Students who have concentrated in Comparative Literature (formely Literature) have gone on to careers in a variety of fields: academics, journalism, film, law, medicine, and business, among others. Past alumni include:
Elif Batuman, 1999, Writer; The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, Senior Thesis: “The Bottled Djinn: Narratives of the Orientalized, the Confined, and the Nonlinguistic”
Elizabeth Brook, 2010, Consultant; Senior Thesis: “The Political to the Playful: Nuyorican Poetry and Representations of Hybridity from the 1970s to the Present” (website submission)
Aline Brosch, Screenwriter, Director, Producer; Senior Thesis: “The Pronouns of Mechanical Narration: The Mainstream American Screenplay as Genre”
Becky Cooper, 2011, Author: "We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence" (Grand Central Publishing, 2020), "Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers" (Abrams April 2013). Former assistant to the Editor of The New Yorker and contributor. Senior Thesis: "Quo Vadis? The Life and Literary Philosophy of David Foster Wallace"
Amrita Dani, 2013, Gates Cambridge Scholar, University of Cambridge, England; Senior Thesis: “Subjectivity and the Rhetoric of the Veil”
Monica Eav, 1999, Immigration Lawyer; Senior Thesis: “Listen all you like, but disbelieve all you hear”: “The Contest for Authority, the Politics of Gossip, and the Power of the People in Three Contemporary Novels about the Philippines”
Cara Eisenpress, 2007, Cookbook Author: In the Small Kitchen: 100 Recipes from Our Year of Cooking in the Real World; Senior Thesis: “The Text on the Horizon: Cycles of Literature and Life in Proust, Woolf, Deleuze, and Sebald”
Noah Fabricant, 2004, Rabbi; Senior Thesis: “Poetry as Prayer: The Case of Liberal Judaism”
Dara Horn, 1999, Writer; The World to Come, All Other Nights; Senior Thesis: "Rewriting Redemption: The Messianic Impulse in Modern Jewish Literature"
Carmen James, 2008, Doctoral Student at Teachers College, Columbia University; Senior Thesis: “The City and the Poem”
Minyang Jiang, 2007, Global Advanced Product Marketing Manager, Ford Motor Company; Senior Thesis: “Difficult Women, Exiled Heroes, Old Men: Reconstructing the Chinese Ideological Novel”
Pelin Kivrak, 2011, PhD in Comparative Literature at Yale University. Assistant to Orhan Pamuk at The Museum of Innocence for a year after her graduation; Senior Thesis: “Displacement, Travails, Redemption, Success”: Searching for the Traditional Immigration Paradigm in The Works of Aleksandar Hemon
Melissa Lee, 2003, Independent Film Producer; Senior Thesis: “Cities “Made of the Measure of Love”: Spatial Itineraries in Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and In the Mood for Love (2000)”
Heather K. Love, 1991, Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies, University of Pennsylvania; Senior Thesis: “What We Call Home: Utopian Vision in the Poetry of Renée Vivien”
Alexandra McCormack, 2000, Corporate Lawyer; Senior Thesis: “Beating Sense Out of the Text: Kreisleriana, Sarrasine, Barthes"
Mark McGurl, 1989, Professor of English, Stanford; Senior Thesis: “Arguing Otherwise: Authority and Authorship in Frederic Jameson’s The Political Unconsciousand J.M. Coetzee’s Foe”
B.J. Novak, 2001, Actor, Writer, Director, (The Office, Inglorious Basterds); Senior Thesis: “’To Be or Not To Be:’” Hollywood’s Answers to Hamlet’s Question”
Tony Qian, 2008, Graduate Student at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Department of Comparative Literature; Senior Thesis: “Fiction and Testimony: 20th-Century Shanghai in History and the Imagination”
Scott Rubin, 1985, Director of Communications, Europe, Middle East & Africa, Google; Senior Thesis: "Theatre as actor: the staging of cultural myths in Genet and Riaza"
Rashid Sabar, 2005, Portfolio Manager, Ellington Management Group; Senior Thesis: “Phenomenology and the Enigma of Meaning”
Kelefa Sanneh, 1998, Staff Writer, The New Yorker; Senior Thesis: “The Black Galactic: Towards a Greater African America”
Eliot Schrefer, 2001, Writer, Glamorous Disasters, The New Kid, The School for Dangerous Girls, The Deadly Sister; Senior Thesis: "Donning the Armor of False Selves": Introspection and Gender Disjunction in Disney's Mulan
A.O. Scott, 1988, Film Critic, The New York Times; Senior Thesis: “Staging Alequin’s Dilemma: The Politics of Genre from Corneille to the Théâtres de la Foire”
Teymour Shahabi, Modeling and Trading, Two Sigma; Author, The Secret Billionaire; Senior Thesis: “Remembrance of Words Past: Translating the Drafts of the Madeleine Episode in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu”
Alice Speri, 2009, Graduate Student in Comparative Literature
Annie Stone, 2010, Aquisitions Editor, Alloy Entertainment; Senior Thesis: “Twentieth-Century Eve: Damned Daughters from C. S. Lewis to Philip Pullman”
Kevin Stone, 2013, Fulbright Scholar, Germany; Senior Thesis: “Exploring Alternative Spaces: Spatial Orders, Heterotopias, and Secret Spaces in Schnitzler's Traumnovelle, Musil's Törless, and Kafka's Das Schloss”
Ben Tarnoff, 2007, Writer, Moneymakers: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Notorious Counterfeiters; Senior Thesis: “Typographical Modernism and New Media in the Weimar Republic; or, How el Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy Made the Printed Page a Vision of Social Hope”
Diane Wachtell, 1985, Executive Director, The New Press; Senior Thesis: "Paradox Lost: An Eschatology for the Modern Novel”
Rachel Weinerman, 2003, Physician; Senior Thesis: “A Modern Aggadah: M.Y. Berdichevsky and the Reshaping of the Hebrew Narrative Tradition”
Oussama Zahr, 2004, Editor, Opera News; Senior Thesis: “Spectatorship as Masochism in Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca”