On September 16, 2009 Jennifer Rowell, '08 wrote- Since graduating from the COLT Master's program in 2008, I have done several things. Immediately afterwards, I attended Middlebury's Summer Language Schools where I studied Portuguese after receiving the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Fellowship for Peace. Later, I taught English in Mexico, served as the Secretary/Treasurer for the Young Democrats Abroad of Mexico City, and survived swine flu thanks to good friends and a stock of masks. More recently, I accepted a position as a Junior Specialist (aka Editor) for a company called MacroSys that works for the U.S. Department of Transportation in Cambridge, MA. Thanks for keeping in touch, Jennifer
In August 2008, Katherine Hawkins, '96 - finished her Ph.D, lives in Philadelphia where she teaches yoga "till the munchkins go off to school. Life is beautiful."
Mary Brown, '98 - I'm still in the PhD program in Comp. Lit. at Berkeley, though I am not physically there at the moment. After passing my qualifying exams in 2003 and taking a year to put together a dissertation project, I am now spending a year in Paris on a Chateaubriand fellowship, researching and writing my dissertation on the exchanges between courtly poetry and the medieval encyclopedia at the end of the 13th century.
Lan Dong, '01 graduated from UMass in 2006 and is now teaching at the University of Illinois in Springfield. For her profile online, go to http://www.uis.edu/english/faculty/index.html
Helen Pilinovsky, '02, continued her education at Columbia University, graduating in 2007 with the completion of her dissertation, “Fantastic Emigres: Translation and Acculturation of the Fairy Tale in a Literary Diaspora.” She is currently employed as an assistant professor at California State University, San Bernardino‚ English department, where she teaches courses on children‚ and young adult literature, fairy tales, folklore, and fantasy. She has guest-edited issues of Extrapolation and The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, has reviewed for Marvels & Tales, has published in Realms of Fantasy and The Journal of the Mythic Arts. She is the co-founder and academic editor of Cabinet des Fees, and she has articles forthcoming on postmodern fairy tales and retellings of Alice in Wonderland.
November 2008, Scott Wilson, '03 wrote — I live in Brooklyn with my wife, Shelly, and our 5 month old son, Rheinhart (we call him Hart). I teach Latin, English, and History at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in Manhattan. The courses I've taught over the past few years include Latin 1-5, AP Latin Literature, AP Latin Vergil, an English Elective on Classical Mythology, and a History Elective on Roman History.
My English and History courses are interdisciplinary in many respects, and I often draw from my training as a Comparative Literature student when designing curricula and lesson plans. I try to incorporate literary theory into lessions in the mythology class (Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Psychoanalysis) whenever appropriate.
So yes, I put to practice much of what I learned as a Comp. Lit. graduate student at Dartmouth on a daily basis. I am certainly grateful to Dartmouth and the Comparative Literature Master's Program for preparing me well.
August 2008 Allison Cook, '06 wrote - I am an Editor at Pearson Prentice Hall in Boston, a textbook publisher. I work mainly on Language Arts anthologies but also on Social Studies (primarily Government and Geography) and World Languages texts. My degree in Comparative Lit helps me tremendously in my work because of its very interdisciplinary approach: one day I might be editing a chapter on the history of government in Russia and the next day working with audio files for a beginner Spanish lesson. My time at Dartmouth helped me to be a better reader and my time as a teaching assistant improved my skills working with other people's writing, both of which are crucial in my job. I just bought a house just outside of Boston and am getting married in September.
July 2008 Genevieve Amaral, '07 wrote — After completing her M.A. in Comparative Literature at Dartmouth, Genevieve went on to spend a year teaching English in France and will be beginning a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University in the Fall '08.
Genevieve credits her experience at Dartmouth with helping her reflect on and develop her own position on what "comparative literature" means. She's grateful to the various faculty and staff at Dartmouth who helped her find this sense of direction, which in turn helped her select and apply to graduate schools and has given her a sense of her relation to academia, something which can be difficult to establish on one's own.
April 2008, Duncan Yoon, '07 wrote - My MA thesis is going to be published later this year by Cambridge Scholars Publishing Newcastle UK. It will be in a compilation of essays entitled: "REVOLUTIONS: Mapping Culture, Community and Change.
July 2009, Duncan is at UCLA getting his PhD in Comparative Literature.
Todd Foley, '07, is in the Ph.D. Program at NYU in East Asian Studies.
July 2008, Jason Lewallen, '07 wrote - I scored a job at Baylor University as a French Lecturer, a gig that would've been impossible were it not for my time at Dartmouth, especially working a little with John Rassias. So, I spent that year figuring out how to teach French and putting together PhD applications. After finally choosing Stanford.
Kate Paarlberg , '07, began working as a social worker in a program for pregnant families in downtown Kingston, New York. With the Spanish she practiced at Dartmouth, she works with Kingston's large population of undocumented immigrants. With the critical theory she practiced at Dartmouth, she connects her work to issues of race, class, and the development of gender in the modern urban landscape. Kate hopes to enroll in a PhD program next fall in Latin American Studies.
July 2008, Shalom Black Lane , '00, wrote - I am currently living in Indiana with my husband of two years, Adam. I use my Comparative Literature degree every day, by helping children to value reading and writing, as well as high quality literature and poetry. The research and writing skills I gained at Dartmouth--especially the ability to organize and edit my writing--have been enormously useful in writing grants and articles, and creating programming. I've found that having the name "Dartmouth" on my resume has opened many doors for me, both in teaching positions related to my Com Lit major, and in my new filed of arts administration. My path since graduating from Dartmouth ub 2000 has not run straight, but my time in the MA program certainly challenged me to become a better thinker and writer.
