At most universities, undergraduate education follows a familiar rhythm: attend class, complete assignments, prepare for exams. But a new program in the Comparative Literature department within the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington, is rewriting that script, one student at a time.

The Aleph Program, launched in 2024, pairs comparative literature majors with faculty mentors for semester-long, one-on-one tutorials built entirely around a topic the student chooses. Students apply with a letter describing their proposed field of interest. Once accepted, they receive a small scholarship to cover research costs and begin meeting regularly with a faculty mentor whose expertise aligns with their project. The tutorials carry two academic credits and are funded by the Pasko Fund, a generous gift to the department that opened up new possibilities for student support.

“We’d love for comparative literature to be known as a place where students with passions can work one-on-one with world-renowned scholars while following their respective stars,” said Jacob Emery, chair of the IU Department of Comparative Literature and one of the program’s co-founders.

When the Pasko Fund became available, the department saw its opportunity. In 2023, Emery and Peretz proposed a series of tutorial courses for comparative literature majors. With the support of then-chair Professor David Hertz, the program launched the following year.

Since its founding, the Aleph Program has enrolled three or four students each semester, working on projects that range across the breadth of the field. Students have explored the French New Wave in film, the early queer novel, the theoretical concept of the Other, and the entirety of Proust’s monumental novel cycle, among other topics.

The individual format, he explains, lets those students “explore many areas that would not be available through regular courses, and also to express their unique curiosity in a more fulfilling way.” It also offers a preview of what lies ahead: “The one-on-one format gives them more the experience of what graduate school will be like,” Peretz said, “where you tailor more closely your studies to your individual interests.”

Emery has seen firsthand what that close engagement can produce. During one tutorial, he worked with a student whose proposed project — vampire and gothic fiction — evolved over the semester into something far more expansive. Beginning with early nineteenth-century literature and moving through silent horror films, the student drew on readings across multiple languages, theoretical frameworks drawn from psychology, economics, and linguistics, and a close study of how cultural anxieties take on narrative form.

“The intellectual growth was phenomenal in all kinds of ways,” Emery said. The experience, he noted, also gave the student something more difficult to measure: confidence. “She grew as a writer, too … but the intellectual growth may be less important than the independence and confidence the student gained." 

That confidence had real consequences. Emery was so impressed with the student’s development that he recruited her as a teaching assistant for IU’s Intensive First Year Seminar, a role in which she helped guide incoming students through some of the most challenging texts in the program.

“It’s really thanks to the Aleph Program that I was able to recruit her,” Emery said. “I might not have been able to fully appreciate her talent and initiative in a large class.”

Learning that radiates outward

The Aleph Program’s benefits, Emery argues, don’t stay contained within the tutorials themselves. When students who have done sustained independent research return to the regular classroom, the effects ripple outward.

“The research skills and sense of ownership they have over their learning help other students by example and raise the bar for everybody,” Emery said. “It’s inspiring for faculty, too — the energy is really infectious.”

The department hopes to expand the program until tutorials are available to any student who wants one, a shift that Emery believes will make senior capstone projects a standard feature of the undergraduate experience. For students planning to go on to graduate school, that means polished writing samples and a track record of independent scholarship. 

But the program’s ambitions extend well beyond graduate school preparation.

“The experience of conceiving a complex project and doing the hard work to follow through on it is crucial for anything our students might want to do after College,” Emery said. 

The department is also exploring ways to involve graduate students in the program, blurring what Emery calls an “artificial barrier” between the undergraduate and graduate communities. In many ways, he notes, the work Aleph students are already doing is graduate-level.

For students considering applying, Peretz describes an ideal candidate as “a budding academic in the making” who wants to experience what graduate study feels like, someone who relishes, “the challenge of a deepened intellectual exchange with a professor” around interests that might not find a home in the regular curriculum.

For Emery, the program ultimately reflects something essential about what draws students to Comparative Literature in the first place.

“Comp Lit isn’t the right path for everyone,” he said, “but students who would thrive in Comp Lit would tend to be the same students who would love to do a deep dive on something that uniquely fascinates them.”

In the Aleph Program, those students have a place to do exactly that.