A survey of shorter poetry in the 1500s, from Wyatt to Donne, canvassing a variety of topics from Reformation theology to court politics, but with an emphasis on the century's transformation of the poetic resources of the English language. We study the development of poetic and rhetorical theory alongside the poetry, learning a descriptive and analytic vocabulary that Tudor poets might (partly) recognize. We also imitate their poems--there are weekly exercises in verse composition--just as Sidney and Spenser did with Virgil and Ovid, and with one another.

In the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, how did Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans experience the land and Atlantic littoral from Barbados to Boston? The course disrupts assumed connections between writing and empire to foreground the embodied experience of Europeans and Africans in an unprecedented Atlantic migration. Alongside these arrivals, we examine how Indigenous people adapted to and survived this cataclysmic change. Considering people, non-human animals, plants, earth, and water relationally, we form a critical practice of unsettlement that reimagines the colonial archive as a contingent set of historical futures.

What is poetry's data? And how is this question different than "What is poetry"? We read poetry from the eighteenth century to now and explore questions of poetry's use as data in disciplines as various as folklore, philology, linguistics, literary history, literary theory. Conversely, we ask what the perceived resistance to datafication has reified about affect, authenticity, genius, originality, intention, or indeed Poetry? Understanding poetry's data through quantification, pedagogical instrumentality, prosodic regularity, and machine learning, we think about how poetry's data impacts our contemporary reading practices.

Exile entails a wrenching relocation in space, but it also can disarrange the sense of time. This course explores the double time of exilic life, what Nabokov in Pnin calls physical time and spiritual time. Physical time accentuates the pangs of exile--inhabiting a present so radically different from the familiar past. Spiritual time, in which memory and nostalgia seek refuge, is more mobile and creative; it can recall a vanished world and project a future return. We explore the theme of exilic time through its modern variations from Conrad's Under Western Eyes and Joyce's Ulysses to Naipaul's The Mimic Men.

How to read history through form--not just around it? How do we move from culture to political economy, aesthetics to politics, and back? This seminar surveys the methods of dialectical materialism and Marxist aesthetic theory. Rooted in the Greek dialegein--from dia (through) and logos (discourse)--dialectics involves holding oppositions and articulating mediations between aesthetic form and social process. Through exemplary models of literary criticism, students learn to historicize texts across disciplines, engaging with topics such as racial capitalism, uneven development, gender, labor, and contemporary culture.

This course balances works of canonical aesthetic theory, contemporary queer of color critique, theories of the senses/the sensible, and minoritarian art. One of the connections that is important to the course is that between everyday acts and practices and those practices of making that become legible as art. The aim is to be a robust introduction to various traditions of thinking the relation between aesthetics and political imaginations. Students also encounter important contemporary critics whose work might serve as models for their own.

Academic life is largely configured along disciplinary lines. What are "disciplines," and what does it mean to think, write, teach, and work within these socio-cognitive structures? Are there alternatives? This course, drawing on faculty associated with the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM), takes up these questions, in an effort to clarify the historical evolution and current configuration of intellectual activity within universities. Normative questions detain us. The future is a persistent preoccupation. Collaborative work and generic experiment are encouraged.

In this interdisciplinary class, students of race as well as gender, sexuality, disability, etc. read deeply and broadly in academic journals as a way of learning the debates in their fields and placing their scholarship in relationship to them. Students report each week on the trends in the last five years of any journal of their choice, writing up the articles' arguments and debates, while also revising a paper in relationship to those debates and preparing it for publication. This course enables students to leap forward in their scholarly writing through a better understanding of their fields and the significance of their work to them.