Comp Lit PhD students, Lucas Joshi and Michele Moghrabi have been selected to participate in Brown’s Open Graduate Education Program. Launched in 2011, the objective of the Open Graduate Program is to enable students to combine fields in unique ways and acquire expertise in more than one area. The program aligns the training of doctoral students with the spirit of Brown's Open Curriculum for undergraduate students, a cornerstone of the University's pedagogy.

Lucas Joshi is pursuing a secondary master's in Africana Studies at Brown, enabling him to continue taking coursework in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Africana Studies simultaneously. In his work in this department, he thinks with the Indian Ocean through its legacies of enslavement. By foregrounding his writing in Comparative Literature, a secondary degree in Africana Studies will allow Lucas to consider the ways in which multiple oceans (Indian, Atlantic, and elsewhere) have borne witness to the diaspora of Blackness. Further, and in conversation with his doctoral work in Comparative Literature, he asks how the garden, a site of enslavement and emancipation, overlaps and undergirds Black American and Indian Ocean literatures.

As a Comparative Literature graduate student working on Ancient Greek, German, and French literature, Michele Moghrabi expresses that he is delighted to pursue a Master’s in the Classics department. From his undergraduate training in philosophy, he has always focused on Greek thought, and is grateful to have those efforts recognized through an official association with the Classics department at Brown. Over the next two years, Michele hopes to hone his philological abilities in both Ancient Greek and Latin, as well as deepen his familiarity with fields of Greek culture adjacent to his focus on philosophy—namely tragedy and ancient medicine. It is by developing this deeper interdisciplinary approach to the Greek world that Michele hopes to begin laying the groundwork for my dissertation research. 

Congratulations to both Lucas and Michele — we look forward to hearing more about their ongoing research.