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.

In this creative writing workshop, we will engross ourselves in contemporary literary works that respond to, speculate about, and/or collaborate with ancestors and ancestral languages. We will explore the ways these works conceptualize time, truth, kinship, lineage, and narrative itself, and examine different formal approaches to writing into silences, gaps, and contradictions. In addition to reading and analyzing literature, we will also engage in writing exercises and research processes that borrow or reenact the methodologies of the authors we study.

(Offered as ENGL 280 and FAMS 210) An introduction to cinema studies through consideration of key critical terms, together with a selection of films from different cultural contexts for illustration and discussion. Special emphasis placed on prominent genres, movements, and tendencies within contemporary film culture, and the concepts that animate critical debates on contemporary cinema. The keywords for discussion may include, among others: montage, realism, ideology, the gaze, streaming, digitization, truth, and access.

In this course you will read letters and write letters. We will explore the letter as a complex instrument of self-expression and communication with others, as literary artefact, as carrier of affect, intention and ideas, and as a record of individual and communal growth.  Letter writing will be experienced as a performance that deploys persona, tone, voice, purpose, persuasion, and will focus on the tension between transparency and decorum. Your discoveries and the development of your thoughts will be circulated as letters written among a small circle of correspondence.