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.

Over the past three decades, the new field of Environmental Humanities has become a widely recognized area of research and cultural engagement. Bringing together insights and approaches from fields as diverse as history, philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, literature, gender studies, the performing and visual arts, cultural studies, and communication studies, practitioners of the Environmental Humanities have been exploring new ways to understand, evaluate, and address planetary ecological crises and sustainability issues.

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.

Open to senior English majors who wish to pursue a self-defined project in reading and writing. Students intending to elect this course must submit to the Department a five-page description and rationale for the proposed independent study. Those who propose projects in fiction, verse, playwriting, or autobiography must submit a substantial sample of work in the appropriate mode; students wishing to undertake critical projects must include a tentative bibliography with their proposal.

This is a non-required course for English majors who are currently working on a creative writing or hybrid thesis project. It is meant to offer guidance and a sense of community to these writers as they embark on what can feel like a formidable process. In this course, we will discuss and analyze examples of senior theses in various forms, and discuss issues peculiar to the task of planning, researching, and writing a project of this scope. We will read together to help writers identify models and understand the literary tradition(s) they are working in.

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] What can retellings of eighteenth-century anglophone texts tell us about the original texts? This course centers on the relationship between eighteenth-century texts (including poetry, novels, plays and poems) and recent critical fabulations, adaptations, and works of historical fiction focused on this period. We will question what makes the eighteenth century a source of continued fascination.

(Offered as ENGL 380 and FAMS 382) How do we “know” television today? That is, how do we understand its very definitions, and how do we approach an investigation of it? Shifts in programming, platforms, and viewing habits have quite literally altered how we see it, but do they also alter how we know it? In order to explore these questions, this course will focus on television’s representation of detection and its work as an investigative medium itself.

(Offered as ENGL 372 and SWAG 365) Do people the world over love in the same way, or does romance mean different things in different cultures? What happens when love violates social norms? Is the “romance” genre an escape from real-world conflicts or a resolution of them? This course analyzes romantic narratives from across the world through the lens of feminist theories of sexuality, marriage, and romance.