Berkeley Comparative Literature

Need your UC Berkeley American Cultures requirement met? We have two great summer courses online!

25 students, including 7 grad students, participated in Commencement this year; congratulations everyone!

UC Berkeley Comparative Literature

Dear friends of Comp Lit:

The Berkeley Big Give begins today! This campus fundraising effort is live from 9 pm March 13 till 9 pm March 14. Here in Comparative Literature, our faculty are publishing books both relevant and eternal. Tim Hampton's new Bob Dylan's Poetics: How the Songs Work will be available March 26. Those of you who are in Chicago, New York, D.C., Paris and the Bay Area will be able to catch Tim on his book tour in April. If you're in the area, please come join us at City Lights Books in San Francisco on April 11 or the Townsend Center at Berkeley on April 17.



Bob Alter’s translation of the entire Hebrew Bible, a heroic achievement, has been fêted this spring in New York, London and Berkeley. Bob was honored last week by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for this magnanimous achievement. We celebrated in February with an event at the Magnes attended by several hundred. You can watch the video here.

Our students are ever more curious as to how to use their degrees to create positive change in the world. We are adding a new tab to our website, “Alumni Stories,” and we would be grateful if you would write in with news about your life after Comparative Literature. To know that you have gone on to thrive in diverse careers will be encouraging to both our undergraduates and our graduate students. You can share your alumni story here.

Your gifts in 2018 created an important series of lectures for the campus community and helped to support graduate students as they completed their dissertations. We cannot thank you enough.

All best wishes --
Sophie Volpp
Chair, Comparative Literature
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