A research seminar focusing on the cultural, social, and political life of New York City, with special reference to its uneasy relationship to American society as a whole. Examination of New York politics, writers and artists, architecture, immigrant communities, economic role, and shifting power relations. Accompanying film series and possible field trip to New York City, with historical walking tours.

This course explores the use of revolutionary terror by the state. More specifically, it examines policies of terror pursued by Communist dictatorships in Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the early years of the Cold War. Who did what to whom, and why? What insights do secret police work and public propaganda, knitted together in macabre show trials, allow us into Stalinist rule, European politics, and maybe ourselves? How did memories of terror shape politics after Stalin's death?

Can a story be accurate but false? Should reporters value protecting national security over telling the truth? Is it ethical to tell a lie if it allows access to important information? Journalists face difficult ethical dilemmas every day. But how do they know what to do? Are there rules? In this class we will study ethics in journalism from the time of the muckrakers to the rise of the blog.

An examination of how U.S. women writers in the twentieth and twenty-first century represent sexuality in prose. Topics to include: lesbian, queer, homoerotic, and transgender possibilities; literary strategies for encoding sexuality, including modernist experiment and uses of genre; thematic interdependencies between sexuality and race; historical contexts, including the 'inversion' model of homosexuality and the Stonewall rebellion.

Eighteenth-century England witnessed the birth of the novel, a genre that in its formative years was both lauded for its originality and condemned as intellectually and morally dangerous, especially for young women. We will trace the numerous prose genres that influenced early novelists, including conduct manuals, epistolary writing, conversion narratives, travelogues, romance, and the gothic. In doing so, we will concomitantly examine the novel's immense formal experimentation alongside debates about developing notions of gender and class as well as the feeling, thinking individual.

This course offers practice in the fundamentals of dramatic structure and technique. Weekly reading assignments will examine the unique nature of writing for the theatre, nuts and bolts of format, tools of the craft, and the playwright's process from formulating a dramatic idea to rewriting. Weekly writing assignments will include scene work, adaptation, and journaling. The course will culminate in the writing of a one-act play. Each class meeting will incorporate reading student work aloud with feedback from the instructor and the class.

The finest journalists are professors to the people. They educate citizens so as to facilitate reasoned, fact-based dialogue on subjects as diverse as politics, poverty, war, science, and the arts. We will look at journalism's role in the culture with a particular view to some of the profession's failings and foibles. Students are expected to leave the comfortable confines of the classroom as they try their hand at covering an event, writing a profile, and reporting on an issue of local significance.

What does leadership in the public sphere look like? What does it mean to be an influential leader as an elected official, a policy advocate, or a public servant? In this six-week course, we will examine research literature and case examples, and hear from speakers from different aspects in the public service realm. Topics will include leadership capacities, issue advocacy, working with constituents, women's experiences, and effective mentoring and networking. Students will complete one project relevant to public impact.

This seminar is designed for students who have transferred to Mount Holyoke to pursue a major in the sciences or mathematics. Through it, we connect you to people and resources that will help you fully engage in the sciences at Mount Holyoke. We will study an interdisciplinary science topic (the biology of stress), use the primary literature as a text, and gain practice with writing. You will learn some of the common expectations of upper-level science courses and find out about resources to help you succeed.

How are we to respond to Indian popular film, which is notorious for its distracting song and dance numbers, meandering story line, and visually overblown spectacles? This seminar will develop historical and theoretical approaches to Indian films as what scholar Lalitha Gopalan calls a 'constellation of interruptions.' Students will examine feature films in class, write critical papers on scholarly essays, and pursue independent research projects on various aspects of Indian film.