Comparative Literature

Symposium History

The program fosters an intellectual environment through the annual Texas Tech University Comparative Literature Symposium started in the 1960s. Recent topics include:

• 50 Years after the Fall of Saigon: Colonialism, Interventionism, and Critical Refugee Studies (2025): Symposium Director: Dr. Yuan Shu
• Transnational American Studies Revisited (2024): Symposium Director: Dr. Yuan Shu
• Pandemic, Environment, and Life Writing (2023): Symposium Directors:  Dr. Yuan Shu and Dr. Kanika Batra
• Perspectives on Water on the Llano Estacado (2022)
• Global Vietnam War Literature and Culture (2021): Symposium Director: Dr. Yuan Shu  
• Indigeneity (2020): Symposium Director: Dr. John Beusterien
• Animal/Language: An Interdisciplinary Conference (2019): Symposium Directors: Dr. John Beusterien and Dr. Belinda Kleinhans
• Human Rights Now: Texts, Contexts, Comparisons (2018): Symposium Director: Kanika Batra
• The Word in the World: Culture, Technology, and Discourse in the Twenty-First Century (2017): Symposium Director: Kanika Batra
• Translation/Transnation: Languages, Geographies, Genders (2016): Symposium Director: Kanika Batra
• Performing the Social (2015): Symposium Director: Kanika Batra
• Representing Reality in Text and Image: Clichés, Stereotypes, and Caricatures (2014); Symposium Directors: Chris Bains, John Beusterien and Anita McChesney
• Gendering Globalization (2013): Symposium Directors: John Beusterien and Kanika Batra
• Comparative Book History (2012): Symposium Director: John Beusterien
• Eco-criticism and Comparative Literature (2011): Symposium Director: John Beusterien
• American Studies as Transnational Practice (2010): Symposium Director: Yuan Shu
• Migration, Border, and the Nation-State (2009): Joint Conference Director: Yuan Shu
• War, Empire, and Culture (2008): Symposium Director: Yuan Shu
• America's Asia, Asia's America (2007): Symposium Director: Yuan Shu
• Narratives in Trauma Response and Recovery (2006): Symposium Director: Yuan Shu
• The Representation of Space: Geo-critical Approaches to Comparative Literature (2005): Symposium Directors: Bertrand Westphal and David Troyansky
• Memory and History: Cultural Representations of Displacement and Genocide (2004): Symposium Directors: Ingrid Fry and Charles Grair
• (In)versions of the New World: Writing Race, Religion & Sex in Colonial Latin America (2003): Symposium Director: Susan Isabel Stein.
• Transnational Cultures, Diasporas, and Immigrant Identities in France and the Francophone World (2002):Symposium Directors: Hafid Gafaiti and David Troyansky
• Shakespeare 2001: New Readings of the Page, New Meanings for the Stage (2001): Symposium Director: Donald Rude
• Woman in the Eighteenth Century (2000): Symposium Director: Sharon Nell
• Narrative and Consciousness: Literature, Psychology and the Brain (1999): Symposium Directors: Ted E, McVay and Gary Fireman
• Webs of Discourse: the Intertextuality of Science Studies (1998): Symposium Director: Bruce Clarke
• French Feminism Across the Disciplines (1997): Symposium Directors: Hafid Gafaiti, Paul Allen Miller, and Sharon Diane Nell
• A Comparative Approach to Sport (1996)
• Latin American Women Writers: Canons, Traditions, and Revisions (1995)
• Carnivalizing Difference: Bakhtin and the Other (1994)
• The Literature of Emigration and Exile (1990)
• The Body and the Text: Comparative Essays in Literature and Medicine (1989)
• The Spanish Civil War in Literature (1988)
• Literature and Anthropology (1987)
• Film and Literature: A Comparative Approach to Adaptation (1986)
• War and Peace: Perspectives in the Nuclear Age (1985)
• Myths and Realities of Contemporary French Theater (1984)
• Women World Walkers: New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy (1983)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Continuing Vitality (1982)
• Calderon de la Barca at the Tercentenary: Comparative Views (1981)
• The Teller and the Tale: Aspects of the Short Story (1980)
• Shakespeare's Art from a Comparative Perspective (1979)
• Classical Mythology in Twentieth-Century Thought and Literature (1978)
• Ibero-American Letters in a Comparative Perspective (1977)
• Ethnic Literature since 1776: The Many Voices of America, Part One and Part Two (1976)
• Albert Camus' Literary Milieu: Arid Lands (1975)
• Joseph Conrad: Theory and World Fiction (1974)
• William Faulkner: Prevailing Verities and World Literature (1973)
• Modern American Fiction: Insights and Foreign Lights (1972)
• Franz Kafka: His Place in World Literature (1971)
• From Surrealism to the Absurd (1970)
• James Joyce: His Place in World Literature (1969)
• Untitled Symposium (1968)