This course explores the contemporary Anglophone novel since 1989, a period that coincides with the increased pace of globalization. Written largely from transnational perspectives that defy traditional national boundaries, the novels in this course share a common concern with capturing global experience and analyzing the cultural and economic impact of globalization. Potential readings include works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, and Ruth Ozeki.
A study of several plays after 1600.
A study of the major seventeenth-century poets, concentrating on such poets' redefinitions of genre, mode, and source. Readings emphasize works by Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Herrick, Milton, and Marvell.
This seminar ranges across the diverse, innovative, playful, and provocative works of British modernist author Virginia Woolf. Readings include a selection of Woolf’s short fiction, novels, and nonfiction writing, as well as secondary scholarly works that situate Woolf in her historical and cultural milieu and illuminate the threads of aesthetics, feminism, and what we now call “modernism” in her work. Woolf’s writing opens up timely and important questions about the role of form and voice in writing, the conventions of both literary and academic writing, and how and when to play at the edges of those conventions.
This course examines some of the most significant conflicts and turning points in the history of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth in Europe and its Caribbean slave colonies from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. We approach women’s reproductive bodies as contested sites of political struggle over issues as diverse as slavery, colonialism, population growth and birth control, religious reform, midwifery, the medicalization of childbirth, and nation-building. Centering women’s voices and experiences of the birth process where the sources allow us, we study the cultures and communities that women of diverse racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds constructed around biological reproduction.
This seminar investigates how and why sexuality became the key to selfhood in modern Europe. Drawing on the tools of gender analysis and cultural history, students explore the ways in which political, socioeconomic and cultural tensions of particular historical moments were manifested in the sexuality of individuals. Students also examine a variety of primary sources from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries to consider how individuals defined themselves through sexuality and how definitions were imposed on them by a variety of institutions and authority figures.
A survey and critical evaluation of research investigating individual, social, psychological, and cultural factors in sexual behavior, with some attention to the biological underpinnings of sexuality, along with comparison and contrast across individuals, cultures, and species. Common topics include sex research methodology, gender, sexual orientation, changes across the lifespan, paraphilias, and non-human sexual behavior. Readings include selections from works that have changed understanding of sexual behavior.
An examination of the origins, nature, and content of representative literature from the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament, and cognate literature. Attention is paid to issues of critical reading and theological interpretation of Jewish scriptures. Not open for credit to students who have completed RELG 141.
An examination of the origins, nature, and content of representative literature from the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament, and cognate literature. Attention is paid to issues of critical reading and theological interpretation of Jewish scriptures. Not open for credit to students who have completed RELG 141.
In this course, students will study the epistemological and theoretical roots of Women’s and Gender Studies and explore the interdisciplinary methodologies developed by feminist researchers. The course will emphasize debates within WGS and challenges to mainstream feminist thought, with particular consideration to issues of race, class, sexuality, ability, gender identity, nationality, globalization, and other vectors of identity and oppression. Students will come away with an understanding of how feminist inquiry and methodologies have transformed disciplines in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities.
This interdisciplinary course approaches the study of food from a rhetorical perspective. Specifically, this course works to understand how the way we talk about meat reveals our assumptions about both gender and race. This class draws from cookbooks, memoirs, online “foodie” communities, and food studies scholarship to understand the diverse ways we communicate about every aspect of food from: its production and consumption, its connection to understandings of power; and its ties to pleasure. Furthermore, this class attempts to dismantle the human/animal binary, in order to create a more equitable world for living creatures.