(Offered as ENGL 484 and FAMS 424) Sometimes referred to as the “silver era” of US film production, the 1970s were a period of aesthetic, technological, and cultural transformation. New “auteurs” emerged as both mavericks and commercial success stories. Independence reigned supreme for some, while others helped to usher in the contemporary blockbuster. At the same time, scholarly study of film was steadily increasing, experimenting with new disciplinary methods, waging debates, and often distancing itself from popular critical writings.

In this seminar, we will read and study living writers who build on the antiracist feminist tradition of This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color, the groundbreaking 1981 anthology that remains urgent in its call for intersectional analysis, coalition-building between U.S. and international freedom struggles, and “theory from the flesh.” How are contemporary WOC writers reflecting that legacy in literature and theory written in and for the present moment?

(Offered as ENGL 474 and AAPI 474) This seminar  draws on transpacific literatures and methods to examine the relationship between narrative and ecology. “Ecology” as a field of scientific study concerns the “relationships between people, social groups, and their environment” (OED). Throughout the course, we will draw on transpacific frameworks to reflect on how the transits of people, and the circulation of ideas, capital, and materials structures impact ecologies and the relationships between people, communities, and non-human lives.

(Before 1800) Can reading poetry change our understanding of our environment? How might the way we perceive nature be conditioned by the ways in which writers from other time periods have imagined it? In turn, how might the way that we perceive our own imaginations be conditioned by ideas about the natural world? Although “nature” might seem like a universal and unchanging concept, British Romantic writers did much to invent our modern ideas about it. Notions of perception, cognition, and the imagination changed alongside our ideas about nature.

We are living in the end-times of empire and racial capital, and thus, we are experiencing the long brutality of the western world order’s final tantrums. As poets and journalists are assassinated in Gaza for their permission to narrate, as poets in the Global North risk their livelihoods to protest many genocides we are complicit in, and poets in the Global South resist forces of total annihilation daily, this class will honor our living, dead, and the long histories of anti-imperial poetics throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

This class focuses on how writers give narrative shape and poetic expression to a single day, ordinary moments, and the rhythms of quotidian life. Even the seemingly mundane can reveal powerful historical, political, and cultural realities. It is also about how theorists make sense of the everyday as an object of analysis or a site for social commentary. What happens to our expectations about plot, event, character development, linear progression, climax, or closure when a novel is set on one single day?

[Before 1800] Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval masterwork, The Canterbury Tales, represents pilgrims from all walks of life, from peasants to artisans to nobility, telling tales that are comical, tragic, religious, and fantastical. In this course, we read almost the entirety of the Tales in its original language. The course aims to give the student rapid mastery of Chaucer’s English and an active appreciation of his poetry.

This poetry workshop proceeds from the idea that all creative work begins in “failure.” What happens when poets transform their relationship to that idea? We will explore the poem not as a product, but rather as a process—a documentation of effort, an unfinished attempt, a brief witness of the body and an ongoing record of the mind. Written projects will center on drafts, revisions, collaborations and experiments, utilizing techniques such as fragmentation, research, erasure, collage, ekphrasis, somatic exercises and other forms of radical revision.

How do we inhabit fiction writing as a practice? What does it mean to dig deeper into our stories? And which stories do we choose to stick with over time? In this advanced fiction writing course, students will explore these questions and more through writing, reading, and sharing their writing, with a special focus on deepening the workshop process.