Early modern vernacular writers did not simply imitate classical antiquity or later Italian or French verse as if it were ancient, but traded verse horizontally and multilaterally. Languages faded into one another through proximity, trade and war. We explore this cross-lingual, transnational literary field through the poetry and drama of diplomats, colonists, prophets, pharmacists, indigenous voice, and the work of traveling theater companies. The Netherlands is the polyglot hub for much of this activity, but we also chart rising interest in English beyond the British Isles, and tackle how we can think of an early modern global literature.

Long Romanticism: a lively era of literary imagination, experiment, testing and adventure across genres--songs and lyrics, hybrid media (Blake's Songs), epic autobiography, modern "romance," odes, narratives, ballads, prose and fiction shaped on "poetic" principles. We sample the excitements (Blake, Wm Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Keats, Hemans, Barbauld, Charlotte Smith), along with critical statements and polemics: on slavery; the French Revolution; the rights of women; the long war, 1793-1815, modern science; modern psychology.

Modernism comes with a host of monsters and ghosts. This course traces the teleology of "walking shells" in literary and visual culture and explores the crisis of: 1) parenthood in an age of synthetic reproduction; 2) racial and gendered logic in the sub-/semi-/non-human. We explore similarities and differences among these categories of the less-than-human. We want to rethink oppositional relationships, including between humans and things, bodies and objects, essence and prosthetics, art and technology.

Engaging trans studies, disability studies, histories of science, ecocriticism, posthumanism, queer and postcolonial theory, this class contends with how bodies and bodies of knowledge change over time. Bodies of Transformation takes a historiographic approach to the social, political, and cultural underpinnings of corporeal meaning, practice and performance in the 19th and 20th centuries. Animating questions include: what is the corporeal real? how does bodily transformation map the complex relationships between coercion and choice? how might one approach nonhuman interiority?

Phenomenology is a tradition concerned with how the world gives itself to appearances. It is also an epistemological method, committed to perpetual beginning as a way of apprehending the world and our place in it. This course is an introduction to this philosophy of continual introductions, beginning with several of Edmund Husserl's foundational texts, then moving to a multi-week reading of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, alongside recent works of critical phenomenology that engage race, gender, sexuality, and disability.

This for-credit class combines making books with the study of books as fruit of all sorts of labor. Meeting in Firestone's Special Collections, students learn how to set type, proof, and print a broadside portfolio of poems, using Firestone's historic Albion Press, with the guidance of printer David Sellers. Seminars begin with presentations of printed material in Special Collections, from the Gutenberg Bible up to 21st-century book arts.

If politics always entailed psychopolitics (psychical and political-economic conjunctures) then why do contemporary politics feel so particularly psycho? We investigate this question across a range of theoretical, historical, and political-economic contexts: Freudo-Marxism, platform capitalism, decolonization, authoritarianism, conspiracism, neoliberalism, fossil fascism, and crises of authority. Readings include Thomas Hobbes, Andreas Malm, Adorno and Horkheimer, Jacqueline Rose, Herbert Marcuse, Wendy Brown, Frantz Fanon, Alenka Zupancic, and Freud.

Required weekly seminar for all English Department PhD students teaching for the first time at Princeton and scheduled to precept during the Spring 2025 semester. Balancing pedagogical theory with practical tips and collaborative discussion, the seminar helps students meet the challenges of their first semester in the classroom while also preparing them to lead their own courses. Topics include: integrated course design (preparing lesson plans; leading discussions; lecturing; teaching writing; assessment and grading); writing recommendations; and managing students, faculty, and time.

Narratology and theory of the novel, related but distinct traditions in literary theory, have in the twenty-first century moved away from their respective formalist/structuralist and literary historical roots, and converged in the post-print era on questions of ethics. This seminar offers an opportunity to explore the new ethical narratologies alongside recent theories of the ethics of the novel.

"What shall we say of the Marxian philosophy and of its relation to the American Negro?," Du Bois once asked. His answer was that "it must be modified," not because Marx was wrong but because Capital is one of the four "books in the world which every searcher for truth must know." To know Capital to be true, in this seminar, is to understand how Marx, after the American Civil War, learned to include in his work the most brutal facts of capitalism: chattel slavery, servitude, and extraction in colonies across the globe. "Race," and everything signified by this four-letter word, completes Marx's own expansive account of modernity.

Through a comparative focus on the concepts of dialectic and difference, we read some of the formative theoretical, critical and philosophical works which continue to inform interdisciplinary critical theory today. Works by Lukács, Adorno, Jameson, Freud, Heidegger, Husserl, Derrida, Arendt, de Man and Benjamin are included among the texts we read.