DLCL 2026 Commencement Address

Regina  Pieck, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature,  delivered the 2026 Commencement Address on Sunday, June 14, 2026 at the DLCL Diploma Ceremony in Dinkelspiel Auditorium with the following speech:

"Hello, and warmest congratulations to our graduates.

My name is Regina Pieck, and I am a faculty member in the Department of Comparative Literature. It is my honor and great pleasure to speak to you on behalf of the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

Today is, of course, a celebration of our graduates, but it is also a celebration of the families, friends, partners, and communities who have accompanied them along the way. Thank you for the care, encouragement, and support that helped bring them to this moment.

And to our graduates: I know I speak for the faculty and staff across the division when I say how proud we are of your accomplishments. Today you receive your degrees, but I hope this is not the end of your engagement with everything you learned during your time here. Rather, I hope it marks the beginning of a lifelong inquiry.

To devote years of your life to studying cultures and their textual traditions is no small achievement. This is a practice that requires learning to inhabit other places and times, to encounter unfamiliar ways of comprehending the world, and to recognize that your own assumptions are neither universal nor inevitable. It demands rigor, discipline, and intellectual courage. But it also cultivates qualities that are equally important: curiosity, attentiveness, and openness.

These qualities matter profoundly at a moment when so much of our world seems organized around speed. We live in an age that often prizes immediate answers over difficult questions, efficiency over reflection, and innovation over understanding. We are surrounded by technologies that promise to generate text, images, and ideas instantly. Yet the humanities remind us that the most important human questions cannot be solved by acceleration alone.

Questions such as: How should we live together? What do we owe one another? What makes a life meaningful? How do we remember the past without becoming trapped by it? How do we imagine a future that is more just, more generous, and more humane?

These are not new questions. They are among the oldest questions human beings have asked. And they are probably the kinds of questions that brought many of you to the study of literatures, cultures, and languages.

As I was reflecting on what I wanted to say today, I found myself thinking about a remarkable scene from the history of the Americas.

Almost five hundred years ago, a group of Franciscan friars founded the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco in central Mexico. This college became one of the earliest institutions of higher learning in the Americas and a remarkable center of multilingual scholarship. There, young Aztec students learned to read and write in Nahuatl, their native language, as well as Spanish, and Latin. They studied grammar, rhetoric, logic, music, astronomy, and theology. The college housed a substantial library and participated in the broader intellectual currents of Renaissance Humanism while remaining deeply connected to Indigenous traditions of knowledge.

The scholars who studied there lived through an extraordinary time of upheaval. The world they had inherited had been transformed by conquest. Political institutions had been dismantled and rebuilt. Communities had been displaced. Most devastatingly, waves of epidemic disease swept repeatedly through the population, causing demographic losses on a scale that remains difficult to comprehend today—but that we may be able to relate to, given our recent experience.

And yet, amid this uncertainty and suffering, they continued to study, teach, write, translate, and preserve knowledge.

Working together across languages and intellectual traditions, Indigenous scholars and Franciscan educators worked together to produce some of the most important documents in the history of the Americas. They wrote a detailed encyclopedia of Nahua culture that preserved vast amounts of knowledge about history, religion, philosophy, and daily life. They also recorded botanical and medical knowledge developed over centuries. Dictionaries, grammars, maps, and historical accounts emerged from this environment of intellectual collaboration.

Some of this work took place while the height of the epidemics raged outside the walls of the college and while many of the scholars’ own friends and relatives were dying.

I often return to this image: a group of scholars gathered around texts, conversations, translations, and ideas while the world around them seemed increasingly tense and uncertain.

What strikes me most about this story is not simply the resilience of those scholars. It is the fact that, in the midst of crisis, they believed that language, learning, and careful thought still mattered. They believed that preserving knowledge, recording memory, and sustaining conversation across difference were worthy endeavors even when the future seemed fraught.

And because they did, we can still hear their voices today.

The humanities often work this way. Their effects are rarely immediate. A poem does not solve a political crisis. A translation does not eliminate injustice. A historical study does not prevent catastrophe. Yet these forms of knowledge shape how people understand themselves, one another, and the worlds they inhabit. They preserve memory. They expand imagination. They make communication possible across distances of culture, language, and time.

An education in the humanities, then, is not a luxury reserved for stable times. It is precisely in moments of uncertainty that humanistic inquiry becomes most valuable.

The humanities teach us how to interpret the world when familiar frameworks fail. They teach us how to listen across differences, how to imagine other possibilities, and how to remain attentive to experiences beyond our own. They remind us to become comfortable with complexity.

This may sound obvious. Yet it is increasingly rare.

We live in a moment saturated with information but often starved for interpretation. We have access to more data than any previous generation, yet we continue to struggle with questions of meaning, responsibility, and purpose. We can generate anything we imagine at an astonishing speed, but we still need human beings capable of asking why certain things matter, whom they serve, and what kind of future they help create.

That is why I believe your education is so important.

You have spent years learning not only how to acquire knowledge but how to evaluate it. You have learned that translation is not simply the substitution of one word for another but an encounter between different ways of being in the world. You have learned that texts are not inert objects but living conversations that extend across centuries. You have learned that language shapes perception and that stories shape political realities. You have learned that culture is not an ornament added onto life but one of the ways human beings make sense of existence itself.

Perhaps most importantly, you have learned to listen.

To study another language is to accept that other people possess concepts, experiences, and forms of wisdom that cannot always be immediately translated into your own terms. It is an exercise in intellectual humility. It reminds us that the world is larger than our individual experiences and that learning requires patience.

The ability to listen carefully may prove to be one of the most valuable skills of your generation.

Wherever you go next, you will encounter people whose assumptions, histories, and values differ from your own. The habits you have cultivated here will help you navigate those encounters. They will help you ask better questions and build stronger communities.

Our world certainly needs more people willing to bring humanistic thinking into every sphere of life.

It needs people who can distinguish information from wisdom.

It needs people who can remember that efficiency is not the same thing as justice.

It needs people who can recognize that communication is not the same thing as understanding.

And it needs people who can imagine futures that are not determined solely by what is profitable, measurable, or immediately useful.

As graduates, you are entering a world that, like the one faced by the scholars of Tlatelolco nearly five centuries ago, is marked by profound transformation. The challenges are different, of course, but the uncertainty is real. New technologies are reshaping how we think, work, and create. Political institutions are under strain in many parts of the world. Questions about culture and responsibility continue to demand our attention.

My hope is that you carry forward what you have learned here; that your brilliant minds continue to be joined to your curiosity; that your independence of thought is matched by generosity of spirit; that you remain open to languages, histories, and experiences beyond your own; and that you never stop asking questions whose answers cannot be reduced to a spreadsheet, an algorithm, or a quarterly report.

Like the scholars of Tlatelolco, I hope you continue to believe that literature matters, that knowledge matters, and that thoughtful conversation across differences remains one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

Class of 2026, congratulations on your many accomplishments. We are proud of what you have done here, and we look forward to seeing what you will do next.

Thank you."