Comparative Literature
Co-Directors of Comparative Literature
Ann Daghistany Ransdell (Ph.D. Southern California, 1971) is an associate professor of comparative literature and specializes in nineteenth-century literature, contemporary fiction, the short study, and myth criticism. Her recent publications include "Guinevere" (co-authored with Kristian Kimbro), Women in the Middle Ages, Vol. 1. (Greenwood P, 2004) and "Agression in Kosovo," Atenea 24.1 (June 2004): 163-75. She co-edited, with Jeffrey Smitten, Spatial Form in Narrative (Cornell UP, 1981) and won the 2004 President's Excellence in Teaching Award. She is working on a book-length study of Louisa May Alcott. She currently teaches multi-cultural contemporary literature with emphases in madness, trauma and healing, and 19th- and 20th-century comparative and trans-Atlantic literatures.
Jim Whitlark (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1976) is a full professor in the Department of English and serves as Associate Chair. Winner of the President's Excellence in Teaching Award in 1998, Whitlark has published Illuminated Fantasy: From Blake's Visions to Recent Graphic Fiction (Fairleigh Dickinson U, 1988); Behind the Great Wall: A Post-Jungian Approach to Kafkaesque Literature (Fairleigh Dickinson U, 1991); and parts of 28 other books and numerous journal articles.
Faculty in Comparative Literature
Wendell Aycock (Ph.D. South Carolina) is an Associate Dean of the Graduate School and a former Department Chair of the Department of English, where he is a full professor. He has edited or co-edited eighteen volumes coming from the Comparative Literature Symposium project at Texas Tech. He has taught in four foreign countries (Panama, Argentina, Turkey and Spain), and his awards include two Fulbrights, an NEH grant, and a Mellon grant. Although he has studies in various genres and periods (e.g., "Shakespeare in the Works of the Young Gutierrez Najera" and "Night Scenes in Don Quixote"), his recent work concerns the short story. He currently serves as Bibliographer for Studies in Short Fiction, and, from 1995-2000, he produced Twentieth-Century Short Story Explication, New Series.
Kanika Batra (Ph.D. Loyola University Chicago, 2006) specializes in Postcolonial literatures and has interests in Feminism and Queer Studies. Her articles have appeared in the journals African and Black Diaspora, The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. In 2001 she published a book-length study of Caribbean poetry for the Indira Gandhi National Open University, India. In 2010, she published the book Feminist Visions and Queer Futures in Postcolonial Drama.
Yuan Shu (Ph.D. Indiana), is an associate professor and serves as the chair of the cross-departmental Comparative Literature program. Shu specializes in contemporary American literature with an emphasis on postmodern American fiction, Vietnam War literature, and Asian American literature. His research interest includes nationalism and globalization theory, technology and discourse, as well as critical and comparative race studies. He is the director of the Texas Tech Comparative Literature program and has published in journals varying from Cultural Critique to MELUS.