In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, belief in demons, fairies, apparitions, and other magical beings was still held by many in early modern England, including both the theaters' audiences and its critics. At the same time, sciences such as alchemy, palmistry, astrology, and dream interpretation borrowed from magical discourse to argue for their efficacy. This course examines the relationships among early modern literature, science, and magic by treating each as influential discursive practices that speak to and yet challenge each other.

Medieval and early modern literature often desires to "paint" an image in our minds, but there are also inherent problems in how vision is represented and how easily those depictions can deceive. If vision is a means for gaining understanding, it is also subject to manipulation through theatrical, artistic, and literary means. Our class will explore how perception leads readily into deception through the works of medieval mystics, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and Margaret Cavendish, among others.

How and why do narrative artists envision whole new worlds? What is the role of fantasy in social change? In this course we will investigate contemporary utopian fictions and their historical antecedents as models for our own utopian writing. We will encounter novels and films from various lineages, including Afrofuturist, anarchist, critical utopian, ecotopian, and feminist. Authors we may read include Sir Thomas More, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Ernest Callenbach, Octavia E. Butler, Walidah Imarisha, Roxane Gay, Ta Neheisi Coates, and Margaret Kiljoy.

This course cultivates sound reasoning. Students will learn to see the structure of claims and arguments and to use those structures in developing strong arguments and exposing shoddy ones. We will learn to evaluate arguments on the strength of the reasoning rather than on the force of their associations and buzzwords.

This course will investigate how gender and class serve as structuring principles in the development of the Victorian novel in Britain, paying attention to the ways in which the form also develops in relation to emerging ideas about sexuality, race, nation, and religion. Novelists include Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, and Gaskell and we will read examples of domestic fiction, detective fiction, social realist novels, and the Victorian gothic.

This course will investigate how gender and class serve as structuring principles in the development of the Victorian novel in Britain, paying attention to the ways in which the form also develops in relation to emerging ideas about sexuality, race, nation, and religion. Novelists include Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, and Gaskell and we will read examples of domestic fiction, detective fiction, social realist novels, and the Victorian gothic.

The course explores comparative racial and ethnic politics in the U.S. during the twentieth century. We will analyze the creation and maintenance of structural inequalities through laws and policies targeted at persons of color in the areas of healthcare, transportation, immigration, labor, racial segregation, and education. Through readings, lectures and films, we will discuss critical histories of community struggle against social inequality, registering the central impact that race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship have had on efforts toward social justice.

A multidisciplinary exploration of the ways humans have understood, represented, experienced, and justified war over time and across cultures. Using art, literature, and film in addition to social scientific research, this course considers the many different meanings war has in human societies. It analyzes possible causes of war, including innate human drives, gender differences, socialization, regimes, and ideological and resource competition in a condition of international anarchy. It probes how war is experienced by soldiers and civilians.

This course facilitates a structured reflection for students to interrogate their intellectual preparation and subsequent experiential learning during high-value internships the previous summer in Ghana. The course concludes, momentarily, a journey of reflection on personal and internship organizations goals that began with a pre-departure course the previous spring continuing on site in Ghana in the summer. It will present a platform where students can explore a new understanding of themselves in the world after their summer experience in Ghana.

Religion and climate change might seem to be an odd combination. After all, we tend to imagine religion as the domain of faith, emotion, and the otherworldly and the climate as the realm of science, objective knowledge, and the here and now. Nevertheless, this course investigates their sometimes surprising connections. For example, how do religious communities work to promote or oppose political action on climate change? How do religious conceptions about God's relationship with nature or with humanity impact adherents' views on climate change?