The University of Pennsylvania Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory and its communities join many others in mourning the untimely passing of our alumnus, Daniel DeWispelare (1983-2024). Daniel was Associate Professor at the George Washington University. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado before coming to Penn to complete his Ph.D. He was Visiting Assistant Professor at Bilkent University in Ankara, Türkiye, before joining the GW Department of English.

Joan DeJean, Trustee Professor Emerita of Romance Languages in the School of Arts & Sciences and the Comparative Literature and Literary Theory Program, renowned scholar of 17th- and 18th-century French literature,  died on December 2 of ALS.   She was 75 years old.

Picked by the Washington Post as one of The Best Poetry Selections for 2023, Timmy Straw's The Thomas Salto takes its name from a difficult and dangerous move in gymnastics, a leaping triple flip popularized during the last years of the Cold War. Both in its Reagan-grained historicity, and in the human body that bears the leap’s flight and risk, the Thomas salto is a kinetic figure for these poems’ action in time and space.

From Tilted Axis Press | A Book, Untitled by Shushan Avagyan, translated from the Armenian by Deanna Cachoian-Schanz.

Words Without Borders

Translator Deanna Cachoian-Schanz was awarded one of the prestigious PEN Translates grants earlier this year for her work on Shushan Avagyan’s Girq-anvernakir: a rich, experimental novel that speaks to repressions, literary legacy, and the expansive collisions between disparate writings, voices, times, and lives.