Undergraduate Alumni List

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:

Scott Rubin, 1985, Partner, Lux Capital. Senior Thesis: “Theatre as actor: the staging of cultural myths in Genet and Riaza”
Rashid Sabar, 2005, Co-Founder and CEO, Correlation One; Senior Thesis: “Phenomenology and the Enigma of Meaning”
Kelefa Sanneh, 1998, Journalist, Music Critic, Staff Writer, The New Yorker; Senior Thesis:  “The Black Galactic:  Towards a Greater African America”
Eliot Schrefer, 2001, Author, The Brightness Between Us; The Darkness Outside Us. Senior Thesis: “Donning the Armor of False Selves”: Introspection and Gender Disjunction in Disney’s Mulan
A.O. Scott, 1988, Journalist, Film Critic, Author, The New York Times;  Senior Thesis:  “Staging Arlequin’s Dilemma: The Politics of Genre from Corneille to the Théâtres de la Foire”
Teymour Shahabi, 2005, 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, Reporter, The Guardian. Senior Thesis: “From the Poet to the People: Resistance, Criticism and Palestinian Identity in the Writing of Mahmoud Darwish”
Ben Tarnoff, 2007, Author, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed;  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”
Ričards Umbrasko, 2025, PhD Candidate, Slavic Department, Harvard University. Senior Thesis: “This here isn’t just a Novel: Multiperspectivity and Problems of Narration in Contemporary Ukrainian Wartime Prose”
Shruthi Venkata, 2022, Software Engineer, PolyAI. Senior Thesis: “Media-ted Space: Narrative, Art, and Technology in Reconstructing Times Square”
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, Vice-President, Editorial Operations, National Geographic. Senior Thesis:  “Spectatorship as Masochism in Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca“

Founded as a graduate program in 1904 and joining with the undergraduate Literature Concentration in 2007, Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature operates at the crossroads of multilingualism, literary study, and media history.

© 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College

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