Comparative Literature Faculty

Program Director: Thomas Nolden
Advisory Board: Michele Respaut (French), Larry Rosenwald (English), Adam Weiner (Russian), Eve Zimmerman (East Asian Lang.&Lit.), tba (ex officio: Language Chairs).
Thomas Nolden Thomas Nolden (PhD, Yale University) is the director of the Comparative Literature Program. Before joining the faculty of Wellesley College in 1993, he taught in the comparative literature program at the Free University in Berlin and in the German department of the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests cover a wide range of interests and span several eras of European culture and literature. He has written books on the history of epistolary poetics from Horace to twentieth-century authors, on Jewish literature in post-war Austria and Germany, on Jewish writers in contemporary France, and has edited several volumes on Jewish writing in present-day Europe.
Carol Dougherty is Professor of Classical Studies at Wellesley College. Her teaching and research focus on the intersection of literature and culture in the archaic and classical world; she is currently working on a book project on issues of travel and culture in classical Athens. Her books include The Poetics of Colonization (Oxford 1993), The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer's Odyssey (Oxford 2001), and most recently Prometheus (Routledge 2006).



Rachel Jacoff teaches courses in the Medieval/Renaissance program and in Italian literature. Her major research interest is Dante's Divine Comedy. She has written many articles on Dante and co-authored a monograph on Inferno II (University of Pennsylvania Press) for the Lectura Dantis Americana series sponsored by the Dante Society of America. She edited a collection of essays by John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Harvard UP, 1986) which received Honorable Mention for the Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association. She also edited The Cambridge Companion to Dante (Cambridge UP, 1993), and co-edited (with Peter Hawkins) The Poet's Dante which was published in February 2001. She has received grants from NEH and the Guggenheim Foundation and has been a fellow of the Bunting Institute, the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti), the Stanford Humanities Center, the Rockfeller Foundation's Villa Serbelloni and the Liguria Study Center in Bogliasco.
 

Alison Hickey's (PhD Yale) main field of research is Romanticism; her teaching interests center on English Romantic-period poetry and extend forwards in time to contemporary English, American, and Irish poetry and back as far as Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, and other 17th-century writers. I regularly teach Romantic Poetry; Victorian Poetry, and Writing 125/Critical Interpretation. From time to time, I make a foray into Comparative Literature (my own fondly-remembered undergraduate major). She is excited to be teaching Comparative Literature 220/English 220 in the fall: this is a new course in which she'll be reading poems from diverse national, linguistic, and cultural traditions. Sspecial attention will be paid to questions of translation (in both the literal and the figurative senses), and students will have plenty of opportunities for creative writing, hands-on exercises (fun with poetry!), and personal and critical essay writing. Her scholarly publications include a book on Wordsworth (Impure Conceits, Stanford 1997) and critical articles on “Romantic collaboration,” defined broadly to include the many kinds of literary relationships--such as joint authorship, intertextual dialogue, parody, quotation, address, influence, editing, sharing, and plagiarism--that manifest themselves, often in clusters, in texts from the Romantic period. One of her recent essays on this topic examines the editorial labor of love performed by Sara Coleridge, S.T. Coleridge's daughter, who, after her father's death, brought his fragmented body of work together into publishable form, defended the integrity of the texts and their author, and helped to establish Coleridge as an enduringly great mind. The essay, "The Body of My Father's Writings: Sara Coleridge's Genial Labor," appears in Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators and the Construction of Authorship (Wisconsin, 2006), edited by Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson.
Lawrence Rosenwald Lawrence Rosenwald (PhD, Columbia) Professor of English at Wellesley College, joined the Wellesley faculty in 1980. In 1997, he became the Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of American Literature. Professor Rosenwald's special intellectual interests include American literature, especially the American literary representation of language and dialect contact; the theory and practice of translation; the relations between words and music; and the relations between nonviolence and literature. Scripture and Translation, his translation of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig's Die Schrift und ihre Verdeutschung, was published by Indiana University Press in 1994; his Emerson and the Art of the Diary was published by Oxford University Press in 1988. Two of his more recent publications are "American Anglophone Literature and Multilingual America," in Werner Sollors, ed., Multilingual America, published by New York University Press, and "The Theory, Practice, and Influence of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience," in William E. Cain, ed., A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau, published by Oxford University Press. Professor Rosenwald has also written some essays on politics and numerous verse scripts for early music theater pieces, and regularly coaches singers on texts at the Amherst Early Music Festival and Workshop.
Marjorie Agosin Marjorie Agosin (PhD, University of Indiana) is a poet and Human Rights activist. She has authored several collections of poetry, literary criticism and a memoir about her mother growing up as a Jewish girl in Chile. AgosÕn is the winner of the 1995 Letros de Oro Award, the Latino Literature Prize and the Good Neighbor Award.
Adam Weiner Adam Weiner (PhD, University of Wisconsin, Madison) has taught Russian language and literature at Wellesley since 1994. He regularly teaches second-year Russian and courses on Dostoevsky and Nabokov, as well as a survey of twentieth-century Russian literature. More recently Weiner has added a course on Chekhov and begun to teach advanced Russian. He is also interested in Comparative Literature and will soon be teaching a course on ethics in the Western novel. Metaphysical skepticism in novels and film is the topic of another course Weiner hopes to teach for the Comparative Literature Program. Weiner's book, By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in Russia (Northwestern University Press, 1997) examines the way a writer's anxiety over the ethics of his novel writing can come to life within the novel itself in the person of the Devil. Lately Weiner has been writing a number of essays on the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, who founded the Russian Department at Wellesley in 1943. The result of this interest will perhaps be a book or series of articles on Nabokov.


Marilyn Sides
Her teaching ranges from creative writing (fiction and travel writing) to the study of and critical writing about literature, both poetry and fiction. Her first published story, "The Island of the Mapmaker's Wife," appeared in the 1990 O. Henry Prize Stories collection. A collection of stories, The Island of the Mapmaker's Wife and Other Tales, appeared in 1996 (Harmony) and her first novel, The Genius of Affection (Harmony) was published in August 1999.
Michèle Respaut teaches and publishes in a wide-ranging interdisciplinary perspective. In keeping with her research in the field of Literature and Medicine, Professor Respaut was the Wellesley Summer Symposium Director of "The Healing Arts: Medicine from a Multidisciplinary Perspective." She offers two courses on that topic; FREN 327: “A Fascination with Bodies: the Doctor’s Malady”, and CPLT 334, “Literature and Medicine,” Comparative Literature course taught in English, which investigates literature’s obsession with medicine. Literary and cinematic representations of doctors and patients, disability and pain, insanity, AIDS, birth, death and grief, the search for healing and the redemptive power of the arts inform the students’ exploration. Several of her articles have been published in journals such as The French Review, Literature and Medicine, the contemporary French Studies journal Sites, as well as in the MLA publication Teaching Literature and Medicine. Her last publication on Jacques Doillons’s French film, “Ponette, the Perennial Mourning Child”, is featured in a special issue devoted to Children and Illness in the journal, Literature and Medicine. Her current research is on “Mourning Children/Children in Mourning.” Michèle Respaut was awarded the Pinanski Teaching Prize in 1990.
Eve Zimmerman (Ph.D. Columbia) teaches courses in modern Japanese literature, language and film with an emphasis on the period after World War II. Currently, she is writing a book on Kenji Nakagami (1946-1992), a burakumin (outcaste) writer who used various literary forms to challenge mainstream Japanese culture. Her recent publications include the entry for Nakagami in Modern Japanese Writers, ed. Jay Rubin, Scribner Reference, 2001; a translation of Nakagami's early stories The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto, Stone Bridge Press, 1999; and an article on the girl in modern Japanese fiction entitled, "‘Curling Up Tight:’ Tsushima Yuko Finds the Shojo," Proceedings of the Midwest Association for Japanese Literary Studies, Summer 1999.


  • Created by: Jessica Varat and Ona Keller
  • Date created: November 2004
  • Last modified: July 5, 2006