This is a colloquium in creative nonfiction writing that takes science and the environment as its subject matter. Students research and write a series of magazine-style, general-audience articles about science, scientists and ordinary people affected by such concerns as disease or global warming. Along the way, students hone their interviewing and research skills and expressive capabilities while contending with issues of factual accuracy, creative license, authority responsibility and the basic tenets of longform nonfiction.

Romantic writers were obsessed with uncertainty, ignorance and the irrational, unthinking mind. Concerned with the unusual ideas that surface when one is sleeping or spaced out, absorbed or intoxicated, Romanticism embraced reason’s alternatives: forgetting, fragmentation, stupidity and spontaneous, uncontrollable emotion. From Wordsworth’s suggestion that children are wiser than adults, to Keats’s claim that great writers are capable of remaining uncertain without reaching for fact or reason, Romantic poets and novelists suggested that one has something to learn from not thinking.

Shakespeare has been both celebrated for his strong female roles—from independent heroines like Rosalind to formidable villains like Lady Macbeth—and condemned for the troubling politics of gender, class and race that he stages. Over the past fifty years, feminist scholars, writers and directors have grappled with this apparent contradiction via boundary-breaking criticism, radical imaginative work and transgressive productions of the Bard’s most difficult plays.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Henry IV, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest and Shakespeare's sonnets. Not open to first-year students.

Introduction to Anglophone fiction, poetry, drama and memoir from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia in the aftermath of the British empire.

Offered as AFR 175 and ENG 236. A survey of the evolution of African American literature during the 20th century. This class builds on the foundations established in AFR 113, Survey of Afro-American Literature 1746 to 1900. Writers include Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall.

This course focuses on the extraordinary burst of literary creativity that coincided with the emergence of a new American nation.

In this course students read as writers and write as readers, analyzing the poetic devices and strategies employed in a diverse range of contemporary poetry, gaining practical use of these elements to create a portfolio of original work and developing the skills of critique and revision. In addition, students read and write on craft issues and attend Poetry Center readings and Q&A’s. May be repeated. Enrollment limited to 12. Writing sample and instructor permission required.

A reading of Anglo-Saxon England’s most powerful and significant poem, invoking the world of barbarian Europe after the fall of Rome.