Outdoor rock climbing is designed to give students experience climbing technical rock faces outdoors. Our semester will focus on technical rock climbing movement, safety systems including belaying, anchor cleaning, anchor set up (bolts/natural), and rappelling. The goal of this class is for students to walk away in November feeling like they can confidently approach outdoor climbing scenarios from a place of safety and risk management. This class is appropriate for both folks who have never climbed before and for more experienced climbers.

Participants in this course will inspect, assess and document trail conditions on publicly accessible lands near campus and in the Hampshire woods. We will cork in conjunction with Indiginous communities and land stewards to work toward living out land acknowledgements. Participants will clear trails of blowdown debris, maintain accessible trail widths, and address wet, damaged or eroded areas through trail relocations, dirtwork, stonework or woodwork. Participants will use saws, loppers and other hand tools. 5-College students will be graded pass/fail.

An examination of race, identity, and resistance in African, Caribbean, and African American literatures through the lens of coming-of-age novels. This course will enable students to critically engage the political and aesthetic imperatives of black writing by interrogating the thematics and legacies of slavery, colonialism, and racism. How do writers of Africa and the African diaspora appropriate the Bildungsroman as a literary form in their constructions of identity, freedom, and citizenship? What makes this genre particularly useful for the liberatory project of black imagination?

Offered as WLT 232 and EAL 232. Can literature inspire personal and social transformation? How have modern Chinese writers pursued freedom, fulfillment, memory and social justice? From short stories and novels to drama and film, we explore class, gender and the cultures of China, Taiwan, Tibet and the Chinese diaspora. Readings are in English translation and no background in China or Chinese is required. Open to students at all levels.

A study of the major writers and diverse literary traditions of Africa with emphasis on the historical, political, social and cultural contexts of the emergence of writing, reception and consumption. We pay particular attention to several questions: in what contexts did modern African literature emerge? Is the term "African literature" a useful category? How do African writers challenge Western representations of Africa? How do they articulate the crisis of postcoloniality? How do women writers reshape our understanding of gender and the politics of resistance?

Offered as WLT 202 and ENG 202. Texts include The Iliad; tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; Plato’s Symposium; Virgil’s Aeneid; Dante’s Divine Comedy.

To introduce the pleasures of poetry, this course travels through poems on themes of journeying and dwelling, voyage and return, travel and home, wandering, war and immigration. Reading ancient Chinese songs and Greek epic to contemporary docupoetry and rap, we explore key elements of poetic art

Advanced aspects of directing for the stage. Structural analysis of dramatic texts, with emphasis on articulating a unique vision for a text. Work on problems of visual composition, rehearsal techniques and development, in collaboration with actors and designers, of the inner score of action and its physical expression the stage. Prerequisites: Directing I. In addition, Acting II (THE 242) and a 200-level design class are strongly recommended. Instructor permission required.

This course focuses upon interpretative approaches to dramatic texts and how they may be realized and animated through characterization, composition, movement, rhythm and style. Prerequisites: Acting I or FLS 280. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required.

This course investigates the counterfactual, speculative, subjunctive impulse in overtly speculative drama and film with a particular focus on race and gender. We examine an international range of plays by such authors as Caryl Churchill, Tess Onwueme, Dael Orlandersmith, Derek Walcott, Bertolt Brecht, Lorraine Hansberry, Craig Lucas and Doug Wright, as well as films such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Pan’s Labyrinth; Children of Men; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; X-Men; Contact and Brother From Another Planet.