Assistant Professor of English Steven Yao organized a seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting, "The Human and its Others," held at Princeton University in March. Yao's panel was titled "Human Difference/ La Difference Humaine." He is the recipient of an American Council on Learned Societies fellowship and currently serving an external faculty fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center.
According to the conference program "The idea of comparison necessarily involves concepts of similarity and difference. Over the past 30 years, the notion of 'difference' has gained considerable critical attention, from its important place within deconstruction to the more recent development of fields premised on the idea of human 'difference' such as Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, and 'minority' literature. This panel welcomes historical, theoretical, philosophical and other interrogations of the category of 'difference' as it relates to the 'human.' How does 'difference' operate within the practice of 'comparison,' especially with regard to the constitution of categories that are foundational to the field, categories such as 'language,' 'culture,' and even the vague notion of 'sensibility'? How do various categories of "difference" such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, etc. operate within and help to constitute the notion of the 'human'? Comparative analyses of regimes of difference across national, temporal and geographical lines welcome."
