Two people walk together down a long hallway

About Us

The department benefits from close ties with Cornell's Society for the Humanities, a center of teaching, research and lectures that provides a unique, historic catalyst for critical and theoretical reflection on campus. The department also has vital connections to the School of Criticism and Theory, a six-week summer program based at Cornell that features leading figures in critical thought, as well as to the Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM), a Cornell research institute dedicated to reflection on the global and plural nature of modernities.

Alumni Spotlight: Irving Goh Ph.D. '12

What can you do with a degree in comparative literature?

Irving Goh was recently awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Literary from the Modern Language Association for his book, Goh received his doctorate in comparative literature from Cornell and served as a research fellow and visiting scholar at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities and as a Mellon Postdoc Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University, before joining the Department of French at the University of Cambridge.

More alumni profiles:

— Karen Pinkus, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature

The Odyssey, in its complexity, seems more adapted to the very complex situation we’re facing now with climate change than, say, a scientific study trying to predict concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It teaches us that we don’t have an easy control over the future.