What is it?
The Comparative Literature Annual Undergraduate Symposium is an ongoing series dedicated to highlighting the range and ambition of undergraduate work in comparative literature and related fields. Organized by an undergraduate committee with guidance from faculty, the symposium offers a supportive, rigorous venue for students to share research and creative-critical projects that cross languages, forms, and disciplines—literature, film, visual art, performance, translation, and media studies.
Each edition is built around a theme that invites experimentation and sharp argument: students present, respond to one another’s work, and engage in conversation with a keynote guest whose scholarship and practice model what comparative inquiry can do in the world. The symposium is open to all USC undergraduates and aims to make undergraduate research more public, legible, and consequential—an annual moment to gather, think together, and publish or develop work toward future opportunities.
Past Symposia
THE BODY WRITES BACK
With The Body Writes Back: Performance and Praxis, we approach the body not merely as a biological or representational form, but as a site where histories, languages, and affects are inscribed and contested. The symposium itself functions as a performative site, translating theory into action and refining critical thought through practice.
ON THE HORIZON
With On the Horizon: Speculative Ecologies for the Future we identify ecologies not simply as the “natural order” but more broadly as entanglements of people, space, affect, and power that create the conditions for social life. The conference is both an ecology of intellectual exchange and a speculative call towards a future in the making.
