(Offered as BIOL 230 and ENST 210.) A study of the relationships of plants and animals (including humans) to each other and to their environment. We'll start by considering the decisions an individual makes in its daily life concerning its use of resources, such as what to eat and where to live, and whether to defend such resources. We'll then move on to populations of individuals, and investigate species population growth, limits to population growth, and why some species are so successful as to become pests whereas others are on the road to extinction.

Independent Reading Courses.

Fall and spring semester. The Department.

(Offered as ENGL 481, FAMS 481, and ARHA 481.)  This seminar explores different ways of entering into conversations with experimental filmmakers.  Through weekly screenings, in-class visits by contemporary artists, and rigorous examinations of artists’ writings, interviews, and related theoretical texts, we will seek to develop critical and creative vocabularies through which to interact with an array of experimental films and videos.  We will ask:  What sorts of aesthetic, conceptual, and political keywords do contemporary filmmakers draw on to frame their artisti

(Offered as ENGL 478 and FAMS 478.)  Documentary’s difference from fiction is frequently understood in terms of its emphasis on the spoken word.  In documentary studies, voice, rather than point of view, is the standard parlance for describing the unique social perspective of a documentary film.  Voice is also the metaphor of documentary’s social mission:  some of the most influential histories of documentary are narrated as a history of giving--and having, or appropriating--the right to speak.

(Offered as ENGL 454 and BLST 442.)  William Faulkner and Toni Morrison are generally understood as two of the most important writers of the twentieth century.  In a country that works hard to live without a racial past, both authors have brought deep articulation to what it means to experience that which is often otherwise ignored and regardless unspoken.

What are the antecedents of the central line of poetry in English as one finds it early in the twenty-first century?  Given the great variety of English-language poetry today, the term “central line” may be disputable; what is not disputable is the tradition of secular and religious lyrics and odes that derives from the major poets of the early seventeenth-century: John Donne, Ben Jonson, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell.

(Offered as ENGL 441 and EUST 374.)  [before 1800]  In this course, we read a selection of English and other European lyrics (in translation) from the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries.  An exciting, fertile era in poetic innovation, these centuries see the dawn of the first romantic love poetry in these languages, the invention of new forms like the sonnet, and the invention of the lyric “anthology.”  Reading the lyrics of the French troubadour poets, Chaucer, Petrarch, Wyatt, Donne, Shakespeare, and the many brilliant anonymous poets of medieval Eng

In this course, we’ll explore the history (and the fantasy) of the performing machine on stage, on screen, and beyond.  It’s easy to think of technologies as dead things that enhance the live performances of humans.  This course will ask you to do something harder:  to find the liveness in a machine and to take its agency seriously.  We will watch how new technologies tangle with humans in performance, and we will ask:  what happens when human actors begin to accept a new technology as their scene partner–or their identity?

Emily Dickinson’s poetry is rich in what she called “illocality.”  Her writing characteristically dissolves images and refuses all specificity of place or event, and yet no writer is more intimately connected to a single particular place. Dickinson wrote almost all of her poems within this one house on Main Street in Amherst.