Symposium History

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

• Pandemic, Environment, and Life Writing (2023)
• Global Vietnam War Literature and Culture (2021) 
• 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

  Ketu Katrak
  Ileana Rodríguez

• Comparative Book History (2012): Symposium Director: John Beusterien
• Eco-criticism and Comparative Literature (2011): Symposium Director: John Beusterien

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• 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)

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• The Body and the Text: Comparative Essays in Literature and Medicine (1989)

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• The Spanish Civil War in Literature (1988)

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• Literature and Anthropology (1987)

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• Film and Literature: A Comparative Approach to Adaptation (1986)

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• War and Peace: Perspectives in the Nuclear Age (1985)
• Myths and Realities of Contemporary French Theater (1984)

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• Women World Walkers: New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy (1983)

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• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Continuing Vitality (1982)
• Calderon de la Barca at the Tercentenary: Comparative Views (1981)

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• The Teller and the Tale: Aspects of the Short Story (1980)

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• Shakespeare's Art from a Comparative Perspective (1979)

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• Classical Mythology in Twentieth-Century Thought and Literature (1978)

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• Ibero-American Letters in a Comparative Perspective (1977)

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• Ethnic Literature since 1776: The Many Voices of America, Part One and Part Two (1976)

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• Albert Camus' Literary Milieu: Arid Lands (1975)

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• Joseph Conrad: Theory and World Fiction (1974)

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• William Faulkner: Prevailing Verities and World Literature (1973)

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• Modern American Fiction: Insights and Foreign Lights (1972)

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• Franz Kafka: His Place in World Literature (1971)

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• From Surrealism to the Absurd (1970)

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• James Joyce: His Place in World Literature (1969)

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• Untitled Symposium (1968)

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