(Offered as BIOL 230 and ENST 210.) A study of the relationships of plants and animals (including humans) to each other and to their environment. We'll start by considering the decisions an individual makes in its daily life concerning its use of resources, such as what to eat and where to live, and whether to defend such resources. We'll then move on to populations of individuals, and investigate species population growth, limits to population growth, and why some species are so successful as to become pests whereas others are on the road to extinction.

(Offered as ENGL 485 and FAMS 485.)  How do words and images bring each other to life?  How have different graphic and material instantiations articulated their separation or union?  This seminar will explore the relationship between word and image across different media forms and historical periods, continually asking how they mutually animate, constrain, and give shape to one another.

(Offered as ENGL 483, FAMS 426, and WAGS 483.)  This seminar will be devoted to the study of feminism and film, considering the ways feminism has shaped both film theory and film practice.  Though focusing in large part on post-1968 writings, which largely ushered in semiotic, psychoanalytic, and feminist theory to film studies, we will also consider early writings by women from the 1910s-1950s in a range of venues–from fan magazines to film journals–that developed points of view regarding women’s practices as both artists and audience members.  We will also

By working through a combination of creative non-fiction, film, and prose texts, this course in literary theory and textual analysis explores some of the assumed tensions between experiences generally described as real and those described as imaginary.  Over the course of the semester we will consider how literature enlarges personal experience, even as we also attend to what happens when art approaches the limits of representation.  Some of our particular concerns will include:  learning how to draw relationships between texts and their social and historical moments; how to

“Experience is the Angled Road / Preferred against the Mind / By–Paradox–the Mind itself–” she explained in one poem and in this course we will make use of the resources of the town of Amherst to play experience and mind off each other in our efforts to come to terms with her elusive poetry.  The course will meet in the Dickinson Homestead, visit the Evergreens (her brother Austen’s house, and a veritable time capsule), make use of Dickinson manuscripts in the College archives, and set her work in the context of other nineteenth-century writers inclu

A seminar devoted to the work of an eclectic list of poets active from the 1850s to the 2010s:  Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot, Robert Francis, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, James Merrill, and Seamus Heaney.

Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, with preference to junior English majors.  Although an English Department seminar, students not majoring in English are welcome.  Limited to 15 students.  Fall semester.  Professor Sofield and Simpson Lecturer Wilbur.

Although little studied as a separate literary form, the book of interlinked short stories is a prominent (and increasingly popular) form of modern fiction.  This course will slowly read and closely examine a variety of these compositions in order to better understand how they achieve their coherence and how they structure a larger story through an unfolding sequence of independent narratives.  Works likely to be considered include Joyce’s Dubliners, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Hemingway’s In Our Time, Eudora Welty’s