My updates: I published a new novel, South Side (Parresia Press, 2025), and information about it is available here.
I also became the new editor-in-chief of Black Camera: please see this recent story published by the Media School at Indiana University.
Purnima Bose recently published three articles. “Picturing Afghan Women: Cartoons and the Limitations of Photography” appears in the volume Images of War in the North Atlantic Triangle, edited by Waldemar Zacharasiewicz and Martin Loeschnigg (Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2025): 481-514. A second article on Afghanistan, “Withdrawal Narratives: Afghan Women, Time, and Developmental Idealism,” was published in Decolonizing Afghanistan: Countering Imperial Knowledge and Power, edited by Robert Crews and Wazhmah Osman. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2025): 194-217. Against the Current published Bose's essay, "Indiana's Assault on Public Education" (September/October 2025).
“In 2025, Carlos Colmenares Gil completed the chapter “Rhythms of Venezuela: the Extraction and Refinement of Traditional Music,” co-written with Andrea Zarza Canova, for the edited collection Critical Perspectives on Petrosonics, to be published by Bloomsbury in early 2026. This chapter examines a series of six vinyl LPs produced and published by Shell between 1953 and 1958, which presented a wide-ranging, yet inevitably selective overview of Venezuelan music. The piece aims to show how processes of extraction and refinement were present not only in Shell’s activities as an oil company, but also in its labor as a sound culture producer. In addition, his poetry collection, Ver mi alma, was released in Bogotá, Colombia by Matera Libros. He also presented papers in the MLA annual meeting in New Orleans, as well as the Latin American Studies Association annual meeting in San Francisco.”
Professor Emery stepped into the role of Department Chair in August, since which he spends most of his time thinking about how best to support Comparative Literature at Indiana University and in general. Despite these administrative distractions, he has managed to keep a hand in his scholarly projects. This past year he published a pair of articles--"Nabokov's Solus Rex and Its Sibling Cadaverkins" (in The Slavic and East European Journal) and "The Contemporary Russian Novel" (in The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Novel)--and presented work in progress at conferences in New Orleans and Paris. His book project on imaginary transcription technologies, provisionally entitled Offprint: Science Fiction, Transcription, and Art is now in the final stages; so is a second novel, which is to be published under the name J. S. Emery. Professor Emery is now concentrating his research efforts on a book called The Work of Art and Other Kinds of Work--a materialist account of the widespread device of the text-within-the-text.
Professor Hertz finished up his term as chair of Comparative Literature by teaching a graduate class on “Opera as Drama” at the University of Lisbon, which has had an exchange agreement with IU Comparative Literature for 35 years. He presented a keynote talk, “Proust, Cognition and the Arts” at the University of Lisbon in June. Academics from the Lisbon area also joined him to speak on cognition in the arts during a daylong conference. Volume one of his study of American popular song and lyrics during the Jazz Age is scheduled to appear in the fall of 2026 with Louisiana State University Press.
Bill Johnston published two new translations in 2025: Needle’s Eye by Polish novelist Wiesław Myśliwski (Archipelago Books, 2025) and a grammar of the world, a long poem by French writer Jeanne Benameur (Les Fugitives, 2025). Earlier in the year his translation of the novel Great Fear on the Mountain by Swiss modernist Charles Ferdinand Ramuz was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. Over the summer and fall Johnston was a juror for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. He also continues to serve as Indiana University’s Michael Henry Heim Chair in Central and East European Letters. His greatest professional pleasure this year has been working with a fabulous cohort of graduate student translators.
Herb Marks published a new book in French this June titled Ouvertures bibliques (Paris: Éditions du Cerf); a related essay in English, “The Agnostic Bible,” appeared in the spring number of Literary Imagination; and, after teaching a course on his favorite topic of literary ghosts, he chaired a seminar and presented a paper on the same topic at the annual conference of the Association for Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers in Washington, D.C.
Oana Panaïté (Ruth N. Halls Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature, and Director of the Center of Excellence of the French Embassy at IU) co-authored the monograph Fictions of Race in Contemporary Literature: French Writers, White Writing (with Étienne Achille; Oxford University Press, 2024) and co-edited two special journal issues: “Decolonizing Literature in French and the Question of the White Writer” for Contemporary French Civilization (CFC Intersections) and “Thinking with Édouard Glissant” for the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy (with Prof. Anke Birkenmaier, IU Department of Spanish and Portuguese), both published in Fall 2024. In 2025, she co-edited an issue of the journal Research in African Literatures honoring IU Professor Emerita Eileen Julien (Vol. 55, No. 3, Autumn 2025) with IU Prof. Akin Adeṣọkan and the bilingual volume L’Écrivain national par temps de mondialisation / The National Writer in a Global Context (co-edited with Alexandre Gefen and Cornelia Ruhe; Brill, 2025). She also participated in a two-day ACLA seminar (virtual, May 29–June 1) on “necrofiction,” a concept she developed in her 2022 book, in which ten scholars from institutions around the world examined the resonances and potential applications of this concept to understand the role of literary works in creating sites and symbols for remembering as well as coping with individual and collective loss.
I published two books in 2025, Messengers of Infinity: On the Pictorial Logic of Leonardo Da Vinci (SUNY Press, March 2025), and American Medium: A New Film Philosophy (Stanford UP, Nov 2025).
Anya Peterson Royce, PhD, D.Litt, Medalla Binniza (Mexico); Chancellor's Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Comparative Literature, Indiana University; Adjunct Professor Emerita, Irish World Academy of Music and Dance
Publication:
Revision of book: The Silver Age of the Commedia dell”Arte: Player, Masque, and Repertoire, 297 pages, for submission to Toronto Press
Presentation:
“Anthropology of the Performing Arts,” Author’s Corner 2; ICTMD Sub-Study group “Ethnochoreology Matters;” Zoom presentation September 22, 2025.
Photography:
Digital files of my photographs of the famine cottages of the 1840’s along the west coast of Ireland (105 photos) presented to the Historical archives of Co. Clare, Ireland, August 2025.
In 2025, Valentino completed the second half of his Fulbright Scholar award to Croatia, where he continued work on his book Sea of Intimacy; was selected as one of eight 2025-26 IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellows for work on the same project; accepted an invitation to serve as co-convener (with Steve Sanders) for the 2025-26 Institute for Advanced Study’s Bloomington Symposia on “Free Speech and the University”; delivered invited presentations on AI in translation at the annual conference of the International League of Esperanto Instructors (ILEI) and at Princeton University’s Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication; and taught two newly designed courses, the 300-level “Sustainability in the Adriatic” (which satisfies the College of Arts and Sciences new “sustainability literacy” CASE requirement, and the graduate seminar, “Russian Drama,” rescued from the deep archives of IU’s curricular offerings and jointly listed with the Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance. His translation (with Miriam Shrager and Sibelan Forrester) of Vladimir Propp’s Historical Roots of the Wondertale, with an introduction and notes, is due out in December at IU Press.
Prof. Sonia Velázquez organized a panel on "Character" at the first biennial Cervantes Society of America Conference that took place in September 2024 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She presented new research on the ethics of character analysis in the problematic novella La fuerza de la sangre. In New Mexico, she connected with IU PhD alum, professor emeritus Ignacio Navarrete. Also connected to Cervantes's short fiction, Prof. Velázquez is working on an article on forgiveness.
The College of Arts