A study of women’s literature before 1800, this course examines how feminine voices were presented and heard in their historical contexts. Readings for the class are drawn from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century, and ask students to think through the conditions of feminine authorship and identity in the pre-modern period.
A study of several plays written before 1600.
This course examines major authors of the period from 1680 to 1800, including Behn, Dryden, Swift, Pope, Gay, Johnson, Gray, Goldsmith, and Burns. Topics may include Restoration cultures and theater, neoclassicism, satire, and sensibility.
A survey of British poetry and non-fiction prose of the Victorian era (1837 to 1901). Texts include poetry by Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, D.G. Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, and Hardy, as well as prose by Carlyle, Darwin, Arnold, Ruskin, Morris, and Wilde.
Many people know one sentence from early American literature: Puritan leader John Winthrop’s 1630 claim that “we shall be as a City on a Hill.” Often misinterpreted as a promise of inevitable national success, these words were actually a warning that America’s redemptive promises carried the risk of disastrous and conspicuous failure. This course traces the efforts of English-language writers to respond to both the promises and the failures of the tiny colonial settlements that became the United States. Authors studied include Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman.
“In the four quarters of the globe,” sneered the English critic Sidney Smith in 1820, “who reads an American book?” This course introduces the U.S. writers who answered Smith’s challenge, such as Hannah Webster Foster, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry James, Charles W. Chesnutt, Willa Cather, and Theodore Dreiser. They invented a distinctively American novel and in the process produced masterpieces that are still recognized in all four quarters of the globe.
This course introduces students to modern Irish and Northern Irish poetry, fiction, and drama, beginning with Yeats and the last phase of the Celtic Revival and reaching up through the short-lived Celtic Tiger of the Twenty-First Century. These texts are concerned with borders and bequests of all kinds, but class discussions focus primarily on literary responses to high modernism, cultural nationalism and the Irish language, sectarian violence, and the role of the Catholic Church. The survey explores these historical and cultural contexts, observes the different kinds of critical attention these genres demand, and emphasizes the practice of close reading.
The course examines perceptions of truth, history, and humanity by looking at official historical records alongside narrative such as gossip, secrets, and hearsay. This comparative study will open challenging conversations about authoritative history and power by surveying the slave and neo-slave genres alongside the critical texts of scholars such as Zora Neale Hurston and Saidiya Hartman. In doing so, students will develop an ethic of engaging difficult histories and violent transatlantic archives. By surveying the shaping of narrative from the 19th to the 21st century, students will tune their ears to hear the silences of Black stories and the erasures of master narratives.
A study of twentieth-century literature written in English from Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, concentrating on colonial and post-colonial themes, as well as issues of gender, politics, and nationalism. Possible authors include Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, V. S. Naipaul, and Derek Walcott.
This course supports students in conceiving and writing an honors thesis. Students explore the research and writing methods required by a thesis, such as creating a project bibliography, reading scholarship critically, identifying a compelling research question, drafting sections, and bringing multiple pieces of writing together into an extended work of scholarship. The writing for this course will culminate in a polished draft of the thesis.
Environmental Sciences
Data science plays a critically important role in guiding and monitoring sustainable development goals that seek to align environmental, social, and economic progress. This course explores the intersection of data science and sustainable development, with a practical focus on several core skills: managing real-world datasets, data visualization design, reproducible workflows, complex project management, and impactful data-driven storytelling. Students learn tools such as interactive data dashboards, data storyboards and blogs, automated report generation, data cleaning, data repositories, version control, and data entry software design. They then apply these skills to investigate and communicate emerging issues in sustainable development.
Environmental Studies
An interdisciplinary introduction to Environmental Studies through the examination of the scientific and social aspects of environmental issues. Field components of the course focus on the University Domain and the surrounding area. This course is required for all students who major or minor in environmental studies and should be taken before the junior year.
Students conduct experiments in nonfiction writing and critique, informed by study of the local environment and notable contemporary essays that discuss how "nature" is understood and represented. Class activities focus on literary craft, peer critique, and revision of written work. Field study provides both substance and inspiration for student writing.
An introduction to Environmental Arts and Humanities, this course acquaints students with the diverse perspectives offered by environmental approaches in the fields of literature, history, art, art history, classical studies, music, philosophy, anthropology, and religion. Students are expected to integrate three of these perspectives in a transdisciplinary research project.
As an introduction to the geologic, physical, chemical, and biological processes of the world's ocean, this course emphasizes its complex relationships with human cultures. Students in this course engage with a mix of readings from scientific journals, textbooks, and classic literature while conducting their own scientific reviews to pursue questions at the frontiers of ocean sciences.
This seminar-style course exposes students to literature on a variety of issues related to climate change and other examples of our dynamic global environment including natural resource use and natural hazards.
An introduction to the basic concepts and applications of geographic information systems (GIS). Topics include geographic data acquisition, data management, cartography, and methods of geospatial analysis. Laboratory exercises and projects focus on applications of GIS in understanding and managing the environment. Laboratory course.
An introduction to the basic concepts and applications of geographic information systems (GIS). Topics include geographic data acquisition, data management, cartography, and methods of geospatial analysis. Laboratory exercises and projects focus on applications of GIS in understanding and managing the environment. Laboratory course.
An introduction to the basic concepts and applications of geographic information systems (GIS). Topics include geographic data acquisition, data management, cartography, and methods of geospatial analysis. Laboratory exercises and projects focus on applications of GIS in understanding and managing the environment. Laboratory course.
This course introduces students to the most influential factors shaping the ecosystems and their conservation, looking at the global, regional and local factors that determine the climates and the contrasting ecosystems that can be found in Ecuador. The course includes several field visits to the Ecuadorian Amazon (Tiputini Biodiversity Station) and the Galapagos Islands. Thus, allowing students to experience first-hand current topics of conservation and policy issues, while discussing the main environmental challenges associated with the conservation of natural ecosystems in tropical developing countries.