The American Comparative Literature Association recently awarded former Comp Lit concentrator, Hannah Cole (class of 2016) the Charles Bernheimer Prize for the best dissertation.  According to the ACLA, Hannah’s dissertation, A Thorny Way of Thinking: Botanical Afterlives of Caribbean Plantation Slavery, “presents a methodologically original and theoretically innovative model of comparatism. Drawing its conceptual coordinates from postcolonial ecocriticism and critical plant studies and engaging scholarship from a range of fields, the dissertation’s interdisciplinarity is complemented by its holistic embrace of literary texts from different Caribbean traditions—Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanophone.”

Hannah graduated from Brown in 2016, with a concentration in Comparative Literature with two languages.  She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at Cornell University and then went to Yale University as the RITM Postdoctoral Fellow in the Environmental Humanities for the 2022-2023 academic year.  Hannah is a scholar of literature, race, and the environment; during her time at Yale, she has worked on her manuscript and her digital humanities project.