Life has existed on Earth for nearly four billion years, shaped by massive extinction events. In the short span of the last 10,000 years, humans have become important agents in shaping global environmental change. The question this course considers is straightforward: Have humans been modifying the environment in ways that will, in the not distant future, cause another worldwide extinction event? There are no simple, much less uncontested, answers to this question. We will have to consider the ways we have altered habitats and ecosystem processes.

(Offered as ENGL 491 and BLST 461 [CLA].)  What would it mean to write in the language in which we dream?  A language that we can hear, but cannot (yet) see?  Is it possible to conceive a language outside the socio-symbolic order?  And can one language subvert the codes and values of another?  Questions like these have animated the creolité/nation language debate among Caribbean intellectuals since the mid-1970s, producing some of the most significant francophone and anglophone writing of the twentieth century.  This course reads across philosophy, cultu

Independent Reading Courses.

Fall and spring semester. The Department.

(Offered as ENGL 488 and FAMS 488.)  This course will examine questions of the origins of cinema and notions of its demise.  From its inception, cinema has shaped and informed a critical relationship to modern popular culture.  Recent technological innovations have dislodged the cinema from its position as a distinctive arbiter of public experience and aesthetic engagement, as new mediums and new methods of dissemination proliferate in our networked society.  Claims about the “death of cinema” and the predominance of “new media” will be investigat

(Offered as ENGL 480 and FAMS 480.)  This seminar will introduce students to the methodologies of film history, covering recent questions in the field of cinema studies as well as more general work on historical and archival practice.  We will explore concepts such as historical spectatorship and reception, the intellectual history of film theory, production and studio history, the history of narrative and form, and national and transnational film history.  Students will also be introduced to the practical matters of historical research such as utilizing special collections (

Are we most ourselves when we are alone?  Is creativity made more possible by solitude?  Why do artists and writers tend to be seen as more solitary than other kinds of people?

[before 1800]  Shaped at the convergence of new technologies of print and performance, the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries marked a key moment in the history of media.  Ever since then, the plays have been on the edge of media change, including the rise of cinema, television, multimedia theatre, digital texts and archives, and interactive pedagogies.  This course surveys a range of drama and spectacle that originated in early modern England and survives today in media the Renaissance could not have imagined.  We will attend closely to the changing relation be

This is an advanced writing course for students seeking to move their fiction writing into longer forms. Students will be expected to complete at least 60 pages of new writing, comprised of three different “approaches” to novel writing. Readings will be extensive, including published novels, the work of peers, and essays on theory and craft. One class meeting per week.