Courses

Undergraduate Courses

Spring 2023

AAS 230/ENG 231 Topics in African American Studies: The Fire This Time - Reading James Baldwin This course examines the selected non-fiction writings of one of America's most influential essayists and public intellectuals: James Baldwin. Attention will be given to his views on ethics, art, and politics--with a particular consideration given to his critical reflections on race and democracy. Instructor(s): Eddie Steven Glaude Jr.
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM T
AAS 326/ENG 286 Topics in African American Culture & Life: Black Speculative Fiction and The Black Radical Imagination In this course, students will engage the archive of contemporary Black speculative fiction and Black studies scholarship to interrogate the possibilities and limits of the Black radical imagination as it appears in fantasy, horror, graphic fiction, and other genres. Students will read narrative fiction written after the Black Arts Movement to interrogate what the speculative offers in terms of thinking about Black worlds. The course argues that speculative writing-narrative fiction and theoretical writing-gesture to other social and political modes of thinking about and being in the world. Instructor(s): Justin Mann
Section(s):
S01 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM T Th
AAS 359/ENG 366 African American Literature: Harlem Renaissance to Present A survey of 20th- and 21st-century African American literature, including the tradition's key aesthetic manifestos. Special attention to how modern African American literature fits into certain periods and why certain innovations in genre and style emerged when they did. Poetry, essays, novels, popular fiction, a stage production or two, and related visual texts. Instructor(s): Kinohi Nishikawa
Section(s):
L01 08:30 AM - 09:50 AM M W
AAS 392/ENG 392/GSS 341 Topics in African American Literature: Reading Toni Morrison This course we will undertake the deceptively simple question: how do we read Toni Morrison? In taking up this task, we will devote our attention to various scenes and sites of reading across Morrison's oeuvre, asking how Morrison is encouraging us to read history, slavery, violence, geography, time, space, gender, and friendship. We will also engage with Morrison's own status as a reader by considering her work as an editor and literary critic. Through regular engagement with the Toni Morrison Papers housed at Firestone we will consider what it means to be able to read Morrison in such close proximity to these archival materials. Instructor(s): Autumn M. Womack
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM W
AMS 317/MTD 321/THR 322/ENG 249 Sondheim's Musicals and the Making of America In this course, we'll examine the musicals of Stephen Sondheim from COMPANY (1970) to ROAD SHOW (2009) as a lens onto America. How have Sondheim's musicals conversed with American history and American society since the mid-20th century? How do Sondheim's musicals represent America and Americans, and how have various productions shaped and re-shaped those representations? We'll explore how Sondheim and his collaborators used the mainstream, popular, and commercial form of musical theatre to challenge, critique, deconstruct, and possibly reinforce some of America's most enduring myths. Instructor(s): Stacy E. Wolf
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM T
AMS 334/ENG 234 American Genres: Western, Screwball Comedy, Film Noir Why did three American genres become classics in the same twenty-year period, 1936-1956? Part of the answer lies in global disruptions that unsettled codes of behavior. Part lies in film innovations that altered cinema itself. But more than this intersection of social and formal transformations, the decisive answer lies in a handful of directors who reconfigured gendered relations in three generic forms. The surprising correspondences that emerge among these classic films, if also the obvious divergences even within single genres, that will focus our discussion. Instructor(s): Lee Clark Mitchell
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 02:50 PM M W
AMS 404/CWR 404/ENG 454 Advanced Seminar in American Studies: 'America': Writing the Public, Writing the Self In-depth look into current US issues, with emphasis on democracy and the question 'What is America?'-socially, culturally, politically. Seminar immerses students into nonfiction literature, particularly as it illuminates the idea of "America" and the state of "Americans". Together we explore seminal non-fiction writing about America, the better to hone students' ability to think and write critically about the public sphere, and to write intelligently about their lives. Seminar examines how major writers, and students, best integrate research, socio-political analysis, literary skill, to craft publicly valuable, self-revelatory writing. Instructor(s): Rich Benjamin
Section(s):
S01 03:00 PM - 04:20 PM M W
AMS 415/ENV 415/HUM 415/ENG 435 Land and Story in Native America Creation stories from Turtle Island foreground an integral connection between land and story. "Sky Woman Falling" contains key ecological and environmental knowledge. This course explores the relationship between land and story, emphasizing seeds as sources of sovereignty and repositories of knowledge across generations. We focus on Native New Jersey while understanding the history of this land in the context of global indigeneity and settler colonialism. Course literature engages seeds, land, and the environment from a perspective that crosses the disciplines of American studies, literature, history, ecology, and environmental studies. Instructor(s): Tessa Lowinske Desmond, Sarah Rivett
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM T
ASA 389/ENG 289/HUM 380 New York Stories: Asian Pacific American Art, Activism, Literature and Film This course will focus on the Asian American arts, culture and youth activist movements in New York City from the early 1970s-1990s. Invited guest speakers--filmmakers, visual and literary artists--will engage with students in talk-story, bridging their cultural practices to present day. We will examine how Asian Americans used their struggle for self-determination and talents to build art, literary and independent film organizations and the projects that they have produced. Students will have the opportunity to produce a creative final project based on oral history interviews with members of Asian American organizations. Instructor(s): Angel Velasco Shaw
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM T
ATL 499/AAS 499/ENG 499 Princeton Atelier: Sites of Memory: Gender, Performance, and the Law Students will collaborate with legal scholar Patricia Williams, literary historian Autumn Womack, and guest artists and performers to creatively explore the theatrical and performative archives that animate what we'll understand as black (gendered) legal performances. We will investigate a range of sites - from the Margaret Garner trial to Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation hearing - and the embodied, visual and sonic histories that score them. Alongside filmmakers, visual artists, and performers, students will construct a multi-modal creative record that fills in the silences and supplements the noise that accompanies these trials. Instructor(s): Patricia Williams, Autumn M. Womack
Section(s):
C01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM T
COM 207/ENG 207 What is Socialism? Literature and Politics This class introduces the historic diversity of socialisms through readings in classic socialist philosophy, literature and political writings. We are guided by these questions: How does socialism relate to communism and capitalism? How does it define democracy, equality, freedom, individuality, and collectivity? How does socialism relate to struggles for racial, gender and ecological justice? Are socialist ethics connected to religious traditions such as Christianity and Islam that teach human equality? What is the "social" in socialism? How may we understand injustices committed in socialism's name alongside its striving for social justice? Instructor(s): Benjamin Conisbee Baer
Section(s):
L01 01:30 PM - 02:50 PM T
P01 03:00 PM - 04:20 PM T
P02 03:00 PM - 04:20 PM T
COM 322/ECS 372/ENG 282/ITA 324 Imagining the Mediterranean In Literature and Film: Itineraries Traditions Ordeals Exploring literary texts and films that foreground the benefits, but also the ordeals of transnational migration and the traffic in peoples, goods, and ideas throughout the Mediterranean region, with particular stress on contemporary works and issues. Particular attention will be paid to women's experience of the Mediterranean as a realm of adventure as well as the subjection imposed by patriarchal customs, war, and colonization. Instructor(s): Maria A. DiBattista, Gaetana Marrone-Puglia
Section(s):
F01 07:30 PM - 09:50 PM M
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM T
COM 464/HUM 464/MUS 457/ENG 464 Conversations: Jazz and Literature Why have so many masters of verbal art relied on the stylistics and epistemologies of jazz musicians for the communication of experience and disruption of conventional concepts? We'll draw on musical recordings, live in-class performances by guest jazz artists, poetry, fiction, and recent debates in jazz studies, critical theory and Black studies. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students of literature and/or music are welcomed, but proficiency in both disciplines is NOT required. We will develop together techniques of close reading and listening. Optional performance component for music instrumentalists and vocalists. Instructor(s): Maya Kronfeld
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM Th
ENG 200 Rewriting the World: Literatures in English, 1350-1850 A survey of extraordinary writing, ideas, characters, and voices from the medieval period through the 18th century. We read diversely from Chaucer to Shakespeare, Milton, Austen and others, to trace the origins of our own modernity. What did reading and writing mean in the early modern world? Are they different today? We examine England in relation to the globe, and we ask who gets included and excluded from "great books." What do people, places and situations that existed on the margins of early English society and literature teach us about the problems we currently face? Does seeing things their way help us view our own world differently? Instructor(s): Rhodri Lewis
Section(s):
L01 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM M W
P01 09:00 AM - 09:50 AM M
P02 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM M
P03 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM W
P04 09:00 AM - 09:50 AM W
ENG 246/HUM 246/CLA 241/CWR 246 Re-Writing the Classics The 21st century has seen many Greek classics re-told in ways that challenge dominant power structures. We will analyze some of these new versions of old stories while interrogating the very idea of a 'classic'. Why re-tell a story from over 2,000 years ago to begin with? What are the politics of engaging with texts that have been used to underpin ideas of a superior Western civilization? What challenges do writers have to overcome in working with ancient texts? Students will consider these questions as readers but also as writers who will work towards a classics re-write of their own. Instructor(s): Kamila Naheed Shamsie
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM W
ENG 259/AMS 259 Film and Media Studies: Animation This course offers a survey of the varieties of animation across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well as their critical reception. Animation is a ubiquitous form, present across media and in advertising. Many viewers take its components and effects for granted. But the archive of animation fundamentally complicates any easy assumptions about "realism" in the twentieth century; animation, moreover, challenges assumptions about bodies and their functions, exaggerating their features and functions, promoting alternatives to more mundane notions of life and liveliness, and relatedly, to ideas of time, contingency, and experience. Instructor(s): Monica Huerta, Russ Leo
Section(s):
L01 03:00 PM - 04:20 PM M
P01 07:30 PM - 08:50 PM M
P02 03:00 PM - 04:20 PM W
P03 08:30 AM - 09:50 AM T
P04 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM T
P06 08:30 AM - 09:50 AM Th
P07 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM Th
ENG 269 Sally Rooney and her Contemporaries The young Irish novelist Sally Rooney is widely seen as the writer who best expresses the anxieties and hopes of her generation in the western world. Her three novels - Conversations with Friends (2017); Normal People (2018); and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) - have sold millions of copies and explored sexuality, friendship, communication, social class and inequality. In this seminar course, we explore Rooney's work in the context of the recent and remarkable flowering of fiction by Irish women. Instructor(s): Fintan O'Toole
Section(s):
L01 01:30 PM - 03:20 PM Th
P01 03:30 PM - 04:20 PM Th
P02 03:30 PM - 04:20 PM Th
P03 03:30 PM - 04:20 PM Th
ENG 275 American Television An introduction to the forms and meanings of American television, with an emphasis on watching, thinking, and writing critically about the medium. We will examine a range of structures, styles, and strategies specific to television, including episodic storytelling, the advent of streaming and "peak TV," and the role of television in establishing and sometimes disrupting norms of identity, politics, and aesthetics. The main approach throughout will be close analysis of specific genres, series, and episodes informed by the histories, contexts, and practices that make American television such a significant part of American culture. Instructor(s): William Albert Gleason
Section(s):
L01 12:30 PM - 01:20 PM M W
P01 01:30 PM - 02:20 PM M
P01A 01:30 PM - 02:20 PM M
P01B 01:30 PM - 02:20 PM M
P02 02:30 PM - 03:20 PM M
P02A 02:30 PM - 03:20 PM M
P02B 02:30 PM - 03:20 PM M
P03 03:30 PM - 04:20 PM M
P03A 03:30 PM - 04:20 PM M
P04 07:30 PM - 08:20 PM M
P04A 07:30 PM - 08:20 PM M
P05 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM T
P05A 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM T
P06 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM T
P06A 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM T
P07 01:30 PM - 02:20 PM T
P07A 01:30 PM - 02:20 PM T
P08 02:30 PM - 03:20 PM T
P08A 02:30 PM - 03:20 PM T
P09 03:30 PM - 04:20 PM T
P09A 03:30 PM - 04:20 PM T
P10 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM W
P10A 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM W
P11 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM W
P12 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM Th
P13 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM Th
ENG 325/COM 371 Milton John Milton's writings reflect a lifelong effort to unite the aims of political, intellectual and literary experimentation. This class explores Milton's major works, especially Paradise Lost. We'll consider Milton's highly original characters, especially Satan, with whom we are invited to sympathize, but also Adam, Eve and Samson. We'll encounter Milton's startling poetic innovations, his controversial ideas about sovereignty, marriage and God, and we will consider Milton's writings in relation to other genres, from late antique theology and medicine to much more recent sci-fi and crime fiction. Instructor(s): Russ Leo
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM T
ENG 341/ECS 382 The Later Romantics The flamboyant second generation of British Romantics: Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron, Hemans, Jewsbury. Careful attention to texts--ranging from novels, to odes, to romances, and modern epics--in historical and cultural contexts, with primary focus on literary imagination. Instructor(s): Susan Jean Wolfson
Section(s):
S01 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM M W
ENG 355 British Cinema This course will offer a survey of UK popular cinema from the 1920s to the present. We will investigate how this cinema tradition addresses questions of national identity and history: in the aftermath of the British Empire, what is England? How can popular cinema offer critique and reevaluation of social and economic crises? We will also trace the relationship between British cinema and Hollywood, from the origins of both of these national industries, through international obsessions like the Bond films, the unexpected success of Working Title rom coms of the 90s, and the influence of indie classics like Danny Boyle's "Trainspotting". Instructor(s): Sarah A. Chihaya
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 02:50 PM T Th
ENG 358/LAS 385/AMS 396/AAS 343 Caribbean Literature and Culture: Island Imaginaries: Movement, Speculation and Precarity Looking to the many abyssal histories of the Caribbean, this course will explore major issues that have shaped Caribbean Literature: colonialism, indigeneity, iterations of enslavement, creolization, migration, diaspora, revolution, tropicality, and climate crisis. During our readings, we will be attentive to the Caribbean as a space of first colonial contact, as a place where the plantation system reigned, and as the site of the first successful slave revolt. These past legacies haunt contemporary conditions across the Caribbean in ways that necessitate attention to gender, race, and environment. Instructor(s): Christina León
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM T
ENG 387 Phenomenology Phenomenology is the philosophical study of experience and our shared lifeworld. The course is based on the insights and methods of phenomenology, though our readings will draw from literature, sociology, anthropology, religious studies, and medical humanities. We will proceed with the conviction that the best way to learn phenomenology is by practicing it, and the semester will be divided between textual study of perception and an experimental practicum in which students observe and record their own habits of perception. Instead of a final paper, students will produce an original phenomenology of an object, a place, or an event. Instructor(s): Gayle Salamon
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM W
ENG 388 Topics in Critical Theory: Space This course asks whether our tendency to think space via language, narrative, desire, subjectivity, and the condition of "being in time" is useful or exhaustive. This class is an experiment in what it means to "be" in space, inhabit a place. Instructor(s): Andrew Cole
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM Th
ENG 400/MED 400 Touching Books -- An Introduction to the History of the Book The topic of the "book" can be opened in many ways. This seminar investigates the book's plangent materiality: its claims on timelessness, its transience. Through keyholes in space and time, we'll discuss how the book has changed, how it produces visual and readerly processes, and how it instantiates the persistent trope of the "page". Books have social lives too, and we'll examine grand medieval books and inspect the micrographic doodles on a page's margins that are parts of the textual cultures and communities of books. Attention will be paid to book collectors' books and to collections of books, like libraries and archives. Instructor(s): Sarah May Anderson
Section(s):
S01 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM T Th
ENG 401 Forms of Literature: Short Stories The short story reveals narrative at its most succinct, stripped bare (or rather contained within indispensable parts). Often viewed as insufficient novels, stories expose more fully the possibilities of narrative itself in revealing the flashes of character, lyricism, comedy, voice, coincidence, even fate that shape all fictional forms. This course examines the development of the American short fiction over two centuries, revealing its extraordinary variety and complexity. Instructor(s): Lee Clark Mitchell
Section(s):
S01 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM M W
ENG 402/MED 401 Forms of Literature: Prehistories of Colonialism This course looks for the origins of the modern world - and the unrealized alternatives to its trauma and inequity - in medieval travelogues, histories, and poetic fictions. We will trace ideologies of race, religious difference, and colonialism as they emerged. At the same time, the works we will read belonged to a world radically different from the modernity to come: the medieval literary imagination can surprise with both its beauty and its sense of justice. Readings include work by Ibn Fadlan, Geoffrey Chaucer, and The Book of John Mandeville, as well as theory and criticism from Carolyn Dinshaw, Cedric Robinson, and Sylvia Wynter. Instructor(s): Spencer Arthur Strub
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM W
ENG 404/NES 404/AMS 402/HUM 411 Forms of Literature: Writing Revolution How does political upheaval - especially in the form of revolution - shape memoir? This course focuses on the work of writers, particularly those of Middle Eastern origin who live in the Americas (Mexico, the United States, and Cuba) to explore this question. It pairs their memoirs with other examples of their writing (letters, eulogies, and essays) and artistic production to study issues of post-coloniality, gender, race, and nationalism. Instructor(s): Sarah Gualtieri
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM M
ENG 405 Topics in Poetry: Contemporary Poetry This seminar focuses exclusively on books of poetry published in 2022 and 2023. We'll read and discuss work by established and emerging poets, and attend poetry readings. Poets will also visit the class to discuss their work and the work of their influences. Students will write reviews, rather than essays, and in the process learn about (and contribute to) the contemporary poetry world. Instructor(s): Joshua Isaac Kotin
Section(s):
S01 07:30 PM - 10:20 PM T
ENG 409/THR 410/HUM 409 Topics in Drama: Performing Hamlet This class will investigate William Shakespeare's play Hamlet through discussion and performance. Students will explore and rehearse an adaptation of the play to understand Shakespearean characters, narrative, and language, and to consider the play's resonance in the current moment. The class will culminate in workshop performances at the LCA during reading period. Students must be able to commit to group rehearsals outside of the official class time, working with a student assistant director and a faculty acting coach, in addition to faculty member Professor Wolff. Instructor(s): Tamsen Olivia Wolff
Section(s):
U01 12:30 PM - 04:20 PM F
ENG 411/AMS 411/AAS 413 Major Author(s): Mourning America: Emerson and Douglass This course will focus on two "representative men" of the nineteenth century. It will propose that Emerson and Douglass are two of America's greatest defenders, precisely because they are its greatest mourners. While they point to America's unfulfilled promise of universal representation, they seek to realize it in their own acts of writing. This course attends to these writers' relations to the period's broader discourses surrounding race, ecology, empire, and nation-building. Alongside Emerson and Douglass, we will read short texts by naturalists, politicians, and activists such as J.B. Lamarck, James Madison, and Ida B. Wells. Instructor(s): Eduardo Lujan Cadava
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM Th
ENG 448/THR 448/HUM 448/COM 440 Early Modern Amsterdam: Tolerant Eminence and the Arts Inter-disciplinary class on early modern Amsterdam (1550-1720) when the city was at the center of the global economy and leading cultural center; home of Rembrandt and Spinoza (Descartes was nearby) and original figures like playwrights Bredero and Vondel, the ethicist engraver Coornhert, the political economist de la Court brothers and English traveling theater. We go from art to poetry, drama, philosophy and medicine. Spring Break is in Amsterdam with museum visits, guest talks and participation in recreation of traveling theater from the period. Instructor(s): Nigel Smith
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 02:50 PM M W
GSS 400/ENG 264 Contemporary Theories of Gender and Sexuality One is not born, but becomes, woman. So writes Simone deBeauvoir in The Second Sex, her landmark work of feminist philosophy. But how do we become women, anyway? And what if we don't? In this course we will read The Second Sex in its entirety, exploring Beauvoir's ideas - and our own - about childhood, family, sexuality, abortion, relationships, work, and aging. We will read Beauvoir alongside the work of her primary interlocutors (Hegel, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) as well as contemporary feminist and trans theory, memoir, and fiction (Claudia Rankine, Carmen Maria Machado, Katharina Volckmer) considering gender and its discontents. Instructor(s): Gayle Salamon
Section(s):
S02 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM T
HUM 307/ENG 277 Literature as Data This seminar introduces students to basic concepts of working with literary texts and working with data. Crossing the divisional boundaries of literary analysis and quantitative and computational reasoning, we'll learn how to develop a compelling research question, to explore the many methodologies for using computation to analyze literature, and to put our work in context of the long history of literature conceived of as data. We'll think broadly about the role of humanities in data science, and learn the importance of interpretation, exploration, iteration, creativity, analysis, and critique in both literary and quantitative work. Instructor(s): Brian W. Kernighan, Meredith Anne Martin
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM W
LAO 347/ENG 247 Latina/o Literature and Film In this course students will be reading works from the Latinx literary canon as a survey of diverse Latinx voices. Through the course theme, students will examine how select Latinx authors write about community, identity, race, gender, resistance, and culture in a manner that captures The Latinx Experience. Selected texts will showcase how home is contested as their characters navigate their lives 'here' and 'there' via notions of diaspora, migration, and belonging, languages, and borders. This course analyzes Latinx literary works, including the course novels, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, Sabrina & Corina, and The House on Mango Street. Instructor(s): Keishla Rivera-Lopez
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 02:50 PM M W
THR 316/ENG 217 Modern Irish Theatre: Oscar Wilde to Martin McDonagh to Riverdance This course explores the many different ways in which the whole idea of a distinctively Irish theatre has been transformed every few decades, from Wilde and Shaw's subversions of England, to the search of Yeats and Synge for an authentic rural Ireland, to the often angry critiques of contemporary Ireland by Murphy, Friel and Carr. Plays of the Irish diaspora (O'Neill and McDonagh) are examined in this context. The course will also explore the ways in which ideas of physicality and performance, including the popular spectacle of Riverdance, have conflicted with and challenged Irish theatre's peculiar devotion to poetic language. Instructor(s): Fintan O'Toole
Section(s):
S01 01:30 PM - 04:20 PM W