Our graduate students come from all over the world, fostering a close-knit and truly international atmosphere. They are funded through fellowships and teaching opportunities in both the comparative literature program, as well as teaching outside in national literature departments . In addition to taking courses offered by the program, our students are encouraged to work with other units across campus, including: the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, Media and Cinema Studies, the Medieval Studies Program, the Gender and Women's Studies Program, the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, and the Initiative in Holocaust and Memory Studies, among many others. Several of these programs also offer graduate certificates and minors.

The University of Illinois offers extensive support for graduate student research, through fellowships available to continuing students (the Humanities Research Institute, or HRI, for example, offers six fellowships in support of graduate students in the humanities each year, or the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, which offers fellowships to Cornell's prestigious summer School of Criticism and Theory), as well as the second largest public university library in the world. Both the HRI calendar of events and the Unit for Criticism calendar highlight the frequent conferences, panel discussions, reading groups, and other events of significant interest to graduate students in Comparative Literature.