Responding to the recent trend of media studies and the digital humanities, comparative media studies has emerged as one of the core fields of Comparative Literature. Global media studies as envisioned and practiced by the department combines a two-pronged comparative approach.
On the one hand, media have to be understood in their global dimension, not as a homogeneous mediascape of globalization, but rather as emerging in specific cultural and linguistic contexts, determined by intercultural, regional, and transnational constellations, and subject to transcultural and global movements and flows. On the other, comparative media studies in Comparative Literature espouses a comparative, intermedial perspective, one with a capacious purview of what counts as media—from printed text to images, film, and internet art, from sound technology to performance, from digital archives to computational algorithms—with a view to understanding specific media expressions in comparison with other contemporary or older media and scrutinizing mediascapes as parts of historical developments and media imaginaries.
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Associate Professor
Class of 1916 Professor of English
Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies
Professor
Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature
Professor
Professor Emerita
Professor
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Studies