How do film and literature inform our understanding of the evolving concepts of art, ideology and material conditions in modern China? How have literary and cinematic representations changed over the last century to accommodate and facilitate social transformations? What are the characteristics of the cultural productions from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan? This course helps students develop a critical sense and appreciation for Chinese cinema and literature. Taught in English.
A study of the Canterbury Tales and other poems by Chaucer. A term paper is usually expected.
A study of several plays written before 1600.
A study of the major sixteenth-century genres, with emphasis on sources, developments, and defining concerns. Readings include the sonnets of Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare; the mythological verse narratives of Marlowe and Shakespeare; the pastoral poems of Spenser; and Books I and III of Spenser's Faerie Queene.
A consideration of British fiction from the last half-century, this course will put you into the most current currents of literary expression. There is no canon yet in this course; instead, you will be invited to make and test bold claims about canonicity and how literary value is accorded and revised.
A deep and violent fear of witches took hold of various European communities in the years between 1450 and 1700. This course examines a number of different witch panics across Europe - with a final stop in Salem, Massachusetts - and investigates the necessary conditions for such intra-community terror. It will address a number of different factors which contributed to this fear of one's neighbors: environmental change, gendered anxiety, economic downturns, and religious tension.
A seminar on the history of Latin American women from the seventeenth century to the present, examining the tension in Latin American countries concerning the role of women, their relationship to the family, and their desire for equality. The course explores controversies over the legal status of women, education, employment, and participation in political life. Students will examine several theoretical approaches to gender studies together with specific case studies.
Cities have long offered possibilities for resisting gender and sexual norms, constructing new gender and sexual identities, forming sexual subcultures, and fighting for gender and sexual freedom. But cities have also been sites of repression and violent conflict around gender and sexuality. This seminar asks how urban life has shaped—and been shaped by—gender and sexuality, examining topics such as the anxieties about nineteenth-century “streetwalkers,” “race riots” fueled by rumors of interracial sex, and the gay liberation movement. Course materials draw primarily from histories of American cities but will also consider works of urban history focused on other geographic regions.
This course explores the intersection of Western music with sex, gender, and sexuality. Students apply concepts from the field of women’s and gender studies to analyze the construction of gender in music and musical discourse, as well as the roles sex and gender play in the careers, output, and reception of classical and popular musicians. Set at an intermediate level, this course assumes students have previous familiarity with basic musical concepts, including melody, harmony, major/minor tonality, and meter.
This course examines 1) some of the major social and political ideologies of the 20th century (such as liberalism, socialism, nationalism, feminism, environmentalism); 2) theories of social and political movements in modern societies and market democracies; and 3) concrete examples of such social and political movements in the contemporary world.