This course discusses issues relevant to the theatre history and practices, as well as dramatic literature, theories and criticism of 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century United States of America, including African American, Native American, Hispanic American, Asian American, and gay and feminist theatre and performance. Lectures, discussions and presentations are complemented by video screenings of recent productions of some of the plays under discussion.

This course surveys the history of theatre, drama and performance from the 18th century to the present. The main focus is on the theatres of Europe and the United States and their relationship to their respective cultures. Non-Western issues in regards to African, Australian and South American theaters is also discussed. Lectures and discussions are complemented by video screenings of recent productions of some of the plays under consideration.

This course examines visual and literary documentations of queer life by reading autobiographical texts such as Audre Lorde's Zami and Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues and by screening documentaries like Marlon Rigg's Black Is...Black Ain't and Performing Girl, a short film about transgender Sri Lankan performer D'Lo. We consider the power and value of documenting queer lives while examining the politics of visibility as impacted by race, class and gender presentation.

This course is an introduction to a methodology for the study of dress as material culture, examining physical structures, terminology, technology of clothing production, as well as some of the historical, social and cultural variables shaping- and shaped by- clothing. It is a hand-on class using garments from the Smith Historic Clothing Collection. Students work in small teams to study several similar garments, identifying common features as well as distinctions that may reflect different classes, aesthetic choices and industrial influences. Graded S/U only. Enrollment limit of 24 students.

The course is designed to explore the nature of design, in theatre and the visual arts. Students study the elements of set, costume, lighting and sound design while looking at the work of some of the most influential designers, past and present. Especially designed for those with a limited background in theatre, it involves discussions about assigned plays and projects, as appropriate to the topic. It is open to all students but particularly recommended for first-year students and sophomores. Enrollment limited to 16.

Topics course. This seminar explores the significance of women's voices in Othello, King Lear and The Tempest, viewed in conjunction with reimaginings of these plays and their female protagonists by women playwrights, producers, and directors, as well as women poets and novelists. The course considers how women artists have engaged with, reinterpreted and transformed Shakespeare's women at different cultural moments, exploring questions of adaptive appropriation across global and temporal boundaries as well as race and gender.

Sir Thomas Malory was a Warwickshire knight with a bad conscience, charged with rape, attempted murder and other violent crimes during the Wars of the Roses. He completed his prose compilation of Arthurian lore in Newgate Prison in 1469, which William Caxton published in 1485 as Le Morte Darthur. It became the definitive account of the rise and fall of Arthurian Britain.

"It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe." So Henry James wrote in 1872, and for the rest of his life he would explore that complexity and that superstition alike. A reading of his stories, criticism and travel writing, along with three major novels: The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians and The Ambassadors.

Ursula K. LeGuin is arguably the most important writer of science fiction and fantasy in the second half of the 20th century and certainly one of the best. Although the course stresses her experiments with the novel form, we also consider other genres in which she writes-short story, "suites" of longer stories, essays, poetry. We study the formal experiments of her fiction and its accompanying thought-experiments with gender, identity, the good society, and the promise and fear of the other.

Interrogating theories of intellectualism, among them Antonio Gramsci's notion of traditional and organic intellectuals, and distinctions between categories of criminal and enemy, this course traces the role of black prison writings in the development of American political and legal theory.