Launched in Spring 2026 by graduate students Chloe Wheeler and Ward Awad, this multi-year podcast project builds on Inventory, the translation-focused journal housed in Princeton’s Comparative Literature Department (founded in 2009 by graduate students in Comparative Literature). The podcast extends the journal’s intellectual commitments into a new medium that can address asymmetries in the archive and the academy.
By translating comparative study into an audio format, we aim to expand how scholarly work circulates, rendering it accessible beyond the university while preserving its conceptual rigor and examining the radio/podcast format itself as we do so. Through conversations and narrative-driven podcasting with individuals across the disciplines, we consider how comparison structures knowledge production in distinct domains of scholarship.
This project creates a sustained interdisciplinary space in which people can reflect on the conditions, ethics, and possibilities of comparative work. It brings together emerging and established voices across translation, theory, philosophy, history, and cultural studies so as to think together in a multimedia register. In doing so, the project not only theorizes comparison but performs it across media, disciplines, and audiences.
Contact Chloe (cw2772@princeton.edu) if you are interested in being involved in future episodes of Inventory.
Explore the beautiful covers of the print version of Inventory below.
