While focusing on topical environmental issues, students learn how to gather, analyze and present data using methods from the natural and social sciences. Data are drawn from multiple sources, including laboratory experiments, fieldwork, databases, archival sources, surveys and interviews. Emphasis is on quantitative analysis. Environmental topics vary in scale from the local to the global. Corequisite: ENV 202. Prerequisite: ENV 101. Enrollment limited to 18.

Earth has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, characterized by the accelerating impact of human activities on the Earth’s ecosystems. All over the globe, humans have transformed the environment and have sometimes created catastrophic dynamics within social-ecological systems. Scientists have studied these phenomena for decades, alerting both the general public and policy-makers of the consequences of human actions. However, despite convincing evidence of environmental degradation, humans continue to radically transform their environment.

What is poetry’s role in bearing witness to an age of seemingly unremitting emergency? How can poets represent and respond to ongoing crises such as collapsing public health infrastructure, racialized police brutality and environmental devastation? Conversely, what is poetry’s relationship to highly mediatized “crisis events” like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina? Through literary and cultural analysis, this course explores and historicizes the concept of “emergency” in the United States. What is a state of emergency, and who gets to declare it?

In this class students closely read the novels of Jane Austen, focusing on her innovations in narrative form and style, while putting the novels in the context of early nineteenth-century British literature and culture. The discussions consider how Austen delineates the nuances of feeling, embodiment and attachment, her complex use of the marriage plot and her incisive and often ironic social commentary. At the forefront are issues of gender, power, politics, history, marriage, love and class, and a close and careful attention to narrative form, technique and style. Enrollment limited to 30.

This course helps more advanced fiction writers improve their skills in a supportive workshop context, which encourages experimentation and attention to craft. The course focuses on technique, close reading, and the production of new work. Students submit manuscripts for discussion, receive feedback from peers, and revise their work. They keep a process journal and practice mindfulness to cultivate powers of focus and observation. Students read Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose and short fiction by authors in different genres.

The body of literature written by Asian American women over the past 100 years or so has been recognized as forming a coherent tradition even as it grows and expands to include newcomers and divergent voices under its umbrella. What conditions enabled its emergence? How have the qualities and concerns of this tradition been defined? What makes a text--fiction, poetry, memoir, mixed-genre--central or marginal to the tradition and how do emergent writers take this tradition in new directions?

A study of England's first cosmopolitan poet whose Canterbury Tales offer a chorus of medieval literary voices, while creating a new kind of poetry anticipating modern attitudes and anxieties through colorful, complex characters like the Wife of Bath. The class reads these tales closely in Chaucer's Middle English, an expressive idiom, ranging from the funny, sly and ribald to the thoughtful and profound. John Dryden called Chaucer the "father of English poesy," but if so, he was a good one.