Comparative Humanities

Pathways of study that link the visual, textual, musical, religious and intellectual expressions of Western cultural traditions across the centuries

www.bucknell.edu/comparativehumanities

Related Student Organizations and University Programs

Humanities Residential College

Humanistic Scholars Program

EIDOS (academic journal)

Comparative Humanities Review (academic journal)

Career Paths

Skills acquired through the comparative humanities major equip graduates to work effectively in an increasingly globalized and culturally diverse environment.

Major Requirements

  • A gateway course that introduces the student to comparative analysis. This requirement may be met in the form of a Foundation seminar (HUMN 098) or another appropriate course (HUMN 128).
  • Two period courses in the humanities (HUMN 150 and HUMN 250).
  • Passing an oral exam on the content of HUMN 098/128 and HUMN 150 considered together.
  • Demonstrated competency in a foreign language.
  • Two advanced seminars in Comparative Humanities (selected from HUMN 301, 302, 303, 304).
  • Two courses in related humanities disciplines (one of which in a non-European tradition).
  • A senior thesis (HUMN 350 or 351).

Internships

Comparative Humanities students can gain career experience through summer internships. Recently, students have interned at:

  • The Phoenix (newspaper)
  • Youth Action International

Graduate and Professional School

Majors learn the interdisciplinary study skills needed in cutting-edge graduate and professional study and research. Recent alumni of the comparative humanities program have gone on to:

  • University of Texas
  • Yale University
  • University of Michigan
  • Bucknell University
  • Goethe Institute

Courses Offered

Geography students choose much of their own course of study, in consultation with faculty members, drawing upon the many courses and specialties of the faculty and, if they choose, focusing on a particular world region.

Art, Nature and Knowledge
Cultures and Traditions
Dante and Milton
History of Sexuality
Honors Tutorial and Senior Thesis
Humanistic Disciplines
Hybridity, Identity, Postmodernity
Independent Study
Introduction to Translation Studies
Modern Critical Theory
Myth, Reason, Faith
Narrative and Media
Nihilism, Modernism, Uncertainty
Senior Thesis Workshop
Studies in Autobiography
Topics in Historical Periods

Program Details

  • Through the course of the major, students compare representations of knowledge from different cultures, historical periods and disciplines.
  • First-year students usually begin their work in comparative humanities through the Humanities Residential College, but they also may join the major through subsequent coursework. The humanities foundation seminar can be counted as the first course required for the comparative humanities major.
  • Students in the Humanities College also have the opportunity to continue affiliation with the college beyond the first year through the Humanistic Scholars Program, a special academic program open to majors and nonmajors alike. Through this program, students have the opportunity to combine work in other majors with a rigorous program of course work, oral exams and thesis research in a unique complement to conventional majors.
  • Through intense engagement with some of the most important texts and artifacts that have defined Western culture since the Classical period, comparative humanities majors examine questions of knowledge, aesthetics, politics and ethics across humanistic disciplines in small seminars.
  • Selected students may participate in Bucknell’s honors program, in which they complete a thesis in their senior year.

Faculty

All comparative humanities courses are team-taught by distinguished faculty in the humanities. Core faculty:

Greg Clingham, English
Ph.D. Cambridge
Scholarly interests: memory, nation, and narrative,1660–1832; Enlightenment historiography; the problematics of translation; biography as a genre; the life and writing of Johnson, Dryden and Austen

Katherine M. Faull, German
Ph.D. Princeton
Scholarly interests: intellectual history since the 18th century; feminist theory; translation theory

John C. Hunter, English
Ph.D. Duke
Scholarly interests: medieval and Renaissance literature; literary theory; cultural studies

Stephanie Larson, classics
Ph.D. Texas at Austin
Scholarly interests: classical and Archaic Greek culture; mythology; gender issues

Harold Schweizer, English
Ph.D. Zürich
Scholarly interests: humanities; literary theory; poetry; aesthetics

Alf Siewers, English
Ph.D. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Scholarly interests: medieval; epic

Carol White, religion
Ph.D. Iliff School of Theology and University of Denver
Scholarly interests: philosophy of religion; contemporary religious thought; French post-structuralist thought; hermeneutics; science and religion

Slava Yastremski, Russian
Ph.D. Kansas
Scholarly interests: Russian poetry; theatre and prose; film studies; translation; comparative humanities

Guest lecturers from across the disciplines add to the depth of the program, and visiting scholars allow students to learn more about issues in comparative humanities.

Undergraduate Research and Creative Projects

Students in the comparative humanities can conduct independent scholarly research with a faculty mentor and produce their own creative projects. The program creates opportunities for student research, publication and conference presentations. In fact, a senior honors thesis is one of the requirements of the Humanistic Scholars Program. Recent project titles include:

  • More than just an Apparition: Reviving the Grand Narrative in the Postmodern Era
  • Memory, Language and Place in Exilic Writing
  • The Defender of the Faith and the Victimized Nation: Two Branches of the Same Reformation
  • Media Simulation: A Study of War, Artifice and Reality
  • Suffering as a Means to Redemption in the Works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy

Selected Faculty Publications

Greg Clingham, Johnson, Writing, and Memory, Cambridge University Press, 2002; “Translating Difference: The Example of Dryden’s Last Parting of Hector and Andromache,” in Studies in the Literary Imagination, 2000; editor, The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, 1997 and James Boswell: “The Life of Johnson,” 1992.

Katherine Faull, Moravian Women’s Memoirs: Their Related Lives, Syracuse University Press, 1997; editor, Anthropology and the German Enlightenment, 1995; editor, Translation and Culture, 2004.

John Hunter, “How Much History is Enough? — Overcoming the Alienation of Early Modern Drama,” MLA Guide to Non-Shakespearean Renaissance Drama; co-editor, Renaissance Literature: An Anthology, 2003; “The Well-Stocked Memory and the Well-Tended Self: Erasmus and the Limits of Humanist Education” in Ars Reminiscendi – Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture, 2009.

Stephanie Larson, Tales of Epic Ancestry: Boiotian Collective Identity in the Late Archaic and Early Classical Periods, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007.

Harold Schweizer, Suffering and the Remedy of Art, SUNY Press, 1997; editor, History and Memory: Suffering and Art, Bucknell Review, 1998; “Robert Altman’s Short Cuts: A Phenomenology of Reading,” Q/W/E/R/T/Y, 1999; “Against Suffering: A Meditation on Literature,” Literature and Medicine, fall 2000; On Waiting, Routledge, 2008.

Carol White, Poststructuralism, Feminism, and Religion: Triangulating Positions, Humanity Books, 2002; “Processing Henry Nelson Wieman: Creative Interchange Among Naturalism, Postmodernism, and Religion” in Process and Difference, 2002; “Creative Valuing and the Material, Relational Self ” in Belonging Together: Politics and Faith in a Relational World, 2003; “Valuing Nature: Vital Reconstructions of Anne Conway (1631–79)” in Religion and Public Life, vol. 34, 2004; Reverberations from a Mystical Naturalism: Revitalizing the Legacy of Anne Conway, 1631–79, Summer 2004.

Slava Yastremski, trans., A. Sinyavsky, Strolls with Pushkin, Yale University Press, 1993; trans. Olga Sedkova: Poems and Elegies, Bucknell University Press, 2003; trans., I. Klekh, A Land the Size of the Binoculars, Northwestern University Press, 2004; “The Theme of Orpheus in the works of Marina Tsvetaera” in Poetic Text and the Text of Culture, Vladimir, Russia, 2000.

Study Abroad

Comparative humanities students often enhance their education by studying abroad. Recently, students have spend a semester or year in Italy and Spain.

Quick Facts

Number of core faculty members: 8

Average number of majors per class year: 5