(Offered as: ASLC-XXX, ENGL-356 (before 1800), RELI-256) At the heart of Buddhism is the story of Siddhartha Gautama, a young prince who had everything but renounced it all to become a homeless wanderer, attain awakening, and found one of the world's largest religions 2,500 years ago. His story has been told in countless ways in literature, art, and ritual practice. It is a story that begins in his distant previous lives and encompasses a vast time-scape of pursuing human perfection. It also includes the stories of his family and closest disciples.

This course will examine a variety of ethical dilemmas writers face, and face with particular intensity in our current moment. We will consider identity/representation, appropriation, representing violence and self-harm, standards of “truth” in memoir, cancellation, and the ethics and politics of the creative writing workshop.

(Offered as ENGL 316 and SWAG 316) “From whence comes my help?” “From where does your strength come?” The psalmist and Adrienne Rich ask these questions, which we will face while we read coming-of-age narratives that fit in a genre known by its German name, the Bildungsroman. These novels go beyond the pilgrimage out of adolescence, and into explicit representation of intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual growth experienced in unison with sexual development, awakenings, thrills, mishaps, and marriage.

This course situates Asian American studies in conversation with feminist and queer of color critiques. For years, Asian American literary formation was shaped by a heteromasculinist ideology, but this course asks: What happens when we place queerness at the heart of Asian American cultural production? The course will teach students queer methods of reading against the grain, but it will also immerse them in queer alternatives to that canon. Throughout, the course will chart the literary, artistic, and scholarly genealogies of queer Asian American writers and artists.

(Offered as ENGL 278 and BLST 212 [A]) This course will examine how African writers incorporate digital technologies into their work when they publish traditional print texts, experiment with digital formats, or use the internet to redefine their relationship to local and international audiences. We will reflect on how words and values shift in response to new forms of mediation; on the limits these forms place on the bodies they represent, and on the protections they occasionally offer.

This course is a survey of U.S. LGBTQ literature, culture, and media in the fifty-five years since the landmark 1969 Stonewall Rebellions (widely acknowledged as the “birth” of the modern U.S. LGBTQ human rights/civil rights movement). Our exploration of queer narratives will take two tracks. We will trace a variety of cultural “narratives” associated with LGBTQ+ identities and experiences, including narratives of resistance, transness, coming out/inviting in, fabulosity, dis/ease, exile, butch/femme subjectivities and more.

(Offered as ENGL 256 and BLST 256 [D]) In this course, we will develop a thoughtful understanding of the idea of Africa and the African diaspora and a complex appreciation of the meanings of black presence in the world. We will ask five questions that will allow us to explore the ways literary and philosophical texts from Africa and the African Diaspora challenge the Global Matrix of Power, question anti-Black racism in philosophy, literature, and cultural studies, and shape conceptions of being and identity in Africa and the African diaspora, namely: What is Africa?

(Offered as ENGL 251 and FAMS 251) This course will explore how the cinematic practice of representing reality – or as it is commonly known, documentary – has given rise to distinct formal conventions, audience expectations, film movements, ethical problems, political commitments, institutional frameworks, and communities of makers and viewers. Documentary, perhaps most famously defined by the Scottish filmmaker John Grierson as “the creative representation of reality,” is as old as cinema itself.

A first course in writing fiction. Emphasis will be on experimentation as well as on developing skill and craft. Workshop (discussion) format.

Limited to 15 students. Fall semester section 1: Lecturer Sweeney. Fall semester section 2: Visiting Lecturer Gaige. Spring semester: Postdoctoral Fellow Mysore.

How to handle overenrollment: The instructor will seek to achieve representative equity (majors, class years, gender, background, etc.).

A first course in writing fiction. Emphasis will be on experimentation as well as on developing skill and craft. Workshop (discussion) format.

Limited to 15 students. Fall semester section 1: Lecturer Sweeney. Fall semester section 2: Visiting Lecturer Gaige. Spring semester: Postdoctoral Fellow Mysore.

How to handle overenrollment: The instructor will seek to achieve representative equity (majors, class years, gender, background, etc.).