The Comparative Literature Distinguished Speaker Series is a new initiative that brings leading scholars to Rutgers whose work crosses languages, cultures, traditions, and media while engaging broader theoretical questions. It reflects the program’s longstanding commitment to multilingual, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary scholarship, and aims to create new opportunities for conversation across the Humanities and the wider Rutgers community.
On March 4, 2026, the Program in Comparative Literature welcomed Professor Kevin M. F. Platt (University of Pennsylvania) as the inaugural speaker in the Distinguished Speaker Series to share his work titled “Global Socialist Networks in the Age of Three Worlds: Art and Arbitrage from Mexico to Moscow.” Co-sponsored by the SAS Dean’s Office, the event brought together faculty members from various departments, graduate students with diverse yet related research interests, and members of the Rutgers community for a discussion of transnational cultural exchange during the Cold War era.
The talk opened with welcoming remarks from Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui, Dean of Humanities. Reflecting on his own intellectual trajectory, he connected his experience of changing cultural scene in Mexico City to broader developments within the field of Comparative Literature. His remarks also highlighted that this series resonates well with Rutgers Comparative Literature’s long-standing commitment.
Professor Platt examined how artistic and literary works circulated among the developed capitalist world, the socialist world, and the regions of the developing world or the global south, and how they were shaped and driven by mutually opposing yet interpenetrating aesthetic, political and economic evaluation in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Drawing on case studies such as the blacklisted American writer Howard Fast, the Soviet dissident author Vladimir Voinovich, and the Mexican leftist printmaking collective “Taller de Gráfica Popular,” he showed how cultural actors navigated aesthetic, ideological, and economic systems.
Adapted from economic theory, Professor Platt introduced the concept of “cultural arbitrage,” which describes how artworks or literary works that carried little value in one political, economic, or artistic context could gain new significance and even prestige when relocated to another setting. Through examples ranging from Cold War literary publishing networks to Mexican revolutionary printmaking, Professor Platt demonstrated how artists, institutions, and intellectuals strategically moved cultural forms across ideological borders to generate new political, economic, and symbolic value.
Followed by lively comments and Q&As among the attendees, new and inspiring perspectives on the cultural life in the era of three worlds were discussed, and the lecture concluded successfully.