Comparative Studies entails extensive study of at least two, preferably three, national literatures. This option emphasizes studies of cultural interchange, historical periods, major figures, literary movements, aesthetic initiatives, genres, ideas, themes, and values. The guiding impulse for Comparative Studies originates with the assumption that it is fundamentally limiting to confine the interpretation of literatures within specific national or linguistic boundaries. While Comparative Literature recognizes the importance and value of literary research with more specific regional focus, it conceives Comparative Studies as a necessary complement to the study of national literatures. Graduate students who elect the track in Comparative Studies are expected to enter the program with competency in one foreign language and are expected to have mastered two foreign languages by the time they graduate.

Comparative Literature has a distinguished pedigree, extending back to nineteenth-century work undertaken in the areas of comparative philology and Romance Studies. The germ of the discipline can arguably be traced back to Goethe's dream of one, global Weltliteratur, an aspiration that has led some to question its links to the rise of European imperialism. Modern Comparative Literature began to acquire stronger definition and clarity in Europe between the 1920s and 1940s with the research of such scholars as E.R. Curtius, Erich Auerbach, Ortega y Gasset, Karl Vossler, René Wellek and Leo Spitzer. It is this strong intellectual heritage, combined with the work of the Frankfurt School, that shaped Comparative Literature in the United States following WW II which had displaced many European scholars to North America. In recent decades, Comparative Literature has also increasingly hosted theoretical debates regarding the character of the aesthetic and the literary. Comparative Literature programs, particularly those based at Yale, Johns Hopkins, Cornell's Department of Romance Studies, and the University of Buffalo, were instrumental in introducing to American scholars and students the work of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Serres and René Girard among others. The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, at the dawn of a new millennium, the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Buffalo is more vital than ever. The Department is at the forefront of many new and emerging trends in literary studies and supports a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches to literature.