The Department of English and Comparative Literature warmly congratulates Farah Jasmine Griffin, University Professor, on being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Griffin joins seven other Columbia faculty members recognized for their excellence and impact across a variety of academic fields. In all, 252 leaders from academia, the arts, industry, journalism, philanthropy, research, and science were elected this year, the academy announced this week.
“We celebrate the achievement of each new member and the collective breadth and depth of their excellence –…
The Department warmly congratulates Benjamin VanWagoner (GSAS '18), whose book Imperial Ventures: Maritime Drama and the Invention of Risk (Penn, 2025) has been awarded the Renaissance Society of America's inaugural First Book Prize.
The RSA's citation for Imperial Ventures notes:
This ambitious first book connects theatre studies with the economic and social history of the early modern period through an exploration of two developments: the rise of a concept of economic risk in English commerce and the increasingly frequent presentation of “maritime peril”…
Molly Murray, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, has been selected as a recipient of the 2026 Division of Humanities Faculty Recognition Award for Community Building and Engagement. The award recognizes Professor Murray as a transformative DUS, whose work has been central to the Department’s successes in undergraduate education. The Department congratulates Professor Murray on this much-deserved recognition!
Dennis Yi Tenen, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, has been awarded a 2026 Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. Among his many outstanding contributions to Columbia, the award recognized his innovative scholarship, varied and original pedagogy, commitment to student mentorship and hands-on learning, and leadership in crafting intellectual partnerships extending far beyond our department. The Department congratulates Professor Tenen on this much-deserved honor!
This past weekend in Montreal, the American Comparative Literature Association awarded the 2026 René Wellek Prize to Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, for his book, Atrocity: A Literary History (Stanford UP, 2025). The Wellek Prize honors the year's outstanding book in the discipline of comparative literature, and the full citation for this superb "experiment in cosmopolitan history" follows below. The Department congratulates Professor Robbins on this outstanding achievement!
ACLA Citation for Atrocity: A Literary History by Bruce Robbins
Bruce Robbins’s…
The Department of English and Comparative Literature warmly congratulates Prof. Joseph Albernaz, who has been awarded the MLA Prize for a First Book for his monograph Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community (Stanford UP, 2024).
The Prize Committee's citation reads:
A far-reaching meditation on the poetics and politics of communal life, Joseph Albernaz’s Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community shows how Romantic writers navigated the devastation of the commons (both as material reality and conceptual grounds) and the rise of a capitalist…
The Department of English and Comparative Literature warmly congratulates undergradaute major Fatima AlJarman AlNuaimi (CC '26), who
has been named a United Arab Emirates Rhodes Scholar. She is the first Columbian to receive this award, and is one of two UAE Rhodes Scholars who are selected each year.
Prof. Matthew Hart, the new chair of English and Comparative Literature, spoke with Columbia News about his stewardship of the department, why literature is so fundamental to a college education, and how he ended up as an English professor.
Read the full article here.
