This advanced seminar will study the gothic as a genre and as a malleable yet persistent discursive site in Irish literary and political tradition. From the eighteenth century to the present, the gothic has been used to explore aspects of Irish history, in particular colonialism. The course will focus on texts that engage with three primary problems that the Irish gothic is used to explore: violence and terror, famine, and vampirism as a political metaphor.

Students explore themselves, talents, motivations and dreams to realize new ways to address social needs and change through enterprise development. Grounded in experiential learning, this class is a balance of theory, hands-on learning, best practices and skills building. Students actively engage in creating or advising a social enterprise. Students will work in small teams to complete and present a sustainability assessment for an actual social enterprise and create and implement a quantitatively verifiable solution to a social business need.

This course will examine what queer studies scholarship can teach us about the social construction of race in the United States. To do so, the course will provide an introduction to queer of color critique and other queer studies scholarship that centrally engages questions of race, exploring this dynamic field including its origins in women of color feminism, foundational texts, and recent scholarship.

This course will focus on intermediate-to-advanced pointe technique. Class will begin with a condensed barre and center, devoting the last hour to pointe work. Concentration will be placed on strengthening the foot and ankle and the development of artistry within the technique.

The gains of global capitalism since the 2009 Great Recession and the laws and institutions organized to sustain the market have been breathtaking. What explains how and why citizens around the world have been unwilling or unable to imagine an alternative to free market competition? If citizens are genuinely committed to capitalism, why? During the first part of the course, we will consider these questions and the heightened fear that the triumph of the economy means the end of politics, at least in its democratic form.

This seminar examines some recent developments in cultural sociology and contemporary social theory. The first part of the class asks: How do we imagine social things? The second part of the class reviews the history of social theory with a focus on the multiple crises of the modernity narrative, and various attempts to resolve these crises. The final third of the class poses the question of how to analyze culture and do social theory.

From the Black Lives Matter movement to debates about immigration and a color-blind America, race and ethnicity are at the forefront of contemporary public discourse. In this course students will be introduced to the various sociological perspectives and theoretical frameworks used to understand racial and ethnic relations in the United States. Racial and ethnic identities remain an important aspect of how people view themselves and others.

While influenced by Augustine's warning that worldly inquiry could endanger the pilgrimage of the soul, medieval literature contains many instances of curious looking. Exploring the medieval desire to know, this course considers how the period's tendencies toward spiritual and metaphysical thought are balanced against its fascinations with the observable world. We will study the ways allegories, travel narratives, romances, and dream visions intersect with natural philosophy, historiography, cartography, and architecture.

An exciting array of dance technique classes for the intermediate to advanced dancer in a variety of styles, taught by guest artists from the New England area.

This course focuses on the integration of dance technique, performance and improvisational research to expand students' embodied awareness, range of motion, and performance skills as contemporary dancers.