CWL student wins Commitment to Social Justice Award
Congratulations to Jessica King, a CWL and English / Creative Writing double major, for being awarded the Commitment to Social Justice Award on behalf of her work for the Comparative Literature Club, by Student Life and Development. 
Jessica has led a number of workshops and events for the CLC around disability awareness. As a disabled student and disability activist herself, Jessica says, “My name may be on the certificate, but my award is dedicated to CSULB students with disabilities and the disabled community. This award is a promise that I will keep going in representing my community and advocating for more narratives to be acknowledged.”
Jessica will be working for CSULB’s LIFE Project this summer as a peer mentor and starting Fall 2024 as a peer coach. LIFE Project benefits students with an autism-spectrum disorder, Asperger Syndrome, or similar conditions. We are proud of you, Jessica!
For more information about Jessica and her disability advocacy, please visit her Instagram and/or LinkedIn pages, @TheWhiteDovePoet.
Welcome, Dr. Viola Lasmana!
WELCOME, DR. VIOLA LASMANA!
Dr. Viola Lasmana teaches and writes about global digital humanities, transnational feminisms, transpacific studies, Asian & Asian American studies, Indonesia and Southeast Asia, film, literature, and media activism. Her work has been published in Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, Film Quarterly, make/shift: feminisms in motion, The Cine-Files, Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, Visual Anthropology, Computers and Composition, and Interdisciplinary Humanities. She is currently completing her book project, Shadow Imaginations: Post-1965 Transnational Indonesian Feminist Archives.
Dr. Lasmana received her PhD in English from the University of Southern California with a certificate in Digital Media and Culture from the USC School of Cinematic Arts’ Media Arts + Practice Division, and the Andrew W. Mellon PhD Fellowship in Digital Humanities. Before doctoral work, she did her undergraduate studies at Foothill Community College and the University of San Francisco, and completed her MA at San Francisco State University.
Prior to joining Cal State Long Beach, Dr. Lasmana taught at Rutgers University-New Brunswick as an ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) Emerging Voices Fellow and a South & Southeast Asian Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of American Studies and the Global Asias Initiative. She was also an NYU A/P/A (Asian/Pacific/American) Institute Visiting Scholar. Dr. Lasmana has also taught in the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, and Media Arts & Culture department at Occidental College.
Dr. Lasmana is thrilled to begin her journey in CWL. She believes in the classroom as a transformative space of possibilities and is excited to build community with students, faculty, and staff at the Beach.
CWL 58th Annual Conference during the week of April 15, 2024
Join us in-person or on Zoom!
Writers of Extreme Situations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective
New CWL courses this Fall 2024
Check these out!
CWL 115 Intro to Health Humanities–Interested in healthcare or the medical field? Want to become a better health advocate or provider? This class is for you! MW 3:30-4:45 pm, #7535. Fulfills GE: C.
CWL 230B Heroes and Rebels: World Literature and Its Contexts from the 1700s to the Present–explore stories about heroes and/or rebels from around the world! TuTh 9:30-10:45 am, #11191.
CWL 265 Intro to Literary Theory–Comp Lit is all about text and theory. Find out how it works! MW 12:30-1:45 pm, #11176. Fulfills GE: C.
Plus two courses that are offered from time to time:
CWL 344 Literature of the Holocaust–yes, it’s a heavy topic, but you’ll be inspired by the resilience of the human spirit. TuTh 11:00 am-12:15 pm, #10445. GE: UD-C.
CWL 405 Global Fantasy–it’s SF, fantasy & horror without the SF and horror. TuTh 2:00-3:15 pm, #11135. GE: UD-C.
And the classes offered by our new professor coming this Fall, Dr. Viola Lasmana:
CWL 205 Digital Narrative and Culture. TuTh 11:00 am-12:15 pm, #11557. GE: C.
CWL 300 Representing the World: Literature and Culture in Contact and Conflict. TuTh 2:00 -3:15 pm, #10761. GE: UD-C, Writing Intensive.
CWL 495 genre–practicum on publishing the next volume of our journal. W 12:30-3:15 pm, #11136
CWL Graduates Publish Research Papers
Three CWL graduates from 2021 and 2022 have published their CWL 480 research papers! Congratulations to
Recent CWL Faculty Publications
Dr. Crystal Yin Lie would like to share her recent article, published in the interdisciplinary quarterly Biography. “Drawn To History: Healing, Dementia, and the Armenian Genocide in the Intertextual Collage of Aliceheimer’s” explores Dana Walrath’s memoir, Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass (2016), noting graphic medicine’s commitments to interrogating power relations in medical discourse, highlighting the valuable perspective of dementia experience, and revealing how by juxtaposing personal essay with the visual-verbal affordances of comics, intertextual collage, and the altered book, Walrath links her experiences of caregiving, Alice’s dementia, and Armenian history to the adventures of Carroll’s Wonderland, creating a sense of both dissonance and exploratory freedom to broach subjects that might typically be regarded as unapproachable. The entire issue can be accessed on Project Muse: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/47911. Readers may also be interested to know that ‘Graphic Medicine’ is also a book forthcoming from the University of Hawai‘i Press in July 2022: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/graphic-medicine/
Also from Dr. Lie:
Lives Matter.
Pertains to Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
(Sari) conference on the theme of “Reinventing the Sea: Precarity, Epistemology, Narratives,” pp. 57-65. Refereed. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02455760/document Refereed. Online.
pp. 120-134. Refereed/Invited. Print.
the all new Health Humanities Minor!
CWL is proud to announce the inauguration of our Health Humanities Minor. The Health Humanities focus on skills that the Humanities and Social Sciences provide that help Health Professionals do their jobs better. We are fortunate to have Dr. Crystal Yin Lie, who is a specialist in Health Humanities and Disability Studies, overseeing the Minor. Read more about Dr. Crystal Yin Lie!
For the list of courses, see the Health Humanities Minor flyer!
new courses for Fall 2021: Global Fantasy and Russian Lit
55th Annual Comp Lit Conference April 7-8, 2021
Our conference this year is ON! “Outcasts and Outliers in Literature, Music, and Visual Arts.” Check out the description and the program! Hope to see you there (on Zoom)!
Statement in support of AAPI
Innocent immigrants working minimum wage
Just lost their lives because their skin color is beige
[…] The old me is to let the hatred slide
But now I am filled with Asian pride
I am so sick of holding the pain inside
[…] My community is under attack
So stop ignoring these crimes and playing pretend
And check in on your Asian family and friends
Let’s have each other’s backs and put this hate to an end.
Sherry Cola
Comparative World Literature denounces racially-motivated violence in the world, especially the most recent tragedy in Atlanta against Asians and Asian-Americans. We lend our support and solidarity to Asians, Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, here in the United States and the world.
Our faculty heartily believes that the world is a better place because of the rich diversity of cultures and literatures. We teach our students to engage with the literatures of the world in an effort to use the power of literature to eradicate racial bias and hatred!
Today, we are All Asian-American!
22 March 2021