English

Book of Beasts and Its Descendants

200 Level - The medieval book of beasts (bestiary) has always been a wild, motley, and beautiful invention. Copied out and illuminated by hand, emerging the same century as the first encyclopedias, and collaged from myriad sources, these text-and-image works mingle moral philosophy, natural history, etymology, and travel writing--and they have impacted centuries of thought and book making.

Letters as Literature

200 Level - First-years welcome! Dear students, dear writers, dear essayists-dear ones: Epistolary writing is letter writing, as in written correspondence. In this course, through reading and writing assignments, we will investigate the epistolary essay as a borrowed form-a soliloquy, a collaboration, a protest, a confession-and a tradition in its own right. We will write postcard essays and open letters, send fan letters and mail art, keep pen pals and hope a message in a bottle washes up on our shores.

Chaucer

This course introduces you to the Father of English literature – Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer was the son of a wine merchant, a servant to three kings, a member of Parliament, and an inspired poet. He also was the first author to write in the English language – and what stories he wrote!

Growing Up Star Wars

200 Level - appropriate for FY students - Anakin Skywalker. Padmé Amidala. Jin Erso. Han Solo. The names of STAR WARS characters infiltrate modern American culture. But have you thought about what it really means to grow up as a Jedi knight? Or to study at a political academy so that you can become queen by age fourteen? Or, more extreme still, to enlist for military service when you're not yet sixteen?

Queer Feelings

Appropriate for FY students- Is it high time we lean into our unpleasant feelings: exhaustion, loneliness, shame, melancholy, anxiety? Can interrogating our feelings help us better know, even see through, the world as it exists? How do we navigate society, relationships, our own selves with and against feelings? In turn, how might understanding ourselves as entities of feeling first and foremost - as the locus of desires, energies, and reactions - free us from traditional categories of identity and being?

American Romanticism

LT: American Romanticism: 1830-1860.  In this course students will embark on a wild ride through the canon of mid-nineteenth-century American literature. During this literary odyssey, we'll explore both land and sea in the company of several great American writers: Cooper, Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman and Dickinson.

Post-Colonial Film, Literature and Theory

Throughout the mid- to late-twentieth century, formerly colonized people from around the world gained independence and established new nations. It meant the end of a particular form of oppression but also the enormous challenge of producing new cultural norms, governance, social relations, and intellectual habits. Decolonization gave as much rise to civil wars and coup d’états as to a rich body of art that imagines unseen possibilities while registering the realities of intergenerational trauma, survival, and diaspora.

Projects for Seniors

Student-initiated projects involving significant study and writing carried out through frequent conferences with a faculty sponsor. These projects are completed in addition to the five courses required for the advanced level of the major. Prerequisites: senior standing, a 3.25 GPA in English, and approval by the departmental Honors/Independent Projects committee. Proposals for fall projects must be submitted to the committee by March 1 of the semester preceding the beginning of fall projects, and by November 1 of the semester preceding the beginning of spring projects.
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