This seminar introduces students to the practice of literary fieldwork. Without assuming that literature directly represents specific places, we will look at the role that place has played in reflecting and shaping collective memory and the relationship between the reader and the literary landscape. As a class, we will examine how thick descriptions of place enrich our readings of literary texts.

(Offered as ENGL 482 and FAMS 422) As an advanced seminar in Film and Media Studies, this course will explore particular figure(s), movements, and/or institutions which have been central to the development of film theory and criticism. By focusing attention on the historical context of these figures or movements, the course will enable students to develop an understanding of both film theory and historical analysis.

Is decolonial love possible? What does it look and feel like? In this course, we will read creative writers and scholars who describe the ways that imperialism, capitalism, racism, and heteropatriarchy structure conventional ways of loving, caring, and forming social bonds, as well as conventional ways of writing literature and critique. We will follow these writers as they imagine alternative practices, asking how we might alter the aspects of ourselves and our worlds that seem as fundamental and intractable as our aesthetics, our desires, and our very pleasures.

[Before 1800] Although many people believe that they know themselves better than anyone else does, it is difficult to say exactly what a “self” is. Some people believe true selves only emerge in public or in relationships, while others believe that the true self is one we tend to keep private (or “to ourselves”). To try to define selfhood is to encounter a series of paradoxes.

Examining media and literature in the orbit of Palestine, it is devastatingly clear that, as Edward Said articulated, “facts do not speak for themselves.” This class will study Palestinian literature’s potential to intervene in imperial histories that have been built on decades of ethnic cleansing and archival destruction. First, we’ll study twentieth-century Palestinian history linearly, examining narrative literature on Ottoman Palestine, the British Mandate, the 1948 Nakba, the 1967 Naksa, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Intifadas.

(Offered as ENGL 388 and FAMS 240.)

(Offered as ENGL 382 and FAMS 355) From its very beginnings, the moving image has shared a close affinity with the uncanny — the strange, mysterious, or unfamiliar. Whether in its ability to preserve the images of people and places long since passed, its disorienting illusion of live-ness, or its fantastic depictions of impossible worlds, cinema has long elicited shock, amazement, and unease in its spectators.

(Offered as ENGL 360, BLST 360, and SWAG 360) This course explores the life and writings of American author James Baldwin. Born in poverty-stricken Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance (where he spent his childhood as a Pentecostal boy-preacher), Baldwin went on to become one of the twentieth century’s most influential essayists, novelists, orators, and political commentators---particularly around issues related to American race relations.

(Offered as ENGL 352 and AMST 355) In this course, we will leave the classroom and get out on the land. The class begins in winter, a time when many people huddle indoors. We will instead go outside and read the winterland, beginning with a tracking workshop. Readings will include Robin Kimmerer’s influential essay, “The Language of Animacy,” which uses the lens of Indigenous languages to reconsider the boundaries of personhood. We will discuss how language shapes the ways in which we categorize other beings, such as animals and trees, as well as other humans.

How do stories move? What are the uses and limitations of the term “plot” in describing movement or development in narrative? What culturally-specific assumptions and expectations about storytelling are bound up with conventional notions of plot, and how can we, as writers and readers, unravel them? In this advanced fiction writing course, students will explore these questions and more through writing, reading, sharing, and thoughtfully critiquing fiction that challenges, resists, or forgoes linear or sequential narrative.