Two features give Comparative Literature at UC Irvine its distinctive character. First, the department is committed to a conception of transnational comparatism in which the Euro-American zone is not accorded any privileged position while literatures and cultures of the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Latin Americathe literatures of the colonized more generallyare accorded their rightful place. Second, the department trains its students in a range of theoretical perspectives that have been transforming scholarship over the past few decades. In fulfillment of these commitments, Ph.D. students in Comparative Literature can use any graduate course offered at the university to fulfill a departmental course requirement. This allows Ph.D. students to pursue research that values lines of inquiry over pre-set national and genre categories.<br><br>Comparative Literature emerged as a separate department at UC Irvine in 2003 at a moment when the largely European orientations of the discipline were already under great stress, as was the idea of 'national' literature as such. Comparative Literature at UC Irvine was formed to explore how the discipline could join its strengths in critical theory to such forces as third world literature and gender and sexuality studies. These movements had developed not as pleas for inclusion in the existing canons but as assertion that most of twentieth-century literature, including many of its milestones, was produced outside the Euro-American zones as oppositional discourse that required re-imagining of the constituted disciplines. Comparative Literature at UCI was constructed to open the meanings of comparative literature as a field. In years since, the program has sought in turn to question the limits of the postcolonial paradigm through research in black studies, Native American studies, LGBQT studies, feminist studies, and various minority formations--for example, racial, ethnic, gendered, sexed, religious--within national and transnational spaces.