Kathleen Komar

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It isn’t just Kathleen Komar’s enthusiasm for her subject, her incisive lectures or her obvious scholarship that prompt students and colleagues to use superlatives when discussing her teaching. As impressive as her talent for instruction are her regard for her students and her determination to create a classroom environment where the free exchange of ideas is an ever-present part of the learning process.

Constantly sensitive to the needs of her students, whether undergraduate or graduate, American or foreign, Professor Komar, who chairs the Program in Comparative Literature, has won accolades for her instruction and her supportiveness ever since joining the UCLA faculty in 1977. Accompanying that approachability is an uncompromising commitment to high academic standards that challenge her students to produce their best. That commitment has manifested itself in two innovative new courses she designed, as well as her role in conceiving and developing a program of computer-assisted instruction. She also co-founded the Work in Progress forum, to enable faculty and graduate students to discuss the current work of group members.

Ultimately, however, it is the lively classroom atmosphere that her students value above all. As one of them wrote in a class evaluation: “I have never enjoyed learning something so much.”