A survey of American literature from the literature of exploration to the Civil War, with special attention to the formation of an American literary tradition, along with the political, social, and religious contexts that helped shape the imaginative responses of American writers to their culture.

his course surveys historical representations of Black female subjects in the literature of the African Diaspora. We will read The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat, Efuru by Flora Nwapa, and We Need New Names by Noviolet Bulawayo as well as a curated list of short stories. Our discussions will center on the changing notions of values for these women as a result of their geographical location: how does space/relationship to land shape African/American women's identities?

An examination of the gothic -- a world of fear, haunting, claustrophobia, paranoia, and monstrosity -- in U.S. literature and visual culture. Topics include race, slavery, and the gothic; gender, sexuality, and the gothic; regional gothic; the uncanny; cinematic and pictorial gothic; pandemic gothic. Authors, artists, and filmmakers may include Dunbar, Elmer, Faulkner, Gilman, Hitchcock, Jackson, Kubrick, LaValle, Lovecraft, McCullers, Morrison, O'Connor, Parks, Peele, Poe, Polanski, Romero, and Wood.

This course introduces students to Asian American literature, considering its historical origins and evolution. Throughout the course we explore questions of identity, immigration and citizenship, generational conflict, war and migration, and mixed and cross-racial politics. Readings of primary texts will be supplemented by historical and critical source materials. Authors may include Nina Revoyr, Ruth Ozeki, Nam Le, Chang-rae Lee, Aimee Phan, Susan Choi, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

This course will examine literary texts that represent new forms of visuality in nineteenth-century Britain as well as examples of visual culture that provide a framework for reading Victorian culture in innovative ways. We will study nineteenth-century photography--portraiture, prison photography, imperial photographs, and private and popular erotic images--as well as novels and autobiographical writing that engage with new photographic technology and its transformation of the ways in which Victorians understood identity, politics, aesthetics, and representation.

How can we change our ideas and enactments of white, Western subjectivity and being? This course contends that one transhistorical figure for such revolution is shapeshifting, and we will read examples in novels, poetry, memoir, and other nineteenth-century and contemporary media. Special attention will be paid to texts, then and now, that speak to queer/trans, disability, and critical race discourses as significant sites of resistance to Western being through bodily transformation. A substantial amount of time will be spent on individual research and methodologies.

Language is a living system. It grows and changes, despite efforts to preserve it. This course examines how slang participates in these changes. What separates slang from standard language, and who sets the standard? Through readings in linguistics and literature, this course examines how we use language to connect, create, and control.

This course introduces speaking, reading, and writing German. Cultural and literary readings together with frequent use of video and other online resources dealing with everyday situations and experiences in the German-speaking countries sensitize students to the cultural context in which the language is used. Weekly conversation sessions with a German language assistant supplement class work.