A concentration in Comparative World Literature provides students with a broader perspective on literary and cultural study at Kenyon College. Below are some of the ways recent graduates have translated their research and studies into new initiatives.
From professional careers to graduate studies to non-profit work, here is a look at how recent CWL graduates make their mark beyond the Hill.
Wrote her Honors thesis on the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé and photography. After graduating from Kenyon, she worked as a photography research assistant at the Jewish Museum in New York City and is currently working in Lausanne, Switzerland at the Cantonal Library and with the Center of the History of Culture at the University of Lausanne on exhibition research and archival projects on photography and graphic design. She has presented at an international James Joyce conference and has also published an article on Virginia Woolf and photography in a French journal.
Majored in MLL with a concentration in CWL. She then spent a year in Amman, Jordan, as a Fulbright English teaching assistant, teaching seventh grade English and studying Arabic. She is now pursing a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Harvard University, with a focus on Arabic and Latin American literatures and translation studies.
Majored in English with a concentration in CWL. After graduation, she was accepted into the master's in comparative studies program at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon (FLUL). She currently contributes to IStReS, an Iberian studies database and has also participated in Ph.D.-level courses within the American Studies Department — each enriching her interest in contemporary Luso-American literature. She secured a fully-funded award to Harvard University's Institute for World Literature, which was held at the University of Tokyo in Japan. In 2018-2019, as she finishes her degree and writes her thesis, she is tackling a new challenge: teaching English literature full-time at PaRK International School in Lisbon.
Liam's CWL project explored the evolution of French and English as used by colonized authors over the course of the twentieth century in those former colonies — Ireland, Algeria, and Morocco — closest to imperial centers. After graduation, he moved to Morocco where he worked at Al Akhawayn University, Ifrane's Office of Development and Communications as a presidential intern. As of May 2018, he has accepted a Princeton in Asia Fellowship and is poised to leave for Seoul in October 2018, where he will be working at JoongAng Daily as a copy editor.
Majored in English with a concentration in CWL. A section of his honors thesis in English, "'Architecture is Frozen Music': Diagrammatic Epistemology in Chris Ware's "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth" is forthcoming in ASAP/Journal, a prestigious peer-review journal on the contemporary arts. Since 2016, he has participated in panels and workshops at Aarhus, Columbia, Groningen, Harvard, McGill, Virginia, the Narrative Society, Novel Society, ACLA, and the Futures Institute at Dartmouth. He is now a graduate student in the English department at NYU, working on a number of projects (on Cuban modernism, ethnographic subjectivity, and William Kentridge, among other topics) that he hopes will see the light of publication soon.