Jennifer Andrews, University of New Brunswick

President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 206
27 King's College Circle
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1
July 14, 2010.

Dear President Naylor:
    I am writing as a University of Toronto alumnus to express my  outrage and disappointment at the proposed closing of the Centre for  Comparative Literature.  Although I received my MA and PHD from the  Department of English at the University of Toronto in 1994 and 1998  respectively, I consider the graduate courses that I took at the  Centre of Comparative Literature to have been absolutely formative  for my scholarly career and critical to the development of my cross- border work in English-Canadian and American literature, which has  resulted in two monographs, over fifteen peer-reviewed scholarly  articles, and dozens of conference papers; it also gave me the  unique training needed to co-edit the only bilingual Canadian  scholarly literature journal in the country.
     The Centre for Comparative Literature offered a dynamic space  to explore literatures and cultures in a truly comparative context,  a perspective that I relish to this day.  While the Department of  English provided requisite training in the discipline of English  literature and its national branches, I vividly recall the thought- provoking and indeed radical perspectives offered up in my  comparative literature classes, which pushed me as a graduate  student to think more broadly and deeply about cross-culture and  cross-literary relations.  For me, the legacy of studying at the  Centre has been a congenial and generous group of colleagues and  friends located around the global who continue to produce  outstanding work across disciplines and languages and inspire my own  continued productivity.  If the University of Toronto aspires to be  a university of global excellence then to close the Centre for  Comparative Literature would be to end one of its finest creations;  surely the university is smarter than that!

Sincerely,

Jennifer Andrews, Professor, Co-editor of Studies in Canadian  Literature & Co-director of Honours and Majors
Room #247, Carleton Hall, Department of English, UNB, P.O. Box 4400
Fredericton, NB E3B 5A3
Office phone: (506) 458-7403
Office fax: (506) 453-5069