernheimer Dissertation Award (Honorable Mention) for 2023. The committee assigning the award praises his entry as follows:

“Repetition Beyond

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