Colton Valentine is a senior at Harvard College, concentrating in Comparative Literature with a citation in French. His academic interests include twentieth-century literature and its premodern intertexts, literary theory, and continental philosophy. His senior thesis develops earlier work on time into a comparative study on Marcel Proust and Milorad Pavić. He has written for The Harvard Crimson, The Harvard Advocate, and the Arts & Culture section at The Huffington Post—and believes a good workout can solve any textual quandary.

Nina Youkhanna graduated from Western University in Ontario, Canada with a BA Honors in Comparative Literature. She is currently pursuing her MA at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature. Her interests lie at the interstice of Russian and Arabic literatures and the cultural and intellectual dialogues between the two traditions. The depiction of women and the feminine voice in literature, or lack thereof, is a topic she hopes to continue exploring in her future postgraduate studies.

Anna Pedersen is a 2015 graduate of Haverford College where she studied Comparative Literature and Spanish. Her research focused mainly on contemporary Latin American literature and seventeenth century Spanish literature, with a particular concentration on Don Quijote. She currently works as a Global Academic Fellow in Writing at New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi and hopes to move to New York in the near future to begin a career in publishing.

 Miguel Penabella is a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with highest honors in Comparative Literature and Communication Studies. His thesis examined the complex effects of temporality on narrative, national identity, and spectatorship in the films of Abbas Kiarostami, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and Nagisa Oshima. He is also interested in theorizations of slow cinema, historical memory, and the relationship of politics and style in global art cinema. In addition to his formal education in film, he has a background in theorizing videogame narrative, having published criticism everywhere from First Person Scholar to Playboy Magazine, all of which are archived on his blog, Invalid Memory. Miguel will be entering into a PhD program in Film Studies in 2016.

Shawn Zhang graduated from UCLA with a double major in English and Comparative Literature in June 2015. Since then he has parted with sunny SoCal and returned to his home in New Zealand. After spending 6 months looking for something to do, he now finds himself not unhappily employed as a civil servant. In his spare time he fantasizes about going to graduate school someday and getting a cat.