Viet Thanh Nguyen's February 13 visit is supported by the Department of Comparative Literature and is part of the Global Georgia Initiative from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. The prestigious lecture honors Dr. Betty Jean Craige, Professor Emerita and former director of the Willson Center.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his 2015 novel The Sympathizer. His follow-up, 2016’s Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, was shortlisted for a National Book Award in nonfiction. A collection of short stories, The Refugees, will be published in February 2017.

Born in Ban Me Thuot, Viet Nam in 1971, Nguyen and his family came to the United States as refugees in 1975. He earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from the University of California, Berkeley before accepting a teaching position at the University of Southern California, where he is now the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity.

Other honors for The Sympathizer include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award from the Asian/Pacific American Librarian Association. His first book, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, was published in 2002.

Additionally, Vietnam/War/Memory/Justice: A Conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen will be held at 4 p.m. February 14 in the Larry Walker Room on the 4th floor of Dean Rusk Hall. Joining him will be Tiana S. Mykkeltvedt, a Georgia Law alumna and partner at the Atlanta law firm Bondurant Mixson & Elmore who was flown out of  Vietnam as an orphan in April 1975, and Rusk Center Director Diane Marie Amann, Associate Dean for International Programs and Initiatives and Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law at Georgia Law, who also serves as the International Criminal Court Prosecutor’s Special Advisor on Children in & Affected by Armed Conflict.

Dr. Haun Saussy, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, and former president of the American Comparative Literature Association, presented new research at the University of Georgia on September 15. The event was organized by Dr. Yuanfei Wang from Comparative Literature and was supported through the Willson Center's Distinguished Lecture Series support.

Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School Students studying Mandarin III Honors and AP Mandarin class traveled to the University of Georgia on Monday, October 3, to visit Chinese classes in the Comparative Literature Department. With help from Dr. Yi, the director of Chinese Language and Literature, each student had a chance to visit 2 classes, one intermediate class and one advanced class, before meeting with the head of the department, Dr. Moshi, and gaining experience about the univeristy.

On September 15 the Comparative Literature Department hosted its first Symposium on Literature and Exile, which featured two panels and a reading. The Symposium was sponsored by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.

The inaugural Spring Jamboree in 2015, which showcased a wide variety of academics, culture, dance and music from across Asia and Africa. Presented by students from across campus, it represented both individuals studying in the Comparative Literature Department (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Yoruba, Swahil, among others) and affiliated student groups. Building on the success of the event, which packed Joe Brown Plaza for several hours, the second celebration of culture took place on March 30 and expanded upon the framework of the first edition.

Title: “The Only Game in Town: Early Buddhist Translations Into Chinese”

The talk examines the earliest translations of Buddhist doctrine into Chinese, apparently by teams of translators working with secondhand sources. These texts show attention to the contexts of reception— in other words the cultural situation into which Buddhist ideas would be integrated. It is cohosted by Comparative Literature and the Willson Center at UGA. For the Willson Center's overview of Dr. Saussy's work, click here.

Haun Saussy is University Professor at the University of Chicago, teaching in the departments of comparative literature and East Asian languages as well as the Committee on Social Thought. His work uses a comparative perspective to interrogate literary texts from premodern China, ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Europe, with a particular leaning toward poetry and poetics. His books include The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (1993), Great Walls of Discourse (2001), The Ethnography of Rhythm (2016), and edited collections such as Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (2006), The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry: A Critical Edition (2008), and the recent translation of writings by the sixteenth-century Chinese iconoclast Li Zhi, A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden) (with Rivi Handler-Spitz and Pauline Lee, 2016). Other activities of his include participating in the design of public artworks with Mel Chin and co-editing the journals CLEAR and Critical Inquiry.

Dr. Ben Frey, Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina, will give a talk titled ""Negotiating with Giants: Agency and Interaction in Language Shift" as part of the “Linguistic Identity in the Americas” Faculty Research Seminar taking place at UGA during 2016-17. These events are co-organized with the Germanic and Slavic Studies Department.

Thursday, September 8th, at 3:30pm

250 Miller Learning Center



When communities transition from using one language to another, we often look toward individual agency as the deciding factor in the transition. Common discourse assumes that people choose to give up one language for another - but how real are these choices, given the sociological, economic, religious, and political circumstances that constrain these individuals?. This talk combines Wallerstein’s (2004) description of the capitalist world system with the notion of verticalization-driven language shift and orients shift within colonialism and the construction of race. I argue that language serves as an indicator of the larger global context in which communities find themselves, and the degree to which they have been able to retain their languages despite seemingly inexorable forces. Drawing on data from Wisconsin German, North Carolina Cherokee, and Pennsylvania Dutch, I show that while individual agency is constrained by global forces, many communities have leveraged factors such as religion and political sovereignty to negotiate with giants.





 

Department professors, current undergraduate and graduate students, and new students are welcome!