Spring 2019

“Development”—and its myriad cognates, including “underdevelopment,” “uneven development,” “developing nations,” “human development index” and so forth—has been the central paradigm framing colonial and postcolonial geopolitical and economic structures over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The aim of this graduate course is twofold: first, we will trace the history and evolution...

Course Description: Both celebrated and maligned, the Bloomsbury Group is the best-known English artistic coterie of the twentieth century. This course will examine some of the works of the individuals who made up this charmed circle, such as prose writers Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Vita Sackville West, and Lytton...

The Victorian period was a time of tremendous poetic experiment. Browning and Tennyson are credited with inventing the dramatic monologue, and innovations in the verse novel and the epic by Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and William Morris rival the period’s prose novels. At the same time, Victorian poets revitalized standard...

The Old English poem we call Beowulf has long been held as a kind of canonical “beginning” for English literature, though in more of a “prehistoric” sense than a foundational one. English departments liked to have an Anglo-Saxonist around to expose students to Old English as a way to inculcate...

In 1790, the planter-historian William Beckford claimed that Jamaica was “one of the richest jewels in the crown of Great Britain.” In the eighteenth century, slave-grown sugar was Britain’s most important colonial commodity, and Caribbean colonies, her most prized economic possessions, more valuable in gross economic terms than the Thirteen...

This course is the payoff for having learned the grammar of Old English in Introduction to Old English (which is the prerequisite for the course unless you see me for permission)! You will continue to develop your skills in Old English reading and translation as you read shorter canonical texts...

Montessori education suggests three stages of learning. First you understand the concepts, then you practice its applications, then you teach it to someone else as the "final." These are the guiding principles of this course, that you've been studying and practicing English for several years and your "capstone" or synthesis...

Incarceration and criminalization have concerned many of the writers, philosophers, and activists who are central to literary, ethnic, and women and gender studies - for example, Harriet Jacobs, Henry David Thoreau, John Okada, Zitkala-Sa, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Richard Wright. We will read these and other authors in order...

What do we mean when we say a story is relatable? This course will examine the different ways in which we can explain the relationships between readers and books (or movies): why we like or dislike characters, how reading might shape our attitudes and behaviors, and whether some kinds of...

A far-flung inquiry into the complicated relationship that has existed between text and image in Europe, Asia, and the Americas since the Middle Ages (with backward glances at Plato and the Bible). We shall study writings on the relationship between language and the visual arts, print culture, and the history...