State of the Discipline Report

The Bylaws of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) mandate that a State of the Discipline Report be prepared by the association every decade. The five previous reports (1965, 1975, 1993, 2006, and 2014) have become landmarks in the history of the discipline, chronicling its developments intellectually and institutionally. Taken together, those reports tell a story of Comparative Literature’s increasing openness to the world beyond Europe, a widening range of interdisciplinary approaches, and a gradual democratization of the process of producing the Report itself: from prescriptive statements issued by eminent scholars at elite institutions to the wide-open format of the 2010s, in which a large number of comparatists from a broad spectrum of institutions and ranks contributed to a mosaic of comparative practices. 

This report features an open call for peer-reviewed contributions in six different areas, and the report's Editorial Team, headed by Waïl S. Hassan (University of Illinois) & Shu-mei Shih (Univeristy of California, Los Angeles), includes faculty from a number of public and private institutions.