Known as a storyteller par excellence, Chaucer was also a famous reader of classical epic, romance, and philosophy. This research seminar will give students the opportunity to read the Canterbury Tales in light of the work's cultural, historical, and literary contexts. Throughout the semester, students will engage with Chaucer's tales and his favorite sources to examine and discuss his representations of gender and class, his perspectives on religious authority, his use of the English vernacular, and his commitment to poetry.

We will read plays by Shakespeare, watch films based on those plays, and study the plays, the films, and the plays-as-films. 'Shakespeare' comes first, of course, both historically and as the source/inspiration for the films. Yet each film has its own existence, to be understood not just as an 'adaptation,' but also as the product of linked artistic, technical, and economic choices.

This course focuses on the various forms the story of the grail takes in Arthurian legends from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries in the literature of England, France, and Europe. Centered in medieval English versions of the Arthurian myth, the course considers the political and cultural forces that helped shape the grail legend after the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, and over the course of the later Middle Ages, into the twentieth century. Readings from Malory, Tennyson and contemporary fiction as well as chronicles and romances.

When George Eliot's first stories were published, Charles Dickens wrote, 'The exquisite truth and delicacy both of the humor and the pathos of these stories, I have never seen the like of.' Decades later, Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.' In her letters, Eliot said she wanted to change what the novel could do. Her novels are concerned with the mysterious and mundane, with the force of culture and history, and with the reverberations that move through the world from individual to individual.

A study of the modernist movement in Britain in the early twentieth century, with the focus on the fiction and nonfiction writings of D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Readings will include Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love; Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Years. Readings will also include critical essays by each author as well as brief critical biographies and selected secondary criticism.

A study of the history of drama in Europe, America, and Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present. Readings include plays by Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, O'Casey, Pirandello, O'Neill, Brecht, Williams, Miller, Beckett, Pinter, Hansberry, Soyinka, Aidoo, Shepard, Fugard, Norman, Wilson, and Parks.

This seminar examines the variety of literary and cultural expression in South Africa since the 1970s, focusing on the relations between art and political struggle. Among the topics to be discussed are the imagination of history in South African literature; the emergence of the Black Consciousness movement (and its legacies); responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Among the authors to be studied are Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coeztee, Njabulo Ndebele, Zoe Wicomb, and Zakes Mda, along with a number of contemporary poets, playwrights, and filmmakers.

Studies of works, principally novels and short stories, by Southern writers from the late 1920s on. The main emphasis is on Faulkner; others to be read may include Tate, Welty, Hurston, O'Connor, Percy, and Martin.

This course will focus on portrayals of women in nineteenth through mid-twentieth century America, particularly in the context of nature and landscape. We will explore how women, often objectified in visual images of the period, appropriated established devices or developed new images and structures to represent womanhood in their own terms. Texts will include selected poetry, sketches, autobiographical essays or memoirs, short stories, novels, paintings, films, and photography.

This course introduces students to the field of environmental studies and to some of the scientific, historical, political, economic and cultural aspects of environmental concerns. Through interdisciplinary lenses, we explore the complexities of many issues and problems such as climate change, threats to biodiversity, and toxic environments. In addition to fostering an understanding of their origins, the course focuses on potential solutions.