Known as a storyteller par excellence, Chaucer was also a famous reader of classical epic, romance, and philosophy. This research seminar will give students the opportunity to read the Canterbury Tales in light of the work's cultural, historical, and literary contexts. Throughout the semester, students will engage with Chaucer's tales and his favorite sources to examine and discuss his representations of gender and class, his perspectives on religious authority, his use of the English vernacular, and his commitment to poetry.

William Wordsworth and George Eliot grew up in a revolutionary age: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, wars of independence and of imperial conquest, and, behind it all, the social transformations arising from the industrial revolution. Both Wordsworth and Eliot wrestled with how to adapt their art to these new realities: he introduced dramatically new content into poetry and experimented with a startling variety of poetic forms; she transformed the various prose genres to construct a novelistic form able to represent the totality of British society.

This course examines contemporary Asian American film and visual culture through the lens of cultural recovery, self-invention, and experimentation. Focusing primarily on film and photography, we will explore issues of race and visuality, Hollywood orientalism, memory and postmemory, and racial impersonation and parody. Students will engage with a variety of theoretical and critical approaches. Artists may include Nikki S. Lee, Margaret Cho, Tseng Kwong Chi, Jin-me Yoon, Justin Lin, Binh Dahn, Richard Fung, Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, and Alice Wu.

Revenge plots display an enduring popularity. We will examine plays and films that show the range of possibilities, exploring: narratives focused on gender, race, and class; the place of family in revenge plots; the "underdog" tale; the importance of religion to ideas of justice; and the way in which genre influences notions of vengeance.

This course brings together literatures from Anglophone South Asia and Africa to explore how belonging to the nation is complicated by realities of marginalization and displacement. Postcolonial histories demonstrate tensions between the ideological aspirations of the nation as home and the reality of internal conflicts and wars that expose the limits of belonging. Texts include novels, literary criticism, and critical theory on internal displacement and refugees, the gendered and ethnic minorities, the political other, and trauma.

Discover how the forces of nature shape our understanding of the cosmos. Explore the origin, structure, and evolution of the earth, moons and planets, comets and asteroids, the sun and other stars, star clusters, the Milky Way and other galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and the universe as a whole.

A hands-on introduction to observing and understanding the extraterrestrial sky. Daily and annual motions of the sun, moon, planets, and stars; celestial coordinate systems; apparent brightnesses and colors of the stars; time; calendars. Observations at the Williston Observatory with the unaided eye, visually with the eight-inch telescope, and by electronic camera with computer-controlled telescopes.

A hands-on introduction to observing and understanding the extraterrestrial sky. Daily and annual motions of the sun, moon, planets, and stars; celestial coordinate systems; apparent brightnesses and colors of the stars; time; calendars. Observations at the Williston Observatory with the unaided eye, visually with the eight-inch telescope, and by electronic camera with computer-controlled telescopes.

This course will survey the past, present, and future of the exploration and science of the planet Venus. We will focus on the evolution of Venus as a paradigm for Earth's possible future. We will have specific units on interiors, heat flow, thermal evolution, magnetism, volcanism, impacts, crustal composition and mineralogy, and spectroscopy of its surface. This is a discussion-based, interactive seminar with students and faculty reading current papers from the literature.

A calculus-based introduction to the properties, structure, formation, and evolution of stars and galaxies. The laws of gravity, thermal physics, and atomic physics provide a basis for understanding observed properties of stars, interstellar gas, and dust. We apply these concepts to develop an understanding of stellar atmospheres, interiors, and evolution, the interstellar medium, and the Milky Way and other galaxies.