SPRING 2026 Courses

Kate Turner

What is Gothic literature?Full of crumbling castles, buried secrets, unquiet ghosts, and unspeakable passions — in the Gothic,the bloody, the monstrous,and the romantic are often one and the same.

In this course, we will learn how to identify the Gothic and trace its influence on the modern-day genres it inspired — like science fiction, horror, and thepsychological thriller — across literature, film, and television from the nineteenthcentury to the present. In the process, we will investigate why these genres are so often linked to romance, from the ghostly lovers that haunt Emily Brontë’sWuthering Heights to the slippage between hunger and desire at the heart oftelevision shows like Hannibal and Yellowjackets. What does it mean to be transgressive?

Why are danger and darkness so persistently compelling? How is it that romance and violence are sooften indistinguishable from one another?

Over the course of the semester, we will explore how shifting cultural norms around race, sexuality, and gender shape what’s deemed monstrous, perverse, or forbidden. We’ll also think through how to understand concepts like desire, consent,erotics, and violence across different historical and cultural contexts.

Additional readings may include Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea, as well as films andtelevision including AMC’s Interview With the Vampire, Jonathan Demme’s TheSilence of the Lambs, Ridley Scott’s Alien, and Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw The TVGlow. These primary texts will be supplemented by a range of short fiction, poetry,essays, and literary criticism.

Assignments will include two papers (one 4-6 pages, one 5-8 pages). As a writing-focused course, there will be frequent opportunities for workshopping and revision. No prerequisites, no exams.

Joelle Troiano

In the United States, our most common idea of the devil is asSatan, “Lucifer,” the fallen angel/tempter, the rebel against God. But how do we actually picture our encounter withThe Bad Guy himself, and where do these images and assumptions come from? In this class, we will follow the literary appearances of the devil from seventeenth century poetry through contemporary television. Over this time, thefigure of the devil in America has mutated through a number of forms: the smooth-talking deal maker, the misshapen goat-man, the disguised seductress, the dark figure of ambiguous intent.

We will be considering works ranging from popular music (Robert Johnson, The Rolling Stones, Rainbow Kitten Surprise), to classic and contemporary literature (stories by Hawthorne, Twain, and O’Connor; novels like Rosemary’s Baby); from film, to musical theater, to the epic poem.Ultimately, these texts will allow us to face such questions as what distinguishes an angel from a devil, how we understand the relationship between death and the demonic,and what a culture’s representations of supernatural evil canteach us about its assumptions regarding the good. Studyingour range of American devils, we will see that they aregendered and racialized differently, that they are feareddifferently, and that they emblematize distinct anxieties within the American imaginary.

Though we will be doing a fair amount of reading,watching, and listening in this class, we will also be sharpening our skills for observation and analysis throughour writing. There will be no exams in this course; instead, assessments will include four informal responses to course material (1-2 pages), one mid-term essay (3-5 pages), and one final project (a 6-8 page essay or combination analytical-creative piece). Both major assignments will be broken down into multiple steps, with significant instructional time given to working through them. No prerequisites.

Dray Denson

Days after choosing immortality, Interview with the Vampire’s Louis de Pointe du Lac, a Black Creole gay man in 1910s New Orleans, raises hell: he embraces his queerness by using bolder fashions and sharper words; he bans white people from his prominent saloon to provoke Jim Crowist city officials, and for dessert, Louis murders a racist city councilman who plotted his demise. Despite the immortal coil—losing his human family, battling sun and insatiable hunger—one fact remains clear: in nocturnal New Orleans, Louis owns the night.

How do Black vampire narratives deepen our understanding of horror, radicalism/resistance, and queerness? In which ways do Black vampire narratives respond to systemic antiblackness, desirability politics, capitalism, and other forms of social violence? How do Black vampire narratives embrace or reject vampirism and what vampirism can symbolize? This course explores the figure of the Black vampire and Black cultural engagement with vampirism in fiction. The Black vampire is a rich and multidimensional pop culture phenomenon thatcomments on systems of oppression and challenges respectability politics and heteronormativity. This myth pushes us to consider thecomplexities of grief, social exile and hypervisibility, and the concept and consequences of immortality. Ultimately, this course will develop students’ abilities to critically assess and create monstrous allegories that depict and/or dismantle systems of oppression.

Media explored in this course will center Black writers, performers, and cultural workers and their experimental works, historical fiction, film,and literature about Black vampirism and immortality. Novels may include Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories and Octavia Butler’s Mindof My Mind, and films like Ganja and Hess, Sinners and the seriesadaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. We will engage this media alongside analytical/theoretical texts like Zakiyyah Jackson’s Becoming Human, La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind, Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, and Simone Browne’s Dark Matters. Assignments include weekly discussion posts, two essays (5-7pg), and a final essay or short story (8-10pg). No exams.

Thomas Pfau

In Book 8 of The Republic, Plato analyzes why, almost inevitably, democracy will sooner or later expire in tyranny. 2,500 years later, the twentieth century once again proved him right as the fledgling democracies of Western and Central Europe, established in the aftermath ofWW I, collapsed intoautocracy and totalitarianstates. With the United States currently poised to follow this trajectory, it is worthwhile forus to examine autocracy and tyranny: 1) how totalitarianism comes into being; 2) how it legitimates itself; 3) what social, cultural and emotional damage autocracy and tyranny inflict on individuals and communities; 4) and what moral demands (and guilt) such systems place on their citizens.

Our best resources for understanding the specter of totalitarianism are often found in creative works – prose fiction, poetry, and film –and in the political and sociological analyses produced by people caught up in totalitarian societies. Cumulatively, these works will not only provide us with a “thick description” of the terrifying reality of totalitarianism; they will also help us perceive and analyze the material practices and changing habits of speech whereby a liberal-democratic society can be swiftly transformed into its opposite. Among the issues that will occupy us throughout this seminar are the following. How autocratic and totalitarian structures … 1) erode the trustworthiness of everyday language and practices on which civil society rests; 2) single out and depict specific groups (the press, minorities, intellectuals) as enemies of the state and suspending notions of civility and tolerance; 3) institute a permanent state of “exception” justified by various threats, both internal and external, real and imaginary; 4) magnify such “crises” so as to induce a moment of shock that “enables an eternity of submission” (Snyder); 5) coerce and/or coopt state and publicinstitutions (educational, regulatory, judicial, police); 6) erase the boundary between private and public life while simultaneously shrouding the actions of the state and its bureaucracy in secrecy; 7) secure “buy-in” from the general populace through coercion,intimidation, and manipulation; 8) inundate its citizenry with a deluge of “breaking news” while short-circuiting any attempt at fact-based, in-depth analysis and, thus, turn truth into something “oracular rather than factual” (T. Snyder), that is, into a function of constantly repeated assertion from above impossible to verify or falsify.

The principal texts andfilms that we’ll explore include Orwell, 1984; Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind; Viktor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich (selections); HannahArendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (selections); Arhur Koestler, Darkness at Noon; as well as poems byA. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam, Czesław Miłosz, and various short essays. – We will also bescreening the followingfilms outside of class in the evening (dinner will be catered for those occasions): Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will (1935; selections);Andrzej Wajda, Ashes & Diamonds (1958); Bernardo Bertolucci, The Conformist (1970); Nikolai Mikhalkov, Burnt by the Sun (1994); and Florian von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others (2006).

Requirements: This will be a reading-intensive course; if you enjoy reading a wide variety of genres and have an interest in literature and history, our seminar will offer you a rich array of materials to explore. – Now that the genius malignus of AI is definitely out of the bottle, writing regular seminar papers will be replaced by the following:1) a 20-min. in-class presentation of a work noton the syllabus (details to follow), with a carefully prepared handout and based on some research; 2) a handwritten midterm exam; and 3) a handwritten final exam; and 4) active participationin discussion throughoutthe term. Each component will account for 25% of the total grade.

Tom Ferraro

A Seminar for Sophomores and Other Newcomers to English

Our age has lost much of its ear for poetry, as it has its eye for color and line,and its taste for war and worship, wine and women.                                                             —Henry Adams (1904)

Why read when there is so much else to do? What is there in a novel, a poem, an essay to hold our imagination captive? to make us smarter, wiser, moreartful and more courageous? to bring us closer to eachother, to the world at large, to the wonder and the terror and the majesty? How are we to know "it" when we see it; get there when we're not; speak of it when we are?And how are we to take the next step--to the point where bearing witness

becomes a form of making present? embodying, a form of propagating? critical analysis, a form ofcollective self-interrogation?

These questions are the biggies--the overarching, meta-issues of deeply engaged, bloody demanding, fiercely intelligent, achingly beautiful reading.

Nice to contemplate, for sure. But, speaking practically, how to begin?

I will gather for us some of the best stuff I know, American Romantic texts especially, treating matters of nearly universal interest: those matters of “war and worship, wine and (wo)men and work,” to expand pointedly on Henry Adams’s 1904 alliterative litany.The kind of texts worth reading again and again. We will take character to heart, query idea and plot, describe the sound and sight and feel of the language. We'll ask each text to tutor us on how it wishes, in particular, to be read. And we'll work methodically on our game: 1) reading aloud, to catch the tone and the drama of the words on the page, even in expository prose, experiencing form ascontent; 2) cross-interrogating between part and whole, whole and part (a given phrase vs. its sentence or paragraph, a given passage vs. the text, the text-at-hand vs. the texts-so-far); and 3) cultivating self-reflexivity, in which what is going on in a text is seen to be at stake in how, separately and together, we discuss it. The ultimate goal is to be able to inhabit a text in its own terms, so intimately that it lives in us; to analyze it so cogently that it, in effect, analyzes us. 

An introduction, in sum, to the pleasurizing intensities of sustained reading during the age of cyber-immediacy and virtual contact: the visceral texture it offers, the analytic trenchancy (including capacity for contradiction) it demands, the repartee it solicits, the essaying that honors it, and the kinship of word and thought it ultimately inspirits.

TEXTS TO BE DRAWN FROM: Poetry by Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Langston Hughes; fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Willa Cather, Jeanette Winterson, and Mohsin Hamid; and art-essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Michael Herr, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Richard Rodriguez.

And, finally, for the record:Around our seminar table, expressive quietwillsupplementanalyticalacumen;writingassignmentswill be short and guided yet informal and exploratory; and grading (which it is time to re-inventor abandon altogether) will be effort- friendly, alert to varying strengths, and happily inflated.

Tim Heimlich

When was the concept of Nature invented, and why? Has it outlived its usefulness? What is the fate of Nature in an era of anthropogenic climate change and ecocide? In this course, we will explore how revolutions in agriculture and industry transformed attitudes towards natural landscapes and resources. Inthe process, wewill investigatehow literatureitself mutated in tandem with large-scale re-shapings of the natural world. Finally, we will track how Nature became a privileged subject matter within the tradition of

lyric poetry in particular. We will also consult a small number of recent ecocritical works,thinking about what it means to read with the environment in mind. As a 101 course, this class will also serve as an introduction to the methods and preoccupations of literary studies more generally.

The syllabus covers a large historical period, spanning the Book of Genesis to late twentieth-century poetry. Authors consulted will include: Virgil, Andrew Marvell, Anne Finch, Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, Oliver Goldsmith, George Crabbe, William Blake, William Wordsworth,Charlo te Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Percy Shelley, John Keats, John Clare, Lord Tennyson, Toru Dutt, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Aldo Leopold, Lorine Niedecker, and Seamus Heaney.

Except in cases where demonstrable medical need exists, screens are not allowed in the classroom. Course requirements include a close reading assignment, two short essays, and regular participation in weekly written and spoken discussion.

Akhil Sharma

This course teaches the fundamentals of narrative and character building. We begin with watching movies such as Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow where timerecurs. We will havean important movieproducer andscreenwriter visit ourclass. We will thenfocus on creative nonfiction, especiallythe profile. Here too we will meet with practitioners. Finally, we will learn aboutfiction.

The goal of theclass is to teachyou to learn about genres andconventions and to expose you to the actual practice of craft. Finally, you will learn how to edit your own writing and see where it is going well and where it could improve.

Faulkner Fox

This course gives students an opportunity to explore and practice four genres of creative writing: creative nonfiction, fiction, drama, and poetry. Partof each class will be devoted to discussion of student work; part totalking about writingcraft and the writing life; and part to close reading of published personal essays, stories,plays, and poems. There will be weekly writing assignments, a midterm and a final exam. Students will also submit a final portfolio of creative work.

Faulkner Fox

This course gives students an opportunity to explore and practice four genres of creative writing: creative nonfiction, fiction, drama, and poetry. Partof each class will be devoted to discussion of student work; part totalking about writingcraft and the writing life; and part to close reading of published personal essays, stories,plays, and poems. There will be weekly writing assignments, a midterm and a final exam. Students will also submit a final portfolio of creative work.

Camille Bordas

Open to students with little or no previous experience in creative writing, this class will help participants gain control over their sentences and paragraphs, with the objective of producing more thoroughly surprising/heartbreaking/hilarious/original/undeniable pieces of writing. The class will focus on two genres: fiction and nonfiction, more specifically the short story and memoir writing. It will mostly be devoted to workshop (discussing the students’ own pieces), but also to the close reading of published material. By discussing strategies that published authors have adopted when it comes to point of view, pacing, description, action, etc., students will start developing a sense of their aesthetic preferences. By submitting writing of their own to workshop, they will in turn discover their own strengths as writers, and get the ultimate reward: to write the piece that only they could’ve written. Each student will turn in at least a piece of their own writing in the course of the semester. Participation in class discussion is mandatory. In-class exercises will likely occur.

Allison Neal

How did modernist writers use gender to reimagine what shaped literature could take? And how did these literary experiments seek to intervene in contemporary debates about gender and sexuality? Theorists of modernism have long shown how masculine high modernism made feminized mass culture its other. For many years, literary scholars and theorists have sought to recapture the importance of women writers, writers of color, and queerwriters toAnglo-American modernism. Yet, despite these efforts, modernism is still often taught as a predominantly male phenomenon, centering writers like James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. In this course, we will examine a variety ofAnglo- American poetry and prose by authors includingVirginiaWoolf, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Claude McKay, Djuna Barnes, and Jean Rhys,exploring howtwentieth-century writers captured gendered bodily experience in literary form. We’ll consider these texts alongside their social and political context, and try our hand at our own literary experiments and close readings.

Yeonwoo Koo

Media technologies like the page, screen, and smartphone are exploding and changing the ways we fundamentally read literature.How did writtenliterature adapt and update itselfwhen new kinds of media entered the picture? Did the page fall silent after the invention of sound recording? Did literary genres like the novel become “new” once more by incorporating cinematic techniques and internet scrolling formats? What happens to storytelling when texts become multi-sensory, multi-platform, and media-aware?

This course explores how literature historically interacted and evolved with newmedia, includingthe phonograph,radio, television, and now digital and social media. Discussions will include the role of the phonograph in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the telegraph in Henry James’s In the Cage, and the language of television in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. We will investigate how online media shapes writing and reading practices through Xu Bing’semoji experiment in Book From the Ground, and the rising phenomenon of Bookstagrams and BookToks.

To grasp how new media brings a different paradigm of perception on the page, this course will be multi-medial in its approach. We will close-read texts, experiment with different media to conduct our analyses, create our own bookish forms in class, and visit the Rubenstein Library’s archives.Assignments include two short essays (2-3 pages), one creative activity, and a final project (6-8 pages). No prerequisites, no exams.

Cathy Shuman

Experimenting with creative nonfiction style, tone, and structure, in this class we will explore the challenges and opportunities offered by the genre of flash nonfiction (very short personalessays). Over the course of the semester each student will gather material for, draft, workshop, revise, and polish a series of six flash nonfiction pieces of approximately 600-800 words each, using a variety ofapproaches. Alongthe way, in-classwriting exercisesand published examples of flash nonfiction will provide inspiration and ideas. No previous creative writing coursework is required for this course.

Will Brewbaker

“Poetry makesnothing happen,”wrote W.H. Auden in1940. Just a few lineslater, though, he revises this dour pronouncement: poetry is “a way of happening, a mouth.” In Auden’s telling,poems don’t makeother things happen; they are what happens. In the words of the critic Jonathan Culler: “Nothing need happen in the poem because the poem is to be itself the happening.” In this class, we will consider what it means for a poem tohappen as we learn to write our own poems. How do we make our poems come alive?What techniques can we deploy to charge our own language with that sense of “happening”?

While writing poetry will be the primary focus of this course, we will also read widely across the richtradition of poetry aswe learn different forms, techniques, and skills from poets both living and dead. Though primarily a workshop, this class will proceed through several modes: the group workshop, the mini- workshop, individual meetings, prompted writing, in-class writing, and group discussion of shared texts. The final project for each student will be a creative portfolio that represents each student’s writing process—and progress—over the course of the semester. No exams or quizzes will be given.

Akhil Sharma

This course uses imitation to teach an awareness of style and technique. We will readTolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov and try to imitate them. We will learn what are the unspoken understandings that allow fictiontoappear“real”.Thegoaloftheclass is to educate you about your own sensibility and talent.

Adam Levin

By seriously examining and critiquing fiction written by others (i.e. measuring and helping advance the success of a work according to its author’s intentions), writers not only develop a greater capacity to strengthen their own fiction, but a clearer understanding of their own literary values. In this workshop, students will hand in two stories forcritique, and will closely read and critique stories by their classmates. Our class will be entirely discussion-based. Focusing primarily on style and structure, we’ll each make it our goal to help others improve their fiction through line-edits and in-class conversation, in accordance with the authors' perceived intentions. Additionally,we will read some work bypublished authors, and reverse-engineer it to determine the ways in which it functions. In-class generative exercises may occasionally be assigned.

Cathy Shuman

How do you craft a self through writing? The semester will be spent exploring approaches to autobiographical writing, as students write preliminary drafts/exercises that will lead through workshops and revision to the production of three autobiographicalessays. As we consider topics such as childhood and memory, the people, places, and things that make up our present selves, and the stories that have shaped our lives, we will read selected examples of published memoir and personal essay that will help us develop techniques for creating our own.No previous creative writing coursework is required for this course.

Victor Strandberg

After a brief look at thePuritanheritage, English 269 will take up major works by majorAmerican authors in the generation leading up to the Civil War -- the time of the Transcendentalist movement.

The syllabus will include essays and poems by Emerson; Thoreau's Walden and Civil Disobedience; tales, poems and essays by Poe; tales and a novel (TheBlithedale Romance or The Scarletletter) by Hawthorne; Melville's Moby-Dick and Billy Budd; many poems by Emily Dickinson, and a generous selection of poems by WaltWhitman. Backgroundreading willinclude aslavenarrative byFrederickDouglass or Harriet Jacobs and numerous handouts provided by the instructor.

Requirements: Three hour exams (no three-hour final exam). One term paper focusing on one or more of the writers in the course.

Victor Strandberg

If you are quite certain that you plan to stay in this course, it would be an advantage for you to obtain the textbooks before the term begins.Accordingly, I am sharing with you my decisions concerning the curriculum.A more detailed syllabus will be provided when we meet at our first class.

The first thing to do is to get hold of a Bible. Any version will do, though I favor the King James version, originally published in 1611, because of its immense influence on writers in English during the last four centuries.(Examples: Faulkner’s Absalom,

Absalom!, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and Steinbeck’s The Grapes ofWrath—titles drawn from the KJ Bible.) Hint: this Bible is

often available for free in any hotel room.

I am planning to begin the course with a series of assignments in whateverversion of the Bible you bring to class, including Genesis,

Exodus, The Book of Job, The Gospel of Luke, The Book of Revelation, andassorted brief selections along the way.

To save money, I am asking students to purchase the following books viaAmazon.com (Amazon Books) or other such sites online. It is greatly desirable that we all have the same editions. The list:

1. The Bhagavad-Gita (Signet Classics edition, Introduction by AldousHuxley)
2. Dante: The Inferno (Signet Classics edition, translated by John Ciardi)
3. Shakespeare: Othello (Signet Classics edition, edited by Alvin Kernan)
4. Greek Drama: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes (BantamClassic, edited by Moses Hadas)
5. Montaigne: Essays (Penguin Classics, translated by J. M. Cohen)

In addition to Dante's Inferno, two stories by Chaucer will represent theMiddle Ages: The Prioress's Tale and The Pardoner's Tale. To save money, I plan to download these tales from the Internet and distribute paper copies to each student.

If it all works out, we will study works from three ancient civilizations (Greek, Hebrew, Hindu), two medieval masters from Italy and England (Chaucer, Dante), and two giants of the French and English Renaissance (Montaigne and Shakespeare).                                                                                                                                                                I am planning to have three exams and one or two term papers. There will be no three-hour final exam.

Richard So

How can data science change the way we understand literature, media, and culture? This course introduces computational and statistical methods for cultural analysis, with no prior coding experience required. Students will learn the basics of Python programming and apply text‐mining tools to explore poems, novels, television shows, and online culture. Alongside hands‐on practice, we’ll read critical and theoretical work on algorithms, AI, and the digital humanities to ask how computation reshapes our study of race, gender, form, and representation.

Topics may includemodernist poetry andaesthetic form, thecontemporary novel and narrative, and social media discourse. Readings will feature scholars such as Safiya Noble, Wendy Chun, Alan Liu, Ted Underwood, Andrew Piper, and Lauren Klein.

Evaluation: approximatelyeight coding problem sets,weekly readings, and classparticipation.

No programming or statistics background required—just curiosity about how computation can illuminate cultural life.

Marguerite Nguyen

As the number of refugees around the world continues to climb, the need to confront refugee issues in nuanced ways has become increasingly important. This course introduces students to critical refugee studies, a field that focuses on understanding the cultures and histories of forcibly displaced populations andprioritizes refugee perspectives.Students will engage with a range of literary and theoretical works to consider the complex ways forcibly displaced populations have been represented as well as how they represent themselves. While mainstream media often depicts refugees as passive objects in need of humanitarian rescue and aid, a critical refugee studies lens encourages us to situate refugees historically and approach them as active, creative shapers of the world around them. Students will also have the opportunity to explore personal histories of refugeehood or under-studied examples of refugee literature within broader categories of local and global culture.

Theoretical readings will span the early-twentieth century onward, while literary investigations will focus on more contemporary works. Writers we will study may include GiorgioAgamben, Hannah Arendt,Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Mohsin Hamid, Dina Nayeri, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Ocean Vuong. Their writings cross the Americas, Asia, Europe, and speculative worlds, and they show how refugee hood has long been central to comprehending contexts of war, colonialism, and political-environmental upheaval.

Assignments such as creative activities, a presentation, two analytical essays (5-7 pages), and a longer final essay or creative-critical project will help students gain fluency with key ideas in critical refugee studies and how they apply to artistic works and current refugee situations.

Chris Ouma

Africa is not a country. There is not a 'single story' about Africa. A novel is a world. This course seeks to pursue the ways in which a contemporary generation of African writers produce a varied and complex imagination of Africa to the world. The course selects a diverse cohort of African novelists and short story writers to give students a multi-dimensional 'handle' on Africa. ForegroundingChimamanda Ngozi Adichie, wewill read her alongside hercontemporaries from East, Central and Southern Africa, including Binyavanga Wainaina, ImboloMbue, Yewande Omotoso and others. The course seeks to expose students to as many of this ‘new’generation of African writers as possible. It seeks to offer an expansive reading experience in which we will immerse ourselves in their novels and short story collections, with the view to deepen our understanding of how contemporary Africans navigate through representations of a continent overdetermined by the legacies of colonialism. From Binyavanga Wainaina’s famous satirical piece ‘How to Write aboutAfrica’ and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, to Noviolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, this generation of African writers are taking on some of the most exciting but also challenging facets of what it means to be African in our contemporary world today. The narrative geographies of this course move across the African continent:from Cape Town, South Africa, Harare and Bulawayo in Zimbabwe into Nairobi in East Africa, Lagos and Accra in Nigeria and Ghana, across the Atlantic (and many times back to Africa) to multiple cities in the US then occasionally across the ‘pond’ to London, the United Kingdom. The ultimate objective is to allow our imagination of Africa to soar alongside these writers, in a manner that will enrich and generatively influence what we imagine Africa to be. Assignments will include occasional short writing assignments, a short mid-term paper (4-6 pages) and a final term paper (6-8 pages).

Sarah Beckwith

Shakespeare’s astonishingly experimental romance The Winter’s Tale has sponsored a fascinating series of literary, philosophical and cinematic reflections. This seminar examines the afterlives of The Winter’s Tale as “the book of second chances”. We will examine together thewinter’s tales of JaneAusten (Persuasion), George Eliot (Daniel Deronda), Eric Rohmer (Contes d’Hiver), KateAtkninson’s Life after Life, Almodovar’sVolver and Talk to Her, as well as the stunning films of the Dardennes brothers (The Child,The Son). None of these works are adaptations of Shakespeare; rather they are meditations on the themes of reconciliation, romance, time, wonder, childhood and change, (re)-marriage, and the power and possibilities of art that his play sponsors orinitiates. What narrative possibilities are engendered by The Winter’s Tale? How do such possibilities morph across the philosophical forms of novel and film? And what thoughts do such works sponsor for thinking about the relation between ethics and the arts?

This seminar will grant us theopportunity for a long and lovinglook at

Shakespeare's greatest play, and anever deepening encounter with it inthe work of

a fascinating range of novelists andfilm-makers.

Katherine Carithers

While we often think of the Victorians as prim and proper, they were obsessed with bodies: how they work; how they think, feel, and want; and how to contain them. This course studies how authors and artists in the Victorian era (1837 – 1901)imagined, understood, and fantasized about thebody as alternatingly strange and beautiful, monstrous and desirable, obscene and divine.Reading widely across Victorian poetry, Realism, Gothicism, sci-fi, and horror, we’ll examine how historical conditions (imperialism, industrialization, health epidemics, etc.) and new scientific theories (of evolution, geological deep time, the psyche, etc.) shaped Victorian literary imaginations. To study the afterlives of those ideas, we’ll turn to depictions of “Victorian- ness” in media today, such as Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things or Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak. Including supplementary readings from critical theory, contemporary gender and sexuality studies, andpostcolonial studies, this course focuses onVictorian literary and cultural writings to askquestions like: What is a body? How are bodies classified or valued; eroticized, racialized, and gendered? What makes a body “human” or “non-human”? And how might Victorian literature help us imagine the body anew?

Primary texts will include fiction by the Brontë sisters and Charles Dickens as well as novels like Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, andH.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau. Non-fiction texts will include excerpts by scientific and political thinkers like Charles Darwin and John Stuart Mill as well as the autobiography of Crimean War nurse and business-owner Mary Seacole, which details her experiences as a Black woman navigating Victorian Britian.

No exams, no prereqs. Students will develop their analysis via readings, discussion, and collaborative workshops. Assignments include short blog posts, two argument-based essays (3-4 pages), and a final paper or project.

Allison Neal

How can we best listen to literature? How is literature like or unlike a conversation, a piece of music, or the cacophony of a city street? This course will examine an arrayof twentieth-centurypoetry and prose inorder to probe theways that we mightlisten to a text in an age of mass culture. It will examine how various modern sound media—the radio, the telephone, the phonograph—affect how texts envision their audience, questioning the extent to which we might connect literature, sound, technology, and orality. Finally,we’ll listen to a variety of twentieth-century music, exploring howliterature succeeds and fails to capture sound in writing.

Texts read: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, James Weldon Johnson; Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf; Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison; Krapps's Last Tape,Samuel Beckett. Wewill read essays onsound and orality bycritics like Jacques Attali and Theodor Adorno and sound studies scholars like Jonathan Sterne, Lisa Gittelman, Alexander Weheliye, and Jennifer Stoever. We will also read a large body of twentieth-century American poetry, by Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, W.H. Auden, Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara, and Robert Creeley, among others

This course counts either as Area III or CTM for majors.

Sarah Beckwith

This course is an invitation to say what you mean, and mean what you say in your writing. Over the course of the term you will write a substantial piece of writing about something you care about in this CREATIVE WRITING non-fiction course.                                                               But please do clear your mind of the fiveparagraph essay structure. Clear your mind of the use of the essay to judge you throughout your schooling thus far!

Consider the essay as the best opportunity to find out what you really think about something and to trust and educate your own experience, to bring to bear the full force of your mind onsomething that fascinates you. (Yourexperience is at the root of an essay, but youhave to educate that experience too, andarticulate it. That is the essay).

Samuel Johnson described the essay as a “loose salley of the mind; an irregular, indigested piece, not a regular, orderly performance.” Although the origin of the essay is an interesting subject of debate, most accounts credit Michel de Montaigne’sbrilliant and innovative “Essais” (1580) withusing experience as a crucial test andtouchstone, developing and followingcuriosity unsystematically over aspects of the world illuminated by the mind that attendedto self and world at once. An essay charts afree mind at play, as one of its bestpractitioners, Cynthia Ozick, says. It is a form that depends on and cultivates attention, anart of noticing. Essayists may treat anything of interest to them and make it interesting to others, --from thumbs, to the death of a moth,to re-reading D.H. Lawrence, to the illumination of an experience through writing—the pleasure of a first book, a traumatic event, a reverie, an encounter, a person whose influence you are only just alive to, a painting or a poem you can’t get out of your mind, a meditation on the form itself. Essays are as singular as the authors that write them when they have given due attention to their own singularity.

In this class we contemplate the marvelous and capacious form of the essay in its best manifestations. And we will practice writingessays, culminating in the production of one substantial essayistic piece of writing or two shorter pieces.

We will track writers on a variety of topics that the best essayists have illuminated--C. L. R. James on cricket, David Foster Wallace ontennis, Rachel Carson on the sea, Lydia Davison the art of note-taking and translation, Elizabeth Hardwick on Billie Holiday, Raimond Gaita on justice and hope, James Baldwin’s Stranger in the Village, NataliaGinzberg’s astonishing “The Little Virtues”, George Orwell, Joan Didion, and Deborah Levy on Why I Write, Michel de Montaigne on Experience. Students will begin to get a sense of the logic and possibilities of essay writing by looking at the work of some of its most innovative, inquiring, and stylish practitioners.

Over the course of the term students will light on a topic of interest to them, research, and write it. We will be using some of our time in class to workshop your writing as itdevelops in sections, paragraphs and excerpts. By the end of term your writing will amount to a long-ish essay or a couple of shorter essays. We will also study intricately and intimately the vagaries of the form and its possibilities and constraints. 

Mesha Maren

Have you ever felt your mind reaching beyond what can be known and into the private corners of your own selfhood or the cobwebbed attics of history? In this class we will let ourselves go there fully. We will read and examine texts that dance across the lines of fact and fiction, novel and documentary (books such as When WeCease to Understandthe World, Going through Slaughter, But Beautiful, In the Lake of the Woods, In Cold Blood, etc.) and we will create our own liminal narratives. This class may be particularly appealing to students who have an interest in autofiction or a general interest in breaking down the dividing lines between literary genres.

Amin Ahmad

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.” – Stephen King on writing a

novel.

Have you thought about writing a novel, but been scared of doing it?

Are you interested inlearning long-formstorytelling, but not sure where to start? Writing a novel seems like a daunting task, but it is a craft that can be learned.

In this class, we will learnhow novelistic techniques differ from short stories.We will discuss the importance of beginnings and endings—and how to keep the reader engaged for 300-400 pages. We will learn all this by reading novel excerpts, but also by reading entire novellas (short novels), learning from them the intricate structures of storytelling. We will also discuss the impact of movies on long-form storytelling and incorporate screenwriting techniques into our work. Students will leave the class with at least 3 chapters of a novel and a full plot outline.

Class will include visits by bestselling publishedwriters who will discuss their writing process and their publishing journeys. This is an intensive class. Come prepared to read a lot, write a lot and expand your storytelling skills!

Faulkner Fox

In his seminal book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James notes that one of the distinguishing characteristics of mystical experience is that it “defies expression; that no adequate report of its content can be given in words.” At the same time, most creative writers agree that good writing is necessarily concrete, rich with clear examples and description. How then is it possible to construct a well-writtenaccount of one’s mystical experiences, one’s spiritual journey? This question will form the central focus of our explorations this semester.

Students will read personal spiritualnarratives from a wide range of traditions, respond to them in discussion and writing, and construct their own spiritual autobiographies. Authors studied will include Mary Oliver, Barry Lopez, Sara Maitland, St. Augustine, Marjane Satrapi, Lucille Clifton, andbell hooks. Students will also do close observation at a spiritual event of their choosing on or off campus and write about this experience.

In class, our time will be devoted to discussion of student work, exploration of writing craft and the spiritual and writing life, and close reading of published spiritual narratives.

Joseph Donahue

The goal of the course is to deepen students’engagement with the history and practice of poetic art in the twentieth and twenty first century. Reading assignments will be drawn from the canon of post WWII avant-guarde poetry and literary art. Lectures will provide an historical and cultural context for the works we are reading, and about the controversies and challenges that inform the poetics of the late nineteen forties to the present. The course proceeds from the premise that a deeply internalized command of literary history is critical to thedevelopment of any serious writer. Students will be expected to read closely, to acquire anoverall grasp ofmodernism and itsdevelopment into whatis now called the postmodern, and above all to participate in discussions. Further, students will beexpected to investigateon their own initiativethe texts towardswhich their own writing leads them. In class and out of class we will explore the possibilities for contemporary poetic practice suggested by earlier works. We will look at a wide range ofpoems with attention to both how they are made and to the personal urgency that makes the poem more than an exercise, that creates surprise orsorrow or exhilaration in the reader. Our main focus will be on writing poems, or creating letter-based artworks, and on developing both a critical and a generous approach to each other’s work.

Camille Bordas

In this class, we will discuss fiction at length: what makes a voice compelling, what makes a piece unique, what narrative strategies published authors have employed to keep us interested/make us think/laugh/break our hearts.

By discussing a wide array of notions such as point of view, pacing, transition, omission, etc., students will develop a sense of their aesthetic preferences. By submitting writing oftheir own to workshop,they will in turn get adeeper sense of their own strengths as writers. Each student will turn in two pieces of their own fiction writing over the course of the semester. Participation in class discussion is mandatory. In-class exercises will likely occur.

Pre-requisite: English 110S or 210S or consent of the instructor.

David Aers

Why would anyone want to spend a whole semester studying John Milton’s writings and their seventeenth-century contexts? The answeris the extraordinary scope and utterly brilliant quality of the writing inoften very demanding but exquisite poetry as well as in passionateprose. This scope includes explorations in ethics, politics and theologyon topics that should still be of central concern to us. In my view thepoetry often opens us to strange spheres of existence, making oftenprovocative claims on us and perhaps making the world seem verydifferent. At some points we will have to reflect on how, just like ourselves, Milton’s views were informed by deformations in his own social and cultural world, ones to which he contributed with immense confidence.

John Milton left Cambridge as an orthodox member of the Church ofEngland. He died (in 1674) as one who had rejected this church, defended the execution of its governor (Charles I), worked asSecretary for Foreign Tongues and propagandist for revolutionary regimes from 1649 to 1658 while composing a theological system which included a dense cluster of positions which were startl ingly “heretical” in terms not only of the magisterial Reformation but alsoof Catholic traditions. Poetry, politics and theology are inextricablybound together in Milton’s work. In this course we will read the great post-revolution poems written in blindness and political defeat(Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes), a little of the pre-revolutionary poetry and substantial work from his writings on divorce, freedom of publication and speech (Areopagetica), politics and ethics during the revolution (1641-1660).

We will study enough of his extraordinary writings to understand his views about human life as they unfoldedduring the revolution, his extremely troubled first marriage, his blindness (total by 1652) his devastating politicaldefeat (this involved him going into hiding and a brief imprisonment) and his life under the restored monarchywith a state church extremely hostile to nonconformists, especially Quakers and Baptists. We humans arethoroughly embodied intelligences with often thoroughly damaged and damaging histories of sin and suffering.Not many of us here will have lived through anything like the civil wars, the political revol ution and violence inwhich Milton was a committed participant. What are the distinctively Miltonic forms for addressing theseconflicts and what are the forms of life he hoped would emerge from them? In his unfinished Latin theology onChristian Doctrine he wrote: “If I were to say that I had focused my studies principally upon Christian doctrinebecause nothing else can so eff ectually wipe away those two repulsive afflictions, tyranny and superstition, fromhuman life and the human mind, I should show that I had been concerned not for religion but for life’s well being.” Not surprisingly then, his work across a remarkable range of genres continually calls us to addresssubstantial life questions. While we will seek to grasp differences between the seventeenth century and our owncontexts, we will also think about continuities in these questions. Milton’s often complex writing does demandthat we cultivate habits of patient, close reading, patient attention. These habits do indeed go against the grain ofmuch in contemporary west ern culture. But, so I believe, they are an essential part of exploring the substantial life questions he explores with such passion and with which to engage.

The set texts for this course (required) is The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton e.d. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich and Stephen M. Fallon (The Modern Library). This anthology includes thought prefaces for each text, which include helpful historical information, and notes on each page, giving readers help with language and historicalallusions. Participants in this class should make full use of the anthology and, I hope. Read beyond the text we study in seminars.

Because we are reading substantial, complex works, the more Milton you read before class the better; but before the first class please read (at least) the following with careful attention: (1) Ad Patrem (To his father) pp. 220-224, contains English translation of the latin poem; (2)Lycidas, pp. 99-110; (3) A poem of the death of the closest friend Milton ever had, Charles Diodati: Epitaphium Damonis/Epitaph for Damon, pp. 232-243. With this poem read the poetry and prose between Milton and Diodati on pp. 172-175, 190-193, 767-768.

In my view, the best of the many biographies of Milton which will also introduce some relevant aspects of his culture is John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought by Gordon Campbelland Thomas Corns. A lovely introduction to the seventeenth century revolution in which Milton became immersed is by Michael Braddick: God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A NewHistory of the English Civil Wars. The best resource for the period is Austin Woolrych’sBritain in Revolution, 1625-1660, especially parts 3-6.

Note on grades, class format, and expectations

This is a seminar and attendance/participation is mandatory. Unwarranted absences will result in failing the course. The grade comes from two essays (8- 10 pages), which must be submitted by the given deadline to count. There will be no exams.

Please also note well: laptops and other electronic devices are not to be used in class. Aseminar is a dialogic form of learning, very different to a lecture class. In my experience, laptops act as an impediment to the kinds of attention and communication I consider essential to a flourishing seminar. Also, since we will have more than enough to chew on already, please refrain from eating during class. Uses of all forms of AI should be acknowledged in footnotes to essays.

Dominika Baran

Language reflects, enacts, reproduces, and challenges sociocultural identities and ideas surrounding gender and sexuality. This course explores these relationships from the perspective of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, including seminal theories and studies, and most work at the forefront ofthe field, and emphasizing work by scholars representing racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, and different national and linguistic backgrounds.Class material will include academic texts, andexamples from media and everyday life. Students will have the opportunity to suggest topics to explore and to lead class discussion.

Thomas Ferraro

Those American high-schoolA.P. classics of the 1920s and ‘30s, revisited: Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hurston’sTheir Eyes Were WatchingGod, and Hemingway’s TheSun Also Rises, at the least.Whether you are reading these novels for the very first or the upteenth time, you will discover how entertaining (because smart) and dangerous

(because smart) they truly are, even when dead white guys are involved (don’t worry, the novels arenever just about the anglos!).

By re-visiting these novels, I mean listening better, witnessing the dramas to the point of inhabiting them, and pondering the whole more capaciously. But that’s not as hard as it sounds: for this “call” Back-to-the-Classics is issued by the inventive gender play, race-and-class savviness, and cross-media-dexterity of our 2025 moment. Indeed, the underlying proposition of Gatsby’s Great Rivals is that it has taken us this long—nearly a century—for even the college classroom to catch up to the storied wisdoms of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Hurston. Indeed,even their seemingly exhausted elders (Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Melville’s BillyBudd, or Chopin’s The Awakening and James’s In the Cage) should prove revelatory, as wouldsuch stepchildren as Claude McKay and Nathanael West.

What am I talking about?

One teaser, for those of you enticed by the course title. Did you know that F. Scott Fitzgerald had planned to use his short story, “Absolution,” as the first chapter of The Great Gatsby? I ambetting not and, further, that you can’t possibly guess what the story is about. [Google only if youreally like spoilers!] In class we will surely find “Absolution” to be a strange puzzle, at best a curiosity and at worst a distraction. But if we take enough time, we will feel it press upon the mind-expanding, heart-bustin’ revelations of the novel itself—which concern love and money, yes,but only in relation both to felt sanctity and spilt blood, whose demands we need to factor together.(What revelations? I have in mind not only the main plot but also its contexts: the laundering of the Carraway family crimes, the hidden intimacy between Jewish gangsterism and WASP finance,that bad driving and those drunken-sex regrets and the wisps of pop lyrics that punctuate the novel.) I swear, you will never use the term “American Dream” again without reaching for a precise definition!

For the record: Around our seminar table, expressive quiet will supplement analytical acumen; writing assignments will be short and guided yet informal and exploratory; and grading (which it is time to re-invent or abandon altogether) will be effort-friendly, alert to varying strengths, and happily inflated.

Priscilla Wald

The computer running your spaceship has turned homicidal; you have crash landed on

a planet run by talking apes.Your little sister can readyour mind; your future isrevealed in the DNA sample taken moments after yourbirth. From space travel to time travel, from mind control to genetic manipulation, from aliens to sentient robots, no genre has

more fully captured—and influenced--the relationship between important scientific discoveries and profound geopolitical and social transformations than science fiction. It registers the anxieties and hopes, the terror and the anticipation that comes with scientific innovation and social change. This class will consider science fiction film from its rise in the 1950s through the present. From its earliest years, science fiction film offered an important mode of engaging profound social changes and of imagining ethical responses to them. In its depiction of the future or of other worlds entirely, it offered a template for rehearsing a variety of outcomes for contemporary dilemmas, from the cultural negotiations of the multi-galactic crew of the starship Enterprise in Star Trek to the consequences of genetic determinism in the sterile world ofGattaca. And it staged explorations of human potential and limitations in the Atomic Age through such scenarios as the discovery of alternate universes and mental dimensions, the implications of human evolution and the creation of artificial intelligence, encounters with alien beings and worlds, and the ultimate unthinkable that was never really far from the humanimagination: the consequences of full-scale nuclear war. Since its proliferation in the post-war period, this cinematic genre, with its fantastical settings, imaginative plotlines, and inventive special effects, has dramatically registered collective responses to the radical scientific innovations and geopolitical transformations that have characterized the second half of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first and has forged new mythologies for the contemporary world.

This class will be organized around the relationship between scientific innovation and social andgeopolitical transformation: how, for example, the threats of nuclear war and the exhaustion ofenvironmental resources, discoveries in virology and genetics, and the innovations in cybernetics and artificial intelligence all intersect with decolonization and global development, race relations, and new social and geopolitical configurations. We will explore how science fiction film registers and responds to the contours and uncertainties of a changing world: to the challenges to the concept of human being and to the survival of the species. We will consider both how the films stage the dilemmas emerging from scientific and social change and how they posit responses to them. We will explore the cinematic innovations, the social criticism, and the mythological imaginings of science fiction film.

Xinyu Dong

What does it mean to leave one’s homeland and create a new home elsewhere? How do immigrant families across generations negotiate the meanings of “home” amid displacement andmobility? This courseexplores the complexexperiences of the Asian diaspora by focusing on the immigrant home as a microcosm of social change: the dreams and longings of the first generation, the in-between and evolving identities of the second, the affective and often physical labor of sustaining new homes in unfamiliar worlds.

Building on scholarship inAsian American studies, inter-Asia studies, andtransnational film studies, the course examines narrative films by AsianAmerican directors and filmmakers across Asia thatportray diasporic life and identity. Screenings include Didi (Sean Wang, USA, 2024), Minari (Lee Isaac Chung, USA, 2020), The Namesake (Mira Nair, USA, 2006), The Joy Luck Club (Wayne Wang, USA, 1993), Pushing Hands (Ang Lee, USA, 1991),Song of the Exile (Ann Hui,Hong Kong, 1990), and ATime to Live, A Time to Die (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Taiwan, 1985). We will ask how filmmakers visualize the spatial and temporal dimensions of the immigrant home – whether as a lost origin, a site of return, or a resilient space of rebuilding – and how these homes witness generational tension, cultural conflict, and reconciliation.

Students will develop interpretive skills and cinematic vocabulary foranalyzing how film form mediates questions of memory, migration, and belonging. Course requirements include eight screening-reading response posts (~250 words each) and two take-home essay-question exams (a midterm and a final, ~1600 wordseach). Films are in English or subtitled in English; all readings are in English. No prerequisites.

Marguerite Nguyen

This course examines various genres of literature and film to understand the legacies of one of the most transformative events inAmerican culture and history: the VietnamWar. Taking a comparative approach, we will explore American, Southeast Asian, and Southeast Asian American perspectives to consider some key issues related to war and war culture, including experiences of violence and mass death, forced displacement and the global consciousness it engenders, memory and worldmaking after war, and the role of art in constructing perceptions of conflict. Toward the end of the semester, students will have the opportunity to delve into an aspect of the Vietnam War that interests them.

Works that we will investigate include Thi Bui’sdebut graphic narrative The Best We Could Do, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s docuseries TheVietnam War, Nha Ca’s landmark MourningHeadband for Hue, Francis Ford Coppola’sApocalypse Now, Mai Der Vang’s poems on Hmong culture and history, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning TheSympathizer, Bao Ninh’s controversial novelThe Sorrow of War, and Dang Nhat Minh’sWhen the Tenth Month Comes, considered to be one of the most important Vietnamese films.

Assignments such as brief responses, guidedgroup work, creative-critical options, andanalytical essays (5- 7 pages) are designed to offer different entry points into the works we study and generate dialogue among students.

Joseph Donahue

It’s no coincidence that the psychopathic drug dealer at the heart of Breaking Bad, WalterWhite, shares initials with the great poet of unrealized possibilities, or that his sublime hymn to cosmic order, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” gets recited by a chemist in a state of the art underground meth lab.

America still doesn’t know what to do withWalt Whitman. Our national bard was, and is,an enigma. He has been seen, variously, as a prophet, a hustler, a madman, a health nut, a spirit guide, a sex therapist, a grief counselor, the flowering of a new kind of human, and the end of civilization as we know it. He is also the best friend you’ll ever have, and he’ll tell you why. This course will pursue the manifold mysteries at the heart of Whitman’s extraordinary poetry. We will read carefully through his magnum opus, Leaves of Grass, its rich array of praise songs, love poems,elegies, satires, its psychic landscapes, itsexplorations of despair, desire, and tough-minded hope. We will look for him in his time, the America of Transcendentalism and the Civil War, and in the poetry he drew upon, the Bible, the Vedic Hymns, Homer, and in the poetry that draws upon his work, Hart Crane, Ginsberg, and others.

Taylor Black

To date, Bob Dylan has written over 600songs, released 40 studio albums, andproduced works across a range of media, from film to visual art to radio to popular music criticism, even welding. Over the decades, Dylan has received every accolade one can imagine for an artist of his stature. He has been inducted into all of the halls of fame and has won all the prizes you can imagine, and he is the only

songwriter in history to have been awarded aNobel Prize in Literature, for what thecommittee describes as Dylan’s “profoundimpact on popular music and Americanculture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” Even with all ofthat in mind, this course operates from theassumption that Bob Dylan has still not received enough credit and that we have only begun to understand him and appreciate the depth and weight of his songs, which will last forever.

This course—which is offered intermittently at Duke—is a chance to spend some time workingthrough

Dylan’s catalog, song-by-song. Despite our culture’s fixation on the image of Dylan as only and evera

folk singing waif with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica, you will find in his career a sincere and often stubborn commitment on his part to creative evolution. There is no oneelse in the history of American popular music who has experimented more than Dylan, and you will find that contact with Dylan’s music is also a way of encountering a multitude of genres, traditions, and sounds that comprise American music and pop culture.

“Bob Dylan” is a popular class that has earned a reputation for being fun and mind-altering. Itis hospitable to music-loving non-majors as well as English/Humanities majors looking to broaden their critical skills. No prerequisites are necessary except sincerity and curiosity.                                                                                                                                                                                       The opportunity to listen and think through so much of Dylan’s material is a reward all its own. At the same time, this course is an intense and potentially life-altering experience that will change the way you think about music, art, and popular culture, and what happens to yourbrain when you learn to think and listen more deeply.

To guide your experience, you will be asked to write two to three short, expository essays aimedat expanding your powers of description and critical reception. You can also expect to do a lot of listening.

Jarvis McInnis

In this course, we will examine the life and work of Zora Neale Hurston. Though best known as a novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, she was also a trained anthropologist, who wrote and experimented across numerous literary genres and culturalmedia, including:novels, short stories,plays, anthropologicaland political essays, autobiography, sound recordings and documentary film. In addition to Harlem, Hurston traveled extensively throughout the US South and the Caribbean collecting and theorizing black vernacular culture, including folklore, music, dance, and religion. Bringing together literary, music, gender and sexuality, and performance studies, we will explore the vast range of Hurston’s impressive oeuvre. Some questions we mighttake up include: What is the relationship between literature and anthropology in Hurston’s oeuvre? How does her work converge with and depart from that of her male contemporaries (e.g., Richard Wright, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, etc.) who also wrote about black southern culture? How does she capture the unique experiences of black women in the early 20th century, and what is her significance for contemporary black feminism? Can wetrace linkages betweenher literary, sonic andvisual projects? If so, how might her work function as a model for practicing and understanding interdisciplinarity, in general, and the project of Black Studies, in particular?

Assignments may include:2-3 critical essays; weekly blogs; and a group presentation.

Mesha Maren

Why Take Advanced Fiction?

Short answer- because you want to drill down deeper into your craft.

Long answer- because you want to give yourself the gift of spending a semester among writers who will help you develop your voice, your taste, your inclinations. By the time you have reachedAdvanced Fiction, you can assume that everyone in the class with you understandsthe basics of fiction writingon the line, scene, and storylevel. You are ready to move beyond the nuts and bolts. You are ready to dig into what makes you tick, what distinguishes your fiction.We will spend much of the semester focusing on how to hone our instincts to make our writing sound more like us. When you understand your preferences, you can better understand your writing impulses. In the end, it may be impossible to articulate why we make certain choices but what can be quite valuable

is to develop one’s ability to choose confidently – to know what you like, what you radically prefer; to get into a comfortable relation with our choosing faculty, let’s say - to get better at identifying these micro-preferences and betterat honoring them

(and then, of course, next pass through, being willing to overturn them and choose again).

The overarching question we will be asking is “what does it feel like in the instant when we’vechosen well?”

Please join me in developing your ability to choose confidently! I love fiction of all types, everythingfrom speculative to historical to lyric and autofiction.

If you have not taken the prerequisites but you still think Advanced would be a good fit for you,please feel free to reach out to me with a writing sample.

Thomas Pfau

Overview: Our class will explore aspects of European Romantic culture across multiple genres – literature, music, painting, satiric prints. Typically, the chronological boundaries of Romanticism tend to be defined by thebeginning of the FrenchRevolution in July 1789 and by the end of Bourbon monarchy in France (1830) or the ascent of Queen Victoria to the throne (1837). That said, the political, cultural, and religious legacy ofRomanticism remains very much with us to this day. To make sense of the period’s immense riches and their long-term effects, our class will be divided into three parts: 1) IMAGES OF REVOLUTION & DISSENT: 1789-1800. – 2) FICTIONS OF WAR & PEACE: 1800-1815. – 3) SOUNDS & Sights of Restoration: 1815-1830.

Part I will explore a mix of political, journalistic, and literary works that respond to the French Revolution and to the beginning of England’s war with Revolutionary France, which with a few briefinterruptions would last twenty-two years. To that end, we’ll study Edmund Burke’s polemic against the revolutionaries in France and their sympathizers in England; we’ll consider William Blake’s andS. T. Coleridge’s indictment of England as a morally and spiritually bankrupt society; as well some first-hand descriptions of events in France.

Part II will take up works from both England and continental Europe, which by 1800 is undergoing unheard changes, many brought about by Napoleon’s ruthless projection of revolutionary power into Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, and ultimately Czarist Russia. Here we’ll consider paintings by Goya and C. D. Friedrich, powerful new developments in musical form and style (Beethoven), and new fictions by H. von Kleist and Jane Austen. Overall, European Romanticism of this period during tends to vacillate between confronting a chaotic and terrifying world of global war and political instability head-on or, faced with political repression at home and abroad, will devise imaginative forms of retreat from that reality. 

Part III will explore Romantic literature, music, and visual art in the aftermath of these upheavals.After the decisive battles of Borodino (1812),Leipzig (1813), and Waterloo (1815) – resulting in a total of more than 200,000 dead and as many wounded – the culture of post-Napoleonic Europe appears traumatized and disoriented. Much of the music, painting, and literature produced during this age ponders the era’s social and political upheaval by conjuring nihilistic visions of social and ecological collapse (e.g.., Berlioz’s Symphony Fantastique, Byron’s “Darkness,” and the prose of A. Stifter). Alternatively, post-Napoleonic Romanticism seeks refuge in aestheticdreamworlds seemingly unaffected by recenthistory, such as in Constable’s paintings of rural England or H. Heine’s deeply ironic portrayal ofrestoration Europe in his Images of Travel (1827).

Structure of the Course: This will be a reading-intensive course; if you enjoy reading a wide variety of styles, and if you also have an interest in developments in painting and music, thiscourse will offer you a rich array of materials to explore. – Now that the genius malignus of AI is definitely out of the bottle, writing regular seminar papers will be replaced by the following: 1) a 15-min. in-class presentation of a work on the syllabus (details to follow), with a carefully prepared handout and based on some research; 2) a handwritten midterm exam; and 3) a closing handwritten exam; and 4) active participation in discussion throughout the term. Each component will account for 25% of the total grade.

“The South Got Something to Say”: The Contemporary Black South in Lit. & Pop Culture

In their acceptance speech for Best New Rap Group at the 1995 Source Awards, André 3000 of the hip hop duo OutKast, proudly declared to a crowd of primarily East and West Coast rappers: “The South got something to say!” This pivotal moment in hip hop history turned out to be quite prescient, as the last 30 years have witnessed a Black southern renaissance, if you will, in literature, music, and pop culture. This course will explore how a range of contemporary Black artists—including award-winning writers Jesmyn Ward and Kiese Laymon, pop stars Beyoncé, Big Freedia, and Lil Nas X, films such as Moonlight, and TV shows such as Atlanta and Queen Sugar—are reimagining the US South as the site of a viable present and future for Black people, even as they continue to grapple with its tortured past of racial injustice and anti-black violence.Journeying through rural Mississippi and the Carolinas to urban centers such as Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, and Houston, we will interrogate the geographic and cultural diversity of the contemporary Black South, not only in relation to whiteness, but the region’s fast-growing Latine population as well. We will engage a range of critical and theoretical readings—by scholars such as Katherine McKittrick, Imani Perry, E. Patrick Johnson, and L.H. Stallings—that cut across literary, cultural, media and performance studies, AfricanAmerican Studies, New Southern Studies, gender and sexuality studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, and environmentalism. A central goal of this course will be to teach students how to think and write critically at the intersections of literature, music, and pop culture.

Chris Ouma & Khwezi Mkhize

What do we mean when we invoke the idea of a Black Archive? What are the conditions, genres and modes of expression through which Black life, imagination and desire become legible? These questions complicate how we understand the concept of the archive. This course will engage with a range of archival material that includes the Robert A Hill papers on Marcus Garvey and the UNIA at Duke, documentaries and creative filmic narratives from Arthur Jafa and John Akomfrah, a novel by Yaa Gyasi, poetry by M NourbeSe Phillips, photography from Zanele Muholi, ‘digilittle’ magazines like Jalada and sonic curatorial platforms such as the Pan-African Space Station. A key objective of the course is to deploy these genres as methodological interventions in understanding what a Black archive could mean. Classroom engagement will entail close readings of primary and secondary texts, conversations with archivists and invited speakers, screenings, listenings and visitations of both paper and digital archives. Students will be expected to write short reflective essays inspired by or based on archival research and engagement with the theoretical debates about Black archives.

Tsitsi Jaji & Stephen Jaffe

In this co-led seminar, scholars, creative writers, and composers are welcomed to explore the fusion of words and music. We focus on the history of Black artists to understand how contemporary composers and poets document and resist racial inequalities. We illumine these themes as restorative, considering how the arts may serve a public function.For example, we listen to Marian Anderson singing of Langston Hughes’ poem I’ve Known Rivers as set by composer Howard Swanson; we consider a mosaic of the poem by Houston Conwill and a photograph of Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka dancing on it! Centrally, composers and writers in the seminar will collaborate on the creation of new poetry and music to be workshopped and presented.Archival research related to the course themes, e.g. slave songs, WPA interviews, opera, pop music and experimental forms foreground the forms of Double Consciousness; they constitute touchstones to inform the ways we think about the musical and literary territory of the arts.Enriching the seminar are sessions devoted to developing works by composer Brittany Green, Shawn Okpebholo and Tsitsi Jaji which highlight the use of archive in today’s arts.

Tim Heimlich

This course presents a familiar narrative in a new way. It considers the rise of the novel from inception to its early nineteenth-century accessionto a place of high cultural esteem. In the process, it reviews major eighteenth-century primary texts, as well as some works newer to the literary canon. Beginning with and expanding upon Ian Watt’s foundational argument that the novel enshrined realism as the chief literary strategy for staging a process of bourgeois individuation, the course seeks to develop a richer contextualization for its historical narrative. Expect major topics of discussion to include: the influence of imperial expansion upon domestic cultural production; the development of successive “anthropological” and “biological” racisms; revolutions in conceptions of gender and sexuality; the emergence of industrial and finance capitalism and of a bourgeois reading public; gothic; moral philosophy and theories of sympathy and sentimentality; and emerging suspicions that observable changes in climate could be attributed to human actions.

Richard So

This graduate seminar introduces computational and statistical approaches to the study of literature and culture—an emerging and increasingly central area in the humanities. Designed for MA and PhD students seeking to develop a digital-humanities dimension in their research, the course provides hands-on training in Python and text-analysis methods alongside exploration of recent applied work in computational literary and cultural studies.

Students will learn practical tools for processing and analyzing large-scale textual and cultural data and engage with exemplary projects that demonstrate how these methods can extend and reshape humanities scholarship. Topics may include genre and form, representation and identity in media, and patterns in online discourse. Readings will feature recent computational research by scholars such as Ted Underwood, Andrew Piper, and Lauren Klein, among others.

By the end of the course, students will be equipped to integrate computational methods into their own research agendas and to contribute to the evolving field of digital humanities. No prior programming experience is required, though curiosity and a willingness to experiment are essential.

Evaluation: weekly coding problem sets, assigned readings, and active discussion participation.

Julianne Werlin

The period from 1500-1700 saw the formation of modern political philosophies. At the beginning of the period, Machiavellianism and reason of state emerged in the fraught political landscape of the Italian city states; toward the end, Hobbes and Locke laid the foundations of modern liberal individualism in England. New political values were not confined to treatises and works of philosophy. They were worked out practically and imaginatively, across cultural contexts and literary forms.

This course traces new strains in European Renaissance political thought across genres. Major themes will include reason of state, individualism, contractarianism, and divine kingship; authors may include Machiavelli, More, Bodin, Shakespeare, Milton, Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke. In addition, we will read widely in the most exciting recent scholarship on Renaissance politics across disciplines. Assignments will consist of weekly readings and one final paper of 20-25 pages.

Kathy Psomiades

This is a workshop for advanced graduate students in English who want to work on writing an article for publication. Ideally, you’d have something—a conference paper, a dissertation chapter, a paper from coursework—that you’d like to turn into an article. You and your dissertation committee should be in agreement that this workshop is a good use of your time at this point in your graduate career. We’ll be working our way through Wendy Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks (2nd edition). We’ll also be making use of Eric Hayot’s Elements of Academic Style. You’ll be workshopping your article, as well as various exercises from Belcher and Hayot, and you’ll be giving feedback to others about their articles as well. We will meet every week for the standard 2.5 hours. You’ll need a permission number from me to sign up.