(Offered as ENST-270 and SOCI-270) Food and farming make fundamental connections between humans and the earth. This course examines how agriculture, food systems, and rural development are entangled with environmental and social transformations around the world, and how we can cultivate solutions for global health, sustainability and social justice.

This course is built around core readings on key policies and agencies of environmental governance in the US. It will provide students with a strong grasp of the most important environmental legislation in the United States (such as the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act). We will explore how existing environmental laws and institutions have provided important environmental protections, and also where they have fallen short.

This course provides an introduction to environmental science. Students will gain an understanding of the interactions between the biotic, which is inclusive of people, and the physical components of the Earth system. Through lecture, analysis of scientific literature, and lab we address topics such as biodiversity, agriculture, water resources, atmospheric pollution and climate change, and renewable and non-renewable energy, linking central scientific concepts to local, regional, and global case studies.

This course provides an introduction to environmental science. Students will gain an understanding of the interactions between the biotic, which is inclusive of people, and the physical components of the Earth system. Through lecture, analysis of scientific literature, and lab we address topics such as biodiversity, agriculture, water resources, atmospheric pollution and climate change, and renewable and non-renewable energy, linking central scientific concepts to local, regional, and global case studies.

This course provides an introduction to environmental science. Students will gain an understanding of the interactions between the biotic, which is inclusive of people, and the physical components of the Earth system. Through lecture, analysis of scientific literature, and lab we address topics such as biodiversity, agriculture, water resources, atmospheric pollution and climate change, and renewable and non-renewable energy, linking central scientific concepts to local, regional, and global case studies.

(Offered as ENGL 480 and FAMS 411) The “essay” derives its meaning from the original French essayer: to try or attempt. In its attempts to work through and experiment with new ideas, the essay form becomes a manifestation of observation, experience, and transformation. Originally developed through the written form, the essay has also taken shape in visual work–photographic, installation, and, of course, cinematic. The “essay film” is exploratory, digressive, subjective; the “video essay” is similarly personal and simultaneously transformative.

This advanced research seminar reframes “accent” as something that conditions not just speaking, but also looking, listening, acting, reading, and thinking. There is no such thing as a voice without an accent, and yet, colloquially as well as in scholarly literature on voice – from film studies to linguistics to machine learning – accents are treated as the exception rather than the rule. We will begin with the opposite premise.

Avant-garde poetry resists definition. In this class, we will explore poetry that defies convention, be it formal (exploding the poetic verse line), material (appearing outside of the conventional venues of the published, mass-produced book), or linguistic (using everyday language rather than poetic diction).  We will read widely from a range of twentieth- and twenty-first century poets as well as important nineteenth-century forebears.

An advanced writing workshop devoted to the reading and writing of novellas.  We will study such novellas as Samantha Lan Chang’s Hunger, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ted Chiang’s The Story of Your Life, and Danielle Evans’ The Office of Historical Corrections, in order to get a sense of the parameters and scope of this in-between form.  Students will write up to ten pages per week with the aim of composing and revising a work of 70-80 pages by the end of the semester.

In this course, we will follow the trajectory of U.S. Black writing from its origins to 1940, paying particular attention to the extraordinarily rich diasporic culture out of which that writing grew. The sounds of Black living, in particular, will inform our approach to the rhythms and patterns of Black writing. We will also address the use of white textual models in early U.S. Black literature, with an emphasis on the artfulness of the way in which Black writers bent the traditions of British and American writing to their own uses.