Graduate Center for Literary Research

Welcome to the Graduate Center for Literary Research

The Graduate Center for Literary Research (GCLR) aims to enrich and enhance the experience of students and faculty involved in literary studies by promoting interdisciplinary dialogue and encounters at various levels. The Center is directed by Dominique Jullien (Professor of French and Comparative Literature) with an advisory board consisting of both faculty members and graduate students from different humanities departments.

Our activities include quarterly roundtables, where students present their work in progress, an annual interdisciplinary conference, and annual week-long visits by distinguished scholars who give a public lecture, teach a seminar, and establish connections with our doctoral students.

We also award travel grants to students giving papers at literary conferences and recruitment fellowships for doctoral candidates pursuing interdisciplinary approaches to literature.

GCLR Events

Announcements

Congratulations to GCLR Distinguished Visitor Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Souleymane Bachir Diagne has been elected to the Académie royale de Belgique and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

2019-2020 Student Coordinator: Applications Due May 31

Apply for the position of next year's GCLR Student Coordinator.

Four UCSB Students Chosen for 2019 Harvard IWL

Caragh Barry, Dalia Bolotnikov Mazur, Deepti Menon, and Yang Zhao will represent UCSB at the Harvard Institute for World Literature's annual summer program.

Congratulations to the 2018-2019 GCLR Recruitment Fellows

GCLR would like to congratulate and welcome to our campus community the new recruitment fellows: Trinankur Banerjee, Shanna Killeen, and Mariam Lmaifi!

Faculty Bookshelf Highlights

The Neighborhood of Gods: The Sacred and the Visible at the Margins of Mumbai

William Elison

This book offers a creative intervention in debates on postcolonial citizenship, urban geography, and visuality in the religions of India.

Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales

Dominique Jullien

This book follows the renunciation story in Borges and beyond, arguing for its centrality as a Borgesian compositional trope and as a Borgesian prism for reading a global constellation of texts.

Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary

Nadège T. Clitandre

This book argues that Danticat—moving between novels, short stories, and essays—articulates a diasporic consciousness that acts as a form of social, political, and cultural transformation at the local and global level.

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Sponsors & Affiliates

The GCLR is proudly affiliated with Harvard's Institute for World Literature and works with its partners at UCSB to send promising graduate students interested in world literature to the IWL's annual summer program.

Harvard IWL

The GCLR is sponsored by the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts, John Majewski and administered by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.

IHC HFA

Interested in joining the group?

If you have questions or would like to become involved, please email Dominique Jullien, the Director of the GCLR

djullien@frit.ucsb.edu

GCLR Co-Sponsorships

As well as bringing a distinguished visiting professor with broad interdisciplinary appeal every year, the GCLR also frequently co-sponsors literary lectures, readings, and conferences on the UCSB campus.

Under the auspices of the GCLR and the Comparative Literature Program, UCSB's Memory Studies Group investigates the relationships between history and memory, past and present, testimony and witnessing, ethics and politics, being and time, digital and global, as well as individual and collective memory. For information on upcoming events, please visit their website.

Memory Studies Group

Other past and present GCLR co-sponsorships are included in our event and announcement archives. Please contact us if you are interested in co-sponsoring an event.