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“What do you do when you meet a stranger?”

According to Associate Professor Shiamin Kwa, the Bryn Mawr coordinator of the Bi-Co Comparative Literature program, this is what the study of comparative literature tries to answer. Comparative literature examines texts from an international perspective, and the program is structured to allow students to engage in “diverse areas of critical inquiry such as East-West cultural relations, global censorship and human rights, diaspora studies, film history and theory, and aesthetics of modernity.”

Students can get started with Introduction to Comparative Literature, which is offered twice a year. This spring it is taught at Bryn Mawr by Associate Professor Martín Gaspar of the Spanish department, and next fall it will be taught at Haverford by Assistant Professor Alessandro Giammei from Transnational Italian Studies.

In the words of Haverford senior Sophie Chochaeva, “This major is great for those who want to explore decolonizing literature, to inquire into the construction of narratives and translation in several languages, and who want to broaden rather than narrow down their area of research.”

Professor Kwa echos that sentiment, saying, “The students who are drawn to comparative literature are the ones who want to make connections between texts that may not necessarily know that the other text even exists, and they are attempting to do that in the texts’ original languages. They are looking for connections.”

For her thesis, Sophie plans to research dystopian and decolonial narratives in contemporary Russian and American science fiction, and learning to find the connections between texts eventually led her to a pre-law track.

Says Professor Kwa, “Our majors go on to do amazing things in different fields, but I think that the curiosity and the optimism they have about understanding others through their study is an attitude that unites them.”

This Valentine’s Day, students in the Bi-Co’s comparative literature major held two events to celebrate the connection between love and the written word.The first, held on Feb. 13 at Bryn Mawr’s Lusty Cup Cafe, was a Valentine card-making workshop where students crafted cards with the help of a curated selection of poetry. The second was a poetry reading held at Haverford’s VCAM, with (of course) chocolate provided.