Fall 2023

Instructor: Tara K. Menon Tuesday & Thursday, 9:00-10:15am | Location: TBD Cities are made of contradictions: playgrounds for the rich and sites of concentrated poverty, highly organized and totally chaotic, an endless party and the loneliest places on...

Instructor: Carlisle Yingst Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: Barker 211 Course Site What is the relation between the humanities and the sciences? What separates these broad fields of knowledge, and how do ideas move between them? This course...

Instructor: Jesse McCarthy Monday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: Barker 211 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site We begin with Steven S. Lee’s 2015 book, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution, a study of the relation between...

Instructor: Kelly Mee Rich Wednesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 269 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site This course addresses the role of the archive in literary and cultural studies. It examines the debates, theories, and methods that...

Instructor: Elaine Scarry Thursday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Approaches Hardy's novels, stories, and narrative poems through the language of the senses (hearing, vision, touch) and through moral agency (philosophic...

Instructor: Nicholas Watson Thursday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students A study of a series of visionary works from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, including Guillaume de Lorris’s Romance of the Rose , Dante...

Instructor: Stephen Greenblatt and Joseph Koerner Wednesday, 9:00-11:45am | Location: Sackler 521 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site Jakob Burckhardt’s claim that the Renaissance invented the self has been vigorously challenged, but it gets at...

Instructor: Daniel Donoghue Tuesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 15 students J. R. R. Tolkien's day job at Oxford was professor of medieval English literature. Throughout his career he cultivated a deep acquaintance with early...

Instructor: Tara K. Menon Monday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Sever 112 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site “No book is genuinely free from political bias,” George Orwell wrote. Indeed. But how do we know what these biases are? How can we read not...

Instructor: Maria Dikcis Wednesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 018 Enrollment: Limited to 15 students Course Site Who gets to count as human? This ostensibly simple question has been complicated anew in the 20th and 21st centuries by a series of...