Courses

Graduate Courses

Fall 2023

Publishing Journal Articles in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Subject associations
AAS 522 / COM 522 / ENG 504 / GSS 503

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.

Instructors
Wendy Laura Belcher
Contemporary Critical Theories: Marx's Capital
Subject associations
COM 535 / ENG 538 / GER 535

Intensive reading of Marx's Capital vol. 1. We read the work closely from beginning to end during the semester. Attention is paid to questions of translation. Knowledge of German is not required, but be prepared to engage with the German text. Secondary readings and other writings by Marx will be included as necessary.

Instructors
Benjamin Conisbee Baer
The Renaissance in England: Shakespeare's Language
Subject associations
ENG 522

A survey of Shakespeare's linguistic resources, from several standpoints: the history of the language, the art of rhetoric, problems of attribution (including the potentials of computational stylometrics), and poetics. Over the course of the semester we study six plays, including Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, and The Winter's Tale. There are weekly exercises in stylistic description and imitation. Our questions: how does Shakespeare sound like himself? (Does he sound like himself?) How does he sound like others, like his age, like his readers? And his characters--can we ask the same questions of them?

Instructors
Jeff Dolven
African-American Literature: Blackness and Empire
Subject associations
ENG 556 / AAS 556

Resistance to imperial expansion and exploitation is a familiar theme of twentieth-century projects of Black liberation. Less familiar are the specific, but no less significant, cases where empire is imagined as a source of Black freedom and self-determination. This seminar surveys U.S.-originating works of Black imperial representation and critique from the 1900s to the present. Framed by readings of historical and speculative fiction, the seminar engages scholarly debates on Blackness, diaspora, coloniality, and empire through writings by Sylvia Wynter, Adom Getachew, Nadia Nurhussein, and Erica R. Edwards.

Instructors
Kinohi Nishikawa
Poetics: Ballad, Sonnet, Lyric, Line: The Stories of Poetic Forms
Subject associations
ENG 563 / CDH 563

What happens to forms across time? Moving beyond the juxtaposition of history and theory, we explore theories of poetic forms in several historical periods and compare these to 20th- and 21st-century ideas. Using the ballad, the sonnet, the lyric, and the line as grounding, we collect, read, and critique both criticism and poetry. When and how does an example of a poetic form take the place of a story of a poetic form? Do our methodologies of reading poetry now and in the past rely on a shared understanding of what a form might mean? How, and when, do poetic forms become abstractions of genres (or abstractions of persons)?

Instructors
Ryan Heuser
Meredith A. Martin
Criticism and Theory: Racial Capitalism
Subject associations
ENG 568 / AMS 568 / MOD 568

What is the "racial" in racial capitalism? The question is posed by abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and we take it up by exploring how literature, media, & art supply an analytic on capitalism's racial logics. It's easy to read texts for descriptions of racial capitalism. The difficult task resides in reading for the mediation between race and capital that the form of the texts enacts. To do this, we learn from Black, Asian American, Indigenous studies; Marxist aesthetic theory; and feminist, anticolonial, environmental critiques of capitalism.

Instructors
Paul Nadal
Literary and Cultural Theory: Frantz Fanon
Subject associations
ENG 571 / AAS 572 / MOD 570 / FRE 572

Frantz Fanon is among the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century whose writings are critical in rethinking our world. In this course we will read all of Fanon's major writings: Black Skin, White Masks, A Dying Colonialism, Toward the African Revolution, and The Wretched of the Earth, as well as essays in Alienation and Freedom. Students must acquire and read David Macey's biography, Frantz Fanon: A Life, before the seminar begins.

Instructors
Andrew Cole
Literature and Society: Global Perspectives on Environmental Justice in Literature and Film
Subject associations
ENG 574

This interdisciplinary seminar explores responses to unequal access to resources and exposure to risk amid widening economic disparity. To engage these concerns, we venture to India, the Caribbean, South Africa, France, Kenya, Palestine, the U.S., Japan, the Faroe Islands, the UK, Australia, and Cambodia. Issues include: climate justice, the Anthropocene, intergenerational injustice, water security, food security, deforestation, the commons and the politics of access, Indigenous movements and cosmologies, environmentalism of the poor, the gendered and racial dimensions of environmental justice, and the role of writer-activists.

Instructors
Rob Nixon