(Offered as HIST 402 [^c] and ENST 401.) Wine is as old as Western civilization. Its consumption is deeply wedded to leading religious and secular traditions around the world. Its production has transformed landscapes, ecosystems, and economies. In this course we examine how wine has shaped the history of Europe, North Africa, and the Americas.

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.

Independent Reading Courses.

Fall and spring semester. The Department.

(Offered as ENGL 486 and FAMS 456.) How can we write histories of media?  How are media written about, used, designed, preserved and sometimes discarded?  Where are the relics of past media stored and what do these alternative paths not taken and now forgotten futures of media say about different historical moments and the present?  This seminar will explore theories and practices of media archaeology and historiography by both examining different scholarly responses to the above questions while also learning about forms of media preservation at various archives throughout th

This course explores psychoanalytic theory beyond Freud.  Reading the work of modern and contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers in depth, we will ask as well what their theories teach us about reading itself.  We will cover a range of modern psychoanalytic approaches, from ego psychology to the British object relations school to “contemporary Freudian revisionists.”  Writers may include Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, Harry Stack Sullivan, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, W.R.D. Fairbairn, D.W.

This course’s primary objective is to enable students to conduct independent and substantive research in literary studies.  The vehicle to meet these goals will be the traditional canon of American literature.  Reading, considering, and evaluating recent scholarship on a selection of canonical American literary texts will demonstrate how different theoretical frames and methodological approaches reveal textual content and meaning in unexpected ways.  Such practices reconstitute our sense of even the most familiar texts.  We will study this scholarship–in area

What if the past is not behind us, but spiraling within our present?  How are indigenous conceptions of time expressed in Native American writing?  How do Native novelists enable us to imagine a past, present, and future that are intertwined, embedded in place, and spiraling in constant motion?  How does the creation of a fictional world, so similar to ours, allow us to envision alternative models of gender, sexuality, race, and nationhood?  This seminar will invite in-depth exploration of contemporary Native American fiction, through frameworks drawn from oral tradition

(Offered as ENGL 456, BLST 441 [US], and FAMS 451.) This class begins with narratives about individuals who pass–that is, who come to be recognized as someone different from whom they were sexually or racially “born as.”  Such stories suggest that one’s identity depends minimally on the body into which one is born, and is more attached to the supplementation and presentation of that body in support of whichever cultural story the body is desired to tell.  Drawing on familiar liberal humanist claims, which centralize human identity in the mind, these na

In this course, students will become proficient in research methods related to the study of poetry.  Focusing on select periods from the English language poetic tradition, we will read poems alongside historical contexts, critical essays, and contemporary treatises on poetics.  The central question we will explore is, how can close reading benefit from secondary research?  Students will be expected to present course material, and to choose a specific poet or group of poems as the basis of the final project, a long literary critical research paper.

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.