This is a focus on the shaping over time of disciplinary knowledge combined with a determined effort to connect other disciplines to the resources of literary knowledge.  Comparative Literature at Michigan is, moreover, one of the few centers in the country that includes scholars from the humanities more broadly and the social sciences among its faculty. Expertise in literature as a national institution includes Vassilios Lambropoulos; in critical histories of philology, Catherine Brown; in history of religion, Tomoko Masuzawa; in intellectual history of the East, David Porter; in history of the classical ideal and in sexology, urban societies, and the history of gender/sexuality, Gayle Rubin.