This course provides an overview of the field of history of American Literature for youth with an emphasis on literature from the 1960s to the current day. Students will read diverse literature from multiple genres and engage in thoughtful analysis of the literature as it reflects the historical, cultural, psychological and sociological nature of American society past, present, or future.

This section examines the major ideas, shifts, expansions, and disruptions of the Victorian period. We will discuss prose, poetry, fiction, and art to understand how these forms engage with movements in voting rights, industry, living conditions, money, gender, definitions of class, and imperialist expansion. Writers may include Arnold, Carlyle, Martineau, Mill, Eliot, Dickens, Bronte, W. Collins, Browning, Rossetti, Hopkins, and many others, as well as painters and current readings in criticism and theory.

This course examines how digital storytelling (DST) may enhance bilingual literacy. Students will assist Spanish-speaking residents in Springfield during the completion of an English-language digital storytelling workshop imparted by the Latino Youth Media Institute. Grounded in New Media Literacies and Latina/o studies, students will bring their own interests and disciplinary expertise as we evaluate and refine our experimental use of DST to promote bilingualism. Five College faculty and community partners will support our multidisciplinary and digital project.

This topics course explores the life, affiliations, and ideas of a political theorist who has made a special contribution to the self-understanding of our age. In addition to the writings by that thinker, we also will read biographies and secondary commentaries as well as selected essays by authors who have influenced our thinker or who have been influenced by her or him.

An introduction to some of the great critical voices of the nineteenth century. We will explore the ideas of such mutinous thinkers as Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, focusing on the style as well as the substance of their theoretical works. The course will highlight their competing notions of the clash between appearance and reality, the logic and historical trajectory of domination and subordination, the basis and function of religion and morality, and the place of reason and irrationality in social life.

Art and music are a part of all human cultures. Is there something about the human brain that drives us to paint and sing? We will examine how the brain simultaneously processes different aspects of visual and auditory stimuli, ask how this processing may affect the way we do art and music, and explore where these phenomena may occur in the brain. As we engage in discussion and hands-on activities, we will discover the commonalities between the arts and the sciences including practice, experimentation, exploration, innovation, and creativity.

A research seminar on the late nineteenth-century transformation of Japan from a feudal state ruled by hereditary warriors into a modern nation-state ruled by a cabinet, a legislature, and a professionalized bureaucracy under the symbolic sovereignty of a sacred monarch. A turning point in East Asia's modern history, this revolution shaped the following century throughout the region and remains a subject of intense scholarly and popular interest.

Writing in South Asian languages (e.g., Hindi, Tamil) and English, modern Indian and South Asian writers, both women and men, have responded to colonialism, nationalism and the partition of India, and spoken for social and gender justice. They have imagined ways of being a person and belonging in and emerging from South Asia, in modernity, in families, nations and the world. We will examine these themes and study style and form in the novels, short stories and essays of major writers, including Rabindranath Tagore, R. K.

This course examines aspects of American art and culture from the Civil War to the turn of the twentieth century. Classes will be thematic, and art will be linked up with ideas, trends, events, and novels of the period. Among the themes to be treated are: naturalism, masculinity, nervousness, street culture, and reform. Key artists include Sargent, Eakins, Homer, Bellows, and Sloan.

The seminar studies the collecting and display of Greek and Roman objects from antiquity to the present. We will look at current and past controversies about plunder and cultural patrimony. Students will engage in firsthand study of coins, vases, statues, portraits, frescoes, and mosaics and conduct advanced research on their original functions and contexts. Trips to museum collections will offer opportunties to assess installations of ancient objects in modern settings.