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Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences

Catalogue Home

  • Explore our Programs
  • University-​wide Policies and Information
    • Academic Policies and Information
      • Academic Calendar
      • Academic Integrity Policies
      • Animal Care and Use Program
      • Credit Hour Policy
      • FERPA
      • PHD Specific Policies
      • Transcripts and Enrollment Verifications
    • Admission and Aid
      • Tuition and Fees
        • Financial Aid
    • Higher Education Act Disclosures
      • General Institutional Information
      • Health and Safety Information
      • Student Financial Assistance Information
    • Office of Institutional Equity
      • Discrimination and Harassment Policy and Procedures
      • Equal Opportunity and Title IX Notice
      • Sexual Misconduct
    • Rights, Privileges, and Responsibilities
      • Academic Grievance Policy: Students and Postdoctoral Fellows
      • New Child Accommodations for Full-​Time Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Trainees
      • Personal Relationships Policy
      • Photography and Film Rights Policy
      • Student Conduct Code
      • Student Disability Services (SDS)
      • Student Health
    • Veterans Affairs
  • Bloomberg School of Public Health
    • Academic Calendar
    • Admission
    • CEPH Requirements
    • Departments
      • Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
        • Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, MHS
        • Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, ScM
        • Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, PhD
        • Non-​Degree Training
      • Department of Biostatistics
        • Biostatistics, MHS
        • Biostatistics, ScM
        • Biostatistics, PhD
      • Department of Environmental Health and Engineering
        • Environmental Health, MHS
        • Environmental Health, SCM
        • Toxicology for Human Risk Assessment, MS
        • Environmental Health, PhD
        • Non-​Degree Training
      • Department of Epidemiology
        • Epidemiology, MHS
        • Epidemiology, ScM
        • Epidemiology, PhD
        • Non-​Degree Training
      • Department of Health, Behavior and Society
        • Social Factors in Health, MHS
        • Health Education and Health Communication, MSPH
        • Genetic Counseling, ScM
        • Health, Behavior and Society, PhD
        • Non-​Degree Training
      • Department of Health Policy and Management
        • Health Administration, MHA
        • Health Policy, MSPH
        • Health Economics and Outcomes Research, MHS
        • Health Policy and Management, PhD
        • Health Policy and Management, DrPH (Tsinghua)
        • Non-​Degree Training
      • Department of International Health
        • Global Health Economics, MHS
        • International Health, MSPH
        • International Health, MSPH, Human Nutrition-​Dietitian
        • International Health, MA/​MSPH
        • International Health, PhD
        • Non-​Degree Training
      • Department of Mental Health
        • Mental Health, MHS
        • Mental Health, PhD
        • Non-​Degree Training
      • Department of Molecular Microbiology &​ Immunology
        • Molecular Microbiology &​ Immunology, MHS
        • Molecular Microbiology &​ Immunology, ScM
        • Molecular Microbiology &​ Immunology, PhD
        • Non-​Degree Training
      • Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health
        • Population, Family and Reproductive Health, MHS
        • Population, Family and Reproductive Health, MHS Online
        • Population, Family and Reproductive Health, MSPH
        • Population, Family and Reproductive Health, PhD
      • Doctor of Public Health (DrPH)
      • Graduate Training Programs in Clinical Investigation
        • Graduate Training Programs in Clinical Investigation, MHS
        • Graduate Training Programs in Clinical Investigation, PhD
      • Master of Arts in Public Health Biology
      • Master of Bioethics
      • Master of Public Health Program
        • DNP/​MPH
        • DVM/​MPH
        • JD/​MPH
        • LLM/​MPH
        • MBA/​MPH with China Europe International Business School
        • MD/​MPH
        • MPH/​MBA
        • MSW/​MPH
      • Online Programs for Applied Learning (OPAL)
        • Master of Applied Science in Community-​Based Primary Health Care Programs in Global Health
        • Master of Applied Science in Global Health Planning and Management
        • Master of Applied Science in Humanitarian Health
        • Master of Applied Science in Patient Safety and Healthcare Quality
        • Master of Applied Science in Population Health Management
        • Master of Applied Science in Spatial Analysis for Public Health
      • Residency Programs
        • General Preventive Medicine Residency Program
        • Occupational and Environmental Medicine Residency
    • Certificates
      • Adolescent Health, Certificate
      • Bioethics, Certificate
      • Climate and Health, Certificate
      • Clinical Trials, Certificate
      • Community-​Based Public Health, Certificate
      • Demographic Methods, Certificate
      • Environmental and Occupational Health, Certificate
      • Epidemiology for Public Health Professionals, Certificate
      • Evaluation: International Health Programs, Certificate
      • Food Systems, the Environment &​ Public Health, Certificate
      • Gender and Health, Certificate
      • Gerontology, Certificate
      • Global Health, Certificate
      • Global Health Practice, Certificate
      • Global Tobacco Control, Certificate
      • Health and Human Rights, Certificate
      • Health Communication, Certificate
      • Health Disparities and Health Inequality, Certificate
      • Health Education, Certificate
      • Health Finance and Management, Certificate
      • Healthcare Epidemiology and Infection Prevention and Control, Certificate
      • Humane Sciences and Toxicology Policy, Certificate
      • Humanitarian Health, Certificate
      • Injury and Violence Prevention, Certificate
      • International Healthcare Management and Leadership, Certificate
      • Leadership for Public Health and Healthcare, Certificate
      • Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Public Health, Certificate
      • Maternal and Child Health, Certificate
      • Mental Health Policy, Economics and Services, Certificate
      • Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety, Certificate
      • Population and Health, Certificate
      • Population Health Management, Certificate
      • Product Stewardship for Sustainability, Certificate
      • Public Health Advocacy, Certificate
      • Public Health Economics, Certificate
      • Public Health Informatics, Certificate
      • Public Health Practice, Certificate
      • Public Health Preparedness, Certificate
      • Public Health Training Certificate for American Indian Health Professionals
      • Public Mental Health Research, Certificate
      • Quality, Patient Safety, and Outcomes Research, Certificate
      • Quantitative Methods in Public Health, Certificate
      • Rigor, Reproducibility and Responsibility in Scientific Practice, Certificate
      • Risk Sciences and Public Policy, Certificate
      • Spatial Analysis for Public Health, Certificate
      • Training Certificate in Public Health
      • Tropical Medicine, Certificate
      • Vaccine Science and Policy, Certificate
    • Policies
      • Academic
        • Academic Ethics Code
        • Academic Leave of Absence
        • Compliance Line
        • Grade Appeal Policy
        • Grading System
        • Graduation Policy
        • Interdivisional Registration
        • Involuntary Leave of Absence
        • Multi-​Term Course Policy
        • Post-​Doctoral Fellow Student Status
        • Student Grievance Policy
      • Research
        • Animal Research
        • Human Subjects Research
        • Worker's Comp
      • Student Life
        • Alternative Beverages
        • Donation Drive Protocol
        • Social Media Policy
        • Special Events Coordination
        • Student Fundraising
  • Carey Business School
    • Admission
      • Graduate Degree Requirements
      • Master’s Programs
      • Certificate Programs
      • Verification of Credentials
      • International Student Admission Policy
      • Inactive/​Deactivated Certificate or Degree Applications
      • State-​Specific Authorization for Online Courses
    • Degrees and Certificates
      • Business Administration (Flexible), MBA
      • Business Administration (Full Time), MBA
      • Business Analytics and Risk Management (Part Time), Master of Science
      • Business Analytics and Risk Management, Master of Science
      • Design Leadership, MBA/​MA Dual Degree
      • Finance (Part Time), Master of Science
      • Finance, Master of Science
      • Financial Management, Graduate Certificate
      • Financial Management, Graduate Certificate, Investments, Graduate Certificate, Applied Economics, MS
      • Health Care Management (Part Time), Master of Science
      • Health Care Management, Master of Science
      • Information Systems, Master of Science
      • Investments, Graduate Certificate
      • Leadership Development Program, Graduate Certificate
      • Marketing (Part Time), Master of Science
      • Marketing, Master of Science
      • MBA/​Applied Economics, MS Dual Degree
      • MBA/​Biotechnology, MS Dual Degree
      • MBA/​Communication, MA Dual Degree
      • MBA/​DNP Dual Degree
      • MBA/​Government, MA Dual Degree
      • MBA/​Healthcare Organizational Leadership, MSN Dual Degree
      • MBA/​JD Dual Degree
      • MBA/​MA in International Relations
      • MBA/​MD Dual Degree
      • MBA/​MPH Dual Degree
      • MSF/​MBA Dual Degree
      • Real Estate and Infrastructure (Part Time), Master of Science
      • Real Estate and Infrastructure, Master of Science
      • Business, Minor
    • Policies and Resources
      • Academic Ethics Policy
      • Academic Progress and Standards
      • Changing Degree Program
      • Grading Policy
      • Graduation
      • Attendance Policy
      • Leave of Absence
      • Registration
      • Student Accounts
      • Transfer of Graduate Credit
      • Waiver Exams
  • Peabody Institute
    • General Information, Procedures and Regulations
      • Introduction and Nomenclature
      • Mission
      • Accreditation
      • Links
      • Honor Societies
    • Procedural Information
      • Applicability
      • Studio Assignments
      • Course Numbering
      • Large Ensemble Participation
      • Competitions
      • Recitals
      • Academic Advising
      • Inter-​Institutional Academic Arrangements
      • Study Abroad Program
      • Outside Instruction and Public Performance
    • Academic Regulations
      • Applicability
      • Academic Code of Conduct
      • Program Classification, Status, and Credit Limits
      • Sources of Credit
      • Grading System and Regulations
      • Dean's List Criteria
      • Academic Standing
      • Registration Regulations
      • Attendance and Absences
      • Interruption of Degree Work
      • Graduation Eligibility
    • Degree and Diploma Programs
      • Bachelor of Music (BM)
        • Curricula
          • Bachelor of Music in Performance
            • Composition, Bachelor of Music
            • Computer Music, Bachelor of Music
            • Guitar, Bachelor of Music
            • Harpsichord, Bachelor of Music
            • Historical Performance, Bachelor of Music
            • Jazz, Bachelor of Music
            • Music for New Media, Bachelor of Music
            • Orchestral Instruments, Bachelor of Music
            • Organ, Bachelor of Music
            • Piano, Bachelor of Music
            • Voice, Bachelor of Music
          • Bachelor of Music in Music Education
            • Composition, Bachelor of Music Education
            • Guitar, Bachelor of Music Education
            • Jazz, Bachelor of Music Education
            • Orchestral Instruments, Bachelor of Music Education
            • Piano, Bachelor of Music Education
            • Voice, Bachelor of Music Education
          • Bachelor of Music in Recording Arts
            • Composition, Bachelor of Music in Recording Arts
            • Computer Music, Bachelor of Music in Recording Arts
            • Guitar, Bachelor of Music in Recording Arts
            • Jazz, Bachelor of Music in Recording Arts
            • Orchestral Instruments, Bachelor of Music in Recording Arts
            • Piano, Bachelor of Music in Recording Arts
        • Minors
          • Business of Music, Minor
          • Directed Studies, Minor
          • Historical Performance, Minor
          • Historical Performance: Voice, Minor
          • Liberal Arts, Minor
          • Music Theory, Minor
          • Musicology, Minor
        • Combined Degree Programs
          • Peabody-​Homewood Double Degree Program
        • Accelerated Graduate Degrees
          • Five-​Year BM/​MM Program
          • Five-​Year BMRA/​MA Program
            • Five-​Year BM/​MA: Music for New Media Variant
      • Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA)
        • Minors
      • Master of Music (MM)
        • Master of Music: Performance
          • Composition, Master of Music
          • Computer Music, Master of Music
          • Guitar, Master of Music
          • Harpsichord, Master of Music
          • Historical Performance Instruments, Master of Music
          • Historical Performance Voice, Master of Music
          • Jazz, Master of Music
          • Orchestral Conducting, Master of Music
          • Orchestral Instruments, Master of Music
          • Organ, Master of Music
          • Piano, Master of Music
          • Piano: Ensemble Arts Vocal Accompanying, Master of Music
          • Wind Conducting, Master of Music
          • Voice, Master of Music
        • Master of Music: Academic Majors
          • Performance/​Pedagogy, Master of Music
          • Music Education, Master of Music
          • Musicology, Master of Music
          • Music Theory Pedagogy, Master of Music
        • Master of Music: Low Residency
      • Master of Arts (MA)
        • Acoustics, Master of Arts
          • Five-​Year BM/​MA Program Requirements: Acoustics
        • Recording Arts and Sciences, Master of Arts
          • Five-​Year BM/​MA Program Requirements: Recording Arts
      • Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA)
        • Composition, Doctor of Musical Arts
        • Guitar, Doctor of Musical Arts
        • Historical Performance Instruments, Doctor of Musical Arts
        • Orchestral Conducting, Doctor of Musical Arts
        • Orchestral Instruments, Doctor of Musical Arts
        • Organ, Doctor of Musical Arts
        • Piano, Doctor of Musical Arts
        • Voice, Doctor of Musical Arts
        • Wind Conducting, Doctor of Musical Arts
      • Performer’s Certificate (PC)
        • Guitar, Performer's Certificate
        • Orchestral Instruments, Performer's Certificate
        • Organ, Performer's Certificate
        • Piano, Performer's Certificate
        • Voice, Performer's Certificate
      • Graduate Performance Diploma (GPD)
      • Artist’s Diploma (AD)
    • Extension Study
      • Music Education Certification -​ Instrumental
      • Music Education Certification -​ Vocal
  • Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
    • Academic Policies and Resources
    • Degrees and Certificates
      • International Studies, Doctor of Philosophy
      • International Affairs, Doctor of
      • European Public Policy, Master of Arts
      • Global Policy, Master of Arts
      • Global Risk, Master of Arts (On-​site)
      • Global Risk, Master of Arts (Online)
      • International Affairs, Master of Arts
      • International Economics and Finance, Master of Arts
      • International Relations, Master of Arts
      • International Studies, Master of Arts
      • International Public Policy, Master of
      • Strategy, Cybersecurity, and Intelligence, Master of Arts
      • Sustainable Energy, Master of Arts (Online)
      • Chinese and American Studies, Hopkins-​Nanjing Center Certificate
      • Dual Degrees and Exchange Programs
      • Graduate Certificates
      • International Studies, Diploma
  • School of Education
    • Academic and Student Policies
      • Academic and Student Conduct Policies
      • Academic Standards
      • Grading System and Academic Records
      • Grievances and Complaints
    • Admission
    • Graduation
    • Programs
      • Doctoral Programs
        • Education (Online), EdD
        • Education, PhD
      • Master's Programs
        • Counseling, Master of Science
        • Education, Master of Science
        • Health Professions (Online), Master of Education
        • Special Education, Master of Science
      • Post Master's Certificates
        • Applied Behavior Analysis, Post–Master’s Certificate
        • Clinical Mental Health Counseling, Post–Master’s Certificate
        • Evidence-​Based Teaching in the Health Professions, Post–Master’s Certificate
      • Certificate of Advanced Graduate Study
        • Counseling, Certificate of Advanced Graduate Study
      • Graduate Certificates
        • Education of Students with Autism and Other Pervasive Developmental Disorders, Graduate Certificate
        • Educational Leadership for Independent Schools, Graduate Certificate
        • Gifted Education, Graduate Certificate
        • Leadership in Technology Integration (Online), Graduate Certificate
        • Mathematics/​STEM Instructional Leader (PreK-​6) (Online), Graduate Certificate
        • Mind, Brain and Teaching (Online), Graduate Certificate
        • School Administration and Supervision, Graduate Certificate
        • Urban Education, Graduate Certificate
    • Research and Development Centers
    • Scholarships
    • State Authorization of Distance Education and Higher Education Agencies in Other States
  • School of Medicine
    • General Information
      • Conduct in Teacher/​Learner Relationships (Student Mistreatment Policy)
      • Faculty Traveling Fellowship and Visiting Scholar Fellowship
      • Lectureships and Visiting Professorships
      • Loan Funds
      • Medical Student Advising
      • Named Professorships
      • Office of Medical Student Affairs
      • Scholarships
      • Student Research Scholarships and Awards
      • Tuition
      • Tuition and Other Fees
      • Young Investigators’ Day
    • Policies
    • Graduate Programs
      • Anatomy Education, MS
      • Applied Health Sciences Informatics, MS
      • Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology, PhD
      • Biological Chemistry, PhD
      • Biomedical Engineering, PhD
      • Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry, PhD/​Molecular Biophysics, PhD
      • Cellular and Molecular Medicine, PhD
      • Cellular and Molecular Physiology, PhD
      • Clinical Anaplastology, MS
      • Clinical Informatics, Post-​Baccalaureate Certificate
      • Cross-​Disciplinary Program in Biomedical Sciences, PhD
      • Functional Anatomy and Evolution, PhD
      • Health Sciences Informatics, PhD
      • Health Sciences Informatics–Research, MS
      • History of Medicine, MA (On-​site)
      • History of Medicine, MA (Online)
      • History of Medicine, PhD
      • History of Medicine, Post-​Baccalaureate Certificate (Online)
      • Human Genetics and Molecular Biology, PhD
      • Immunology, PhD
      • Medical and Biological Illustration, MA
      • Medical Physics, MS
      • Neuroscience, PhD
      • Pathobiology, PhD
      • Pharmacology, PhD
    • Medical Program
      • Doctor of Medicine, MD
      • MD-​PhD, Combined Degree
      • Subject Areas
        • Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine
        • Biological Chemistry
        • Biomedical Engineering
        • Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry
        • Cell Biology
        • Dermatology
        • Emergency Medicine
        • Epidemiology
        • Functional Anatomy and Evolution
        • Gynecology and Obstetrics
        • Health Sciences Informatics
        • History of Medicine
        • Institute of Genetic Medicine
        • Medicine
        • Molecular and Comparative Pathobiology
        • Molecular Biology and Genetics
        • Multi-​Department Courses
        • Neurology
        • Neuroscience
        • Oncology
        • Ophthalmology
        • Pathology
        • Pediatrics
        • Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences
        • Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation
        • Physiology
        • Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
        • Public Health
        • Radiation Oncology and Molecular Radiation Sciences
        • Radiology and Radiological Science
        • Section of Surgical Sciences
    • Postdoctoral Fellows
  • School of Nursing
    • Admission
    • Advising
    • Certificates
      • Healthcare Organizational Leadership, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Nursing Education, Post-​Master's Certificate
      • Pediatric Acute Care Nurse Practitioner, Post-​Master's Certificate
      • Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, Post-​Master's Certificate
    • Doctoral Degrees
      • Doctor of Nursing Practice, Advanced Practice Track
        • Adult-​Gerontological Acute Care Nurse Practitioner, DNP Advanced Practice Track
        • Adult-​Gerontological Critical Care Clinical Nurse Specialist, DNP Advanced Practice Track
        • Adult-​Gerontological Health Clinical Nurse Specialist, DNP Advanced Practice Track
        • Adult-​Gerontological Primary Care Nurse Practitioner, DNP Advanced Practice Track
        • Family Primary Care Nurse Practitioner, DNP Advanced Practice Track
        • Nurse Anesthesia, DNP Advanced Practice Track
        • Pediatric Critical Care Clinical Nurse Specialist, DNP Advanced Practice Track
        • Pediatric Dual Primary/​Acute Care Nurse Practitioner, DNP Advanced Practice Track
        • Pediatric Primary Care Nurse Practitioner, DNP Advanced Practice Track
        • Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, DNP Advanced Practice Track
      • Doctor of Nursing Practice: Executive Track
      • Nursing, Doctor of Philosophy
      • Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP): Advanced Practice Track/​Doctor of Philosophy in Nursing (PhD) Dual Degree
    • Dual Degrees
      • DNP Executive/​MBA Dual Degree
      • DNP Executive/​MPH Dual Degree
      • Healthcare Organizational Leadership, MSN/​MBA, Dual Degree
    • Financial Aid
    • Master's Degrees
      • Entry into Nursing, Master of Science in Nursing
      • Healthcare Organizational Leadership Track, Master of Science in Nursing
    • Online Prerequisites for Health Professions
    • Policies
      • Academic Integrity Policy
      • Academic Standards for Progression
      • Administrative Leave
      • Attendance Policy
      • Canvas and SON IT Help
      • Clinical Placements
      • Clinical Warnings
      • Complaint/​Grievance Policy
      • Compliance
      • Continuous Enrollment Policy
      • Course Policies
      • Criminal Conduct Policy
      • Examination Policy
      • Grading Policy
      • Health Insurance for Students
      • Incomplete Coursework
      • Independent Study Policy
      • Involuntary Leave of Absence
      • Leave of Absence or Withdrawal
      • Letters of Recommendation
      • NCLEX
      • Non-​Degree-​Seeking Students
      • Notification of Missed Clinical Time
      • Pet Guidelines
      • Printing and Copying
      • Professional Attire Policy
      • Professional Ethics Policy
      • Registration Policies and Procedures
      • Religious Observance Attendance Policy
      • Student Code of Conduct
      • Technical Standards for Admission and Graduation
      • Transcripts and Enrollment Verifications
      • Transfer of Graduate Credit
    • Tuition and Fees
  • Whiting School of Engineering
    • Full-​time, On-​campus Undergraduate and Graduate Programs (Homewood)
      • Undergraduate Policies
        • Academic Policies
          • Requirements for a Bachelor's Degree
          • Student Status
          • Registration Policies
          • Grading Policies
          • Academic Standing Policies
          • External Credit Policies
          • Study Abroad Policies
          • Graduation Policies
        • Student Life Policies
      • Graduate Policies
        • Graduate-​Specific Policies
        • Academic Policies
        • Admissions and Finances
        • Student Life
          • International Graduate Students
      • Departments, Program Requirements, and Courses
        • Applied Mathematics and Statistics
          • Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Bachelor of Arts
          • Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Bachelor of Science
          • Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Minor
          • Applied Mathematics and Statistics, PhD
          • Data Science, Master's Degree
          • Financial Mathematics, Master of Science in Engineering
        • Biomedical Engineering
          • Bioengineering Innovation and Design, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Biomedical Engineering, Bachelor of Arts
          • Biomedical Engineering, Bachelor of Science
          • Biomedical Engineering, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Biomedical Engineering, PhD through the School of Medicine
        • Center for Leadership Education
          • Accounting and Financial Management, Minor
          • Engineering Management, Master of Science
          • Entrepreneurship and Management, Minor
          • Leadership Studies, Minor
          • Marketing and Communications, Minor
          • Professional Communication Program
          • Professional Development Program
        • Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
          • Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Bachelor of Science
          • Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, PhD
        • Civil &​ Systems Engineering
          • Civil Engineering, Bachelor of Science
          • Systems Engineering, Bachelor of Science
          • Civil Engineering, Master of Science in Engineering (MSE)
          • Civil Engineering, Minor
          • Civil and Systems Engineering, PhD
          • Systems Engineering, Master of Science in Engineering (MSE)
        • Computational Medicine
          • Computational Medicine, Minor
          • Computational Medicine, Pre-​Doctoral Training Program
        • Computer Science
          • Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts
          • Computer Science, Bachelor of Science
          • Computer Science, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Computer Science, Minor
          • Computer Science, PhD
        • Doctor of Engineering
          • Engineering, Doctor of Engineering
        • Electrical and Computer Engineering
          • Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science
          • Electrical and Computer Engineering, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Electrical and Computer Engineering, PhD
          • Electrical Engineering, Bachelor of Arts
          • Electrical Engineering, Bachelor of Science
          • Energy, Minor
        • Environmental Health and Engineering
          • Engineering for Sustainable Development, Minor
          • Environmental Engineering, Bachelor of Science
          • Environmental Engineering, Minor
          • Environmental Sciences, Minor
          • Geography and Environmental Engineering, Master of Arts
          • Geography and Environmental Engineering, Master of Science
          • Geography and Environmental Engineering, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Geography and Environmental Engineering, PhD
          • Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, Master of Science
        • General Engineering
          • General Engineering, Bachelor of Arts
        • Information Security Institute
          • Security Informatics, Master of Science
          • Security Informatics, Master of Science/​Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Master of Science in Engineering Dual Master's Program
          • Security Informatics, Master of Science/​Computer Science, Master of Science in Engineering Dual Master's Program
        • Materials Science and Engineering
          • Materials Science and Engineering, Bachelor of Science
          • Materials Science and Engineering, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Materials Science and Engineering, PhD
        • Mechanical Engineering
          • Engineering Mechanics, Bachelor of Science
          • Mechanical Engineering, Bachelor of Science
          • Mechanical Engineering, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Mechanical Engineering, PhD
        • NanoBioTechnology
          • Nano-​Biotechnology, Certificate of Advanced Study
        • Robotics and Computational Sensing
          • Computer Integrated Surgery, Minor
          • Robotics, Master of Science in Engineering
          • Robotics, Minor
      • Multi-​School Programs of Study
        • Business, Minor
        • Peabody-​Homewood Double Degree Program
        • Space Science and Engineering
    • Part-​Time, Online Graduate Programs (Engineering for Professionals)
      • Academic Policies
        • Academic Calendar
        • Academic Regulations
        • Registration Policies
        • Tuition and Fees
      • Admission Requirements
      • Applied and Computational Mathematics
        • Applied and Computational Mathematics, Master of Science
        • Applied and Computational Mathematics, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Applied Biomedical Engineering
        • Applied Biomedical Engineering, Graduate Certificate
        • Applied Biomedical Engineering, Master of Science
        • Applied Biomedical Engineering, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Applied Physics
        • Applied Physics, Master of Science
        • Applied Physics, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Artificial Intelligence
        • Artificial Intelligence, Graduate Certificate
        • Artificial Intelligence, Master of Science
      • Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
        • Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Master of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
      • Civil Engineering
        • Civil Engineering, Graduate Certificate
        • Civil Engineering, Master of Civil Engineering
      • Computer Science
        • Computer Science, Master of Science
        • Computer Science, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Cybersecurity
        • Cybersecurity, Master of Science
        • Cybersecurity, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Data Science
        • Data Science, Master of Science
        • Data Science, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Electrical and Computer Engineering
        • Electrical and Computer Engineering, Graduate Certificate
        • Electrical and Computer Engineering, Master of Science
        • Electrical and Computer Engineering, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Engineering Management
        • Engineering Management, Master of Engineering Management
      • Environmental Engineering, Science, and Management Programs
        • Environmental Engineering
          • Environmental Engineering, Graduate Certificate
          • Environmental Engineering, Master of Environmental Engineering
          • Environmental Engineering, Post-​Master’s Certificate
        • Environmental Engineering and Science
          • Environmental Engineering and Science, Graduate Certificate
          • Environmental Engineering and Science, Master of Science
          • Environmental Engineering and Science, Post-​Master’s Certificate
        • Environmental Planning and Management
          • Environmental Planning and Management, Graduate Certificate
          • Environmental Planning and Management, Master of Science
          • Environmental Planning and Management, Post-​Master’s Certificate
        • Climate Change, Energy, and Environmental Sustainability, Graduate Certificate
      • Financial Mathematics
        • Financial Mathematics, Master of Science
        • Financial Risk Management, Graduate Certificate
        • Quantitative Portfolio Management, Graduate Certificate
        • Securitization, Graduate Certificate
      • Healthcare Systems Engineering
        • Healthcare Systems Engineering, Master of Science
      • Information Systems Engineering
        • Information Systems Engineering, Graduate Certificate
        • Information Systems Engineering, Master of Science
        • Information Systems Engineering, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Materials Science and Engineering
        • Materials Science and Engineering, Master of Science
      • Mechanical Engineering
        • Mechanical Engineering, Master of Science
        • Mechanical Engineering, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Occupational and Environmental Hygiene
        • Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, Master of Science
      • Robotics and Autonomous Systems
        • Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Master of Science
      • Space Systems Engineering
        • Space Systems Engineering, Master of Science
      • Systems Engineering
        • Systems Engineering, Graduate Certificate
        • Systems Engineering, Master of Science
        • Systems Engineering, Master of Science in Engineering (ABET-​accredited)
        • Systems Engineering, Post-​Master’s Certificate
      • Technical Management
        • Technical Management, Graduate Certificate
        • Technical Management, Post-​Master’s Certificate
  • Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences
    • Full-​time, On-​campus Undergraduate and Graduate Programs (Homewood)
      • Undergraduate Policies
        • Academic Policies
          • Requirements for a Bachelor's Degree
          • Student Status
          • Registration Policies
          • Grading Policies
          • Academic Standing Policies
          • External Credit Policies
          • Study Abroad Policies
          • Graduation Policies
        • Student Life Policies
      • Graduate Policies
        • Academic Policies
        • Admissions and Finances
        • Graduate-​Specific Policies
        • Student Life
          • International Graduate Students
      • Departments, Program Requirements, and Courses
        • Anthropology
          • Anthropology, Bachelor of Arts
          • Anthropology, Minor
          • Anthropology, PhD
        • Archaeology
          • Archaeology, Bachelor of Arts
        • Behavioral Biology Program
          • Behavioral Biology, Bachelor of Arts
        • Bioethics
          • Bioethics, Minor
        • Biology
          • Biology, Bachelor of Arts
          • Biology, Bachelor of Arts/​Master of Science
          • Cellular, Molecular, Developmental Biology and Biophysics, PhD
          • Molecular &​ Cellular Biology, Bachelor of Science/​Master of Science
          • Molecular and Cellular Biology, Bachelor of Science
        • Biophysics
          • Biophysics, Bachelor of Arts
          • Biophysics, Fifth-​Year Master’s Degree
          • Biophysics, PhD -​ Jenkins Biophysics Program
          • Biophysics, PhD -​ Program in Molecular Biophysics
          • Biophysics, PhD -​ The Program in Cell, Molecular Developmental Biology and Biophysics
        • Center for Africana Studies
          • Africana Studies, Bachelor of Arts
          • Africana Studies, Minor
        • Center for Language Education
        • Chemistry
          • Chemistry, Bachelor of Arts
          • Chemistry, PhD
        • Classics
          • Classics, Bachelor of Arts
          • Classics, Bachelor of Arts/​Master of Arts
          • Classics, Minor
          • Classics, PhD
        • Cognitive Science
          • Cognitive Science, Bachelor of Arts
          • Cognitive Science, Master of Arts
          • Cognitive Science, PhD
          • Linguistics, Minor
        • Comparative Thought and Literature
          • Honors Program in the Humanities
          • Humanistic Studies, PhD
        • Earth and Planetary Sciences
          • Earth and Planetary Sciences, PhD
          • Earth and Planetary Sciences, Bachelor of Arts
          • Earth and Planetary Sciences, Minor
          • Energy, Minor
          • Environmental Science, Bachelor of Science
          • Environmental Studies, Bachelor of Arts
          • Environmental Studies, Minor
        • East Asian Studies
          • East Asian Studies, Bachelor of Arts
          • East Asian Studies, Minor
        • Economics
          • Economics, Bachelor of Arts
          • Economics, Minor
          • Economics, PhD
          • Financial Economics, Minor
        • English
          • English, Bachelor of Arts
          • English, Minor
          • English, PhD
        • Film and Media Studies
          • Film and Media Studies, Bachelor of Arts
          • Film and Media Studies, Minor
        • History
          • History, Bachelor of Arts
          • History, Bachelor of Arts/​Master of Arts Four-​Year Program
          • History, Minor
          • History, PhD
        • History of Art
          • History of Art, Bachelor of Arts
          • History of Art, Minor
          • History of Art, PhD
          • History of Art, Bachelor of Arts/​Master of Arts
        • History of Science and Technology
          • History of Science and Technology, PhD
          • History of Science, Medicine and Technology, Minor
          • History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, Bachelor of Arts
        • Interdisciplinary Studies
          • Interdisciplinary Studies, Bachelor of Arts
        • International Studies
          • International Studies, Bachelor of Arts
        • Islamic Studies
          • Islamic Studies, Minor
        • Jewish Studies
          • Jewish Studies, Minor
        • Mathematics
          • Mathematics, Bachelor of Arts
          • Mathematics, Minor
          • Mathematics, Bachelor of Arts/​Master of Arts
          • Mathematics, PhD
        • Medicine, Science, and the Humanities
          • Medicine, Science, and the Humanities, Bachelor of Arts
        • Military Science
        • Modern Languages and Literatures
          • French, Bachelor of Arts
          • French, Minor
          • French, PhD
          • German Bachelor of Arts/​Master of Arts
          • German, Bachelor of Arts
          • German, Minor
          • German, PhD
          • Italian, Bachelor of Arts
          • Italian, Minor
          • Italian, PhD
          • Romance Languages, Bachelor of Arts
          • Spanish, Bachelor of Arts
          • Spanish for the Professions, Minor
          • Spanish Language and Hispanic Cultures, Minor
          • Spanish, PhD
        • Museums and Society
          • Museums and Society, Minor
        • Music
          • Music, Minor
        • Natural Sciences Area Major
          • Natural Sciences Area, Bachelor of Arts
        • Near Eastern Studies
          • Near Eastern Studies, Bachelor of Arts
          • Near Eastern Studies, Minor
          • Near Eastern Studies, PhD
        • Neuroscience
          • Neuroscience, Bachelor of Science
          • Neuroscience, Bachelor of Science/​Master of Science
        • Philosophy
          • Philosophy, Bachelor of Arts
          • Philosophy, Bachelor of Arts/​Master of Arts
          • Philosophy, Minor
          • Philosophy, PhD
        • Physics and Astronomy
          • Astronomy and Astrophysics, PhD
          • Physics, Bachelor of Arts
          • Physics, Bachelor of Science
          • Physics, Bachelor of Science/​Master of Science
          • Physics, Minor
          • Physics, PhD
        • Political Science
          • Political Science, Bachelor of Arts
          • Political Science, PhD
        • Program in Latin American Studies
          • Latin American Studies, Minor
        • Psychological and Brain Sciences
          • Psychology, Bachelor of Arts
          • Psychology, Minor
          • Psychology, PhD
        • Public Health Studies
          • Public Health Studies, Bachelor of Arts
        • Social Policy
          • Social Policy, Minor
        • Sociology
          • Sociology, Bachelor of Arts
          • Sociology, PhD
          • Sociology, PhD/​Applied Mathematics and Statistics, MSE Joint Program
        • Space Science and Engineering
          • Space Science and Engineering, Minor
        • Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
          • Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Minor
        • Theatre Arts and Studies
          • Theatre Arts and Studies, Minor
        • Visual Arts
          • Visual Arts, Minor
        • Writing Seminars
          • Writing Seminars Minor
          • Writing Seminars, Bachelor of Arts
          • Writing Seminars, Master of Fine Arts
      • Multi-​School Programs of Study
    • Graduate and Professional Programs (Advanced Academic Programs)
      • About Krieger School of Arts and Sciences
      • Administration and Faculty
      • Enrollment Services
        • Academic Regulations for Online Courses
        • Academic Structure
        • Admission
        • Alumni Benefits
        • Grades /​ Performance /​ Conduct
        • Graduation Requirements
        • Registration
        • Tuition and Fees
      • Programs
        • Applied Economics, Master of Science
          • Applied Economics, MS/​ Investment Certificate
          • Applied Economics, MS/​Financial Management Certificate
        • Applied Economics, MS/​MBA Dual Degree
        • Center for Advanced Governmental Studies
          • Data Analytics and Policy, Master of Science
            • Data Analytics and Policy, MS/​Intelligence, Certificate
          • Data Analytics and Policy, Certificate
          • Geospatial Intelligence, Master of Science
          • Global Security Studies, Master of Arts
            • Global Security Studies, MA/​Intelligence, Certificate
          • Government, MA/​MBA
          • Government, Master of Arts
            • Government, MA/​Intelligence, Certificate
          • Intelligence Analysis, Master of Science
          • Intelligence, Certificate
          • Non-​Governmental Organization (NGO) Management, Master of Arts
          • Non-​Profit Management, Master of Arts
          • Nonprofit Management, Certificate
          • Public Management, Master of Arts
            • Public Management, MA/​Data Analytics and Policy, Certificate
            • Public Management, MA/​Intelligence, Certificate
            • Public Management, MA/​Nonprofit Management, Certificate
        • Center for Biotechnology Education
          • Bioinformatics, Master of Science
          • Biotechnology Education, Certificate
          • Biotechnology Enterprise, Certificate
          • Biotechnology, Master of Science
          • Biotechnology, Master of Science/​MBA
          • Food Safety Regulation, Master of Science
          • Individualized Genomics and Health, Master of Science
          • Master of Biotechnology Enterprise and Entrepreneurship
          • Regulatory Science, Master of Science
          • Sequence Analysis and Genomics, Post-​Master’s Certificate
        • Communication, Master of Arts
        • Communication, Master of Arts/​MBA
          • Communication, Master of Arts/​Nonprofit Management, Certificate
        • Cultural Heritage Management, Master of Arts
          • Cultural Heritage Management, MA/​Digital Curation, Certificate
          • Cultural Heritage Management, MA/​Nonprofit Management, Certificate
        • Digital Curation, Certificate
        • Energy Policy and Climate, Master of Science
        • Environmental Sciences and Policy, Master of Science
          • MS in Environmental Sciences and Policy/​Geographic Information Systems, Certificate
        • Film and Media, Master of Arts
        • Geographic Information Systems, Master of Science
          • Geographic Information Systems, Certificate
        • Master of Liberal Arts
        • Museum Studies, Master of Arts
          • Museum Studies, MA/​Digital Curation, Certificate
          • Museum Studies, MA/​Nonprofit Management, Certificate
        • Organizational Leadership, Master of Science
        • Quantitative Methods in Applied Economics, Post-​Master’s Certificate
        • Regenerative and Stem Cell Technologies, Master of Science
        • Research Administration, Master of Science
        • Science Writing, Master of Arts
          • Science Writing, Certificate
        • Teaching Writing, Master of Arts
          • Teaching Writing, Certificate
        • Writing, Master of Arts
        • Office of Summer and Intersession Programs
  • Course Descriptions
    • AS.010 (History of Art)
    • AS.020 (Biology)
    • AS.030 (Chemistry)
    • AS.040 (Classics)
    • AS.050 (Cognitive Science)
    • AS.060 (English)
    • AS.061 (Film and Media Studies)
    • AS.070 (Anthropology)
    • AS.080 (Neuroscience)
    • AS.100 (History)
    • AS.110 (Mathematics)
    • AS.130 (Near Eastern Studies)
    • AS.136 (Archaeology)
    • AS.140 (History of Science, Medicine, and Technology)
    • AS.145 (Medicine, Science and the Humanities)
    • AS.150 (Philosophy)
    • AS.171 (Physics &​ Astronomy)
    • AS.180 (Economics)
    • AS.190 (Political Science)
    • AS.192 (International Studies)
    • AS.194 (Islamic Studies)
    • AS.196 (Agora Institute)
    • AS.200 (Psychological &​ Brain Sciences)
    • AS.210 (Modern Languages &​ Literatures)
    • AS.220 (Writing Seminars)
    • AS.225 (Theatre Arts &​ Studies)
    • AS.230 (Sociology)
    • AS.250 (Biophysics)
    • AS.270 (Earth &​ Planetary Sciences)
    • AS.280 (Public Health Studies)
    • AS.290 (Behavioral Biology)
    • AS.300 (Comparative Thought and Literature)
    • AS.310 (East Asian Studies)
    • AS.360 (Interdepartmental)
    • AS.361 (Program in Latin American Studies)
    • AS.362 (Center for Africana Studies)
    • AS.363 (Study of Women, Gender, &​ Sexuality)
    • AS.370 (Center for Language Education)
    • AS.371 (Art)
    • AS.374 (Military Science)
    • AS.376 (Music)
    • AS.389 (Program in Museums and Society)
    • AS.410 (Biotechnology)
    • AS.420 ( Environmental Sciences)
    • AS.425 ( Energy Policy and Climate)
    • AS.430 ( Geographic Information Systems)
    • AS.440 ( Applied Economics)
    • AS.450 ( Liberal Arts)
    • AS.455 ( Film and Media)
    • AS.460 ( Museum Studies)
    • AS.465 ( Cultural Heritage Management)
    • AS.470 ( Government)
    • AS.472 ( Geospatial Intelligence)
    • AS.475 ( Research Administration)
    • AS.480 ( Communication)
    • AS.485 ( Organizational Leadership)
    • AS.490 ( Writing)
    • AS.491 ( Science Writing)
    • AS.492 ( Teaching Writing)
    • AS.492 (Non-​Departmental)
    • AS.990 (-​JHU Department)
    • AS.999 (AAP)
    • BU.001 (Graduate Business)
    • BU.001 (MBA)
    • BU.120 (Management)
    • BU.132 (Real Estate)
    • BU.210 (Finance)
    • BU.300 (Information Systems)
    • BU.410 (Marketing)
    • BU.510 (Quantitative Methods)
    • BU.550 (Business of Health)
    • BU.610 (Operations Management)
    • ED. (Education)
    • EN.500 (General Engineering)
    • EN.510 (Materials Science &​ Engineering)
    • EN.515 (Materials Science and Engineering)
    • EN.520 (Electrical &​ Computer Engineering)
    • EN.525 (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
    • EN.530 (Mechanical Engineering)
    • EN.535 (Mechanical Engineering)
    • EN.540 (Chemical &​ Biomolecular Engineering)
    • EN.545 (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering)
    • EN.553 (Applied Mathematics &​ Statistics)
    • EN.555 (Financial Mathematics)
    • EN.560 (Civil Engineering)
    • EN.565 (Civil Engineering)
    • EN.570 (Environmental Health and Engineering)
    • EN.575 (Environmental Engineering and Science)
    • EN.575 (Environmental Engineering)
    • EN.575 (Environmental Planning and Management)
    • EN.580 (Biomedical Engineering)
    • EN.585 (Applied Biomedical Engineering)
    • EN.595 (Engineering Management)
    • EN.601 (Computer Science)
    • EN.605 (Computer Science)
    • EN.615 (Applied Physics)
    • EN.625 (Applied and Computational Mathematics)
    • EN.635 (Information Systems Engineering)
    • EN.645 (Systems Engineering)
    • EN.650 (Information Security Institute)
    • EN.655 (Healthcare Systems Engineering)
    • EN.660 (Center for Leadership Education)
    • EN.670 (Institute for NanoBio Technology)
    • EN.675 (Space Systems Engineering)
    • EN.685 (Data Science)
    • EN.695 (Cybersecurity)
    • EN.700 (Doctor of Engineering)
    • ME.100 (Biophsyics)
    • ME.110 (Cell Biology)
    • ME.120 (Art as Applied to Medicine)
    • ME.130 (Functional Anatomy and Evolution)
    • ME.140 (Gynecology and Obstetrics)
    • ME.150 (History of Medicine)
    • ME.200 (Neurology)
    • ME.210 (Biomedical Engineering)
    • ME.220 (Dermatology)
    • ME.250 (Medicine)
    • ME.250 (Health Sciences Informatics)
    • ME.260 (Molecular Biology and Genetics)
    • ME.280 (Ophthalmology)
    • ME.290 (Otolaryngology)
    • ME.300 (Pathology)
    • ME.320 (Pediatrics)
    • ME.330 (Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences)
    • ME.340 (Biological Chemistry)
    • ME.360 (Physiology)
    • ME.370 (Psychiatry)
    • ME.380 (Surgery)
    • ME.381 (Plastic Surgery)
    • ME.390 (Neurosurgery)
    • ME.400 (Orthopedic Surgery)
    • ME.420 (Radiology)
    • ME.440 (Neuroscience)
    • ME.520 (Emergency Medicine)
    • ME.510 (Oncology)
    • ME.560 (Urology)
    • ME.570 (Anesthesiology)
    • ME.580 (Biomedical Engineering)
    • ME.600 (Health Sciences Informatics)
    • ME.680 (Comparative Medicine)
    • ME.700 (Immunology)
    • ME.710 (Human Genetics)
    • ME.711 (Berman Bioethics Institute)
    • ME.712 (The Welch Center)
    • ME.714 (The Bloomberg School of Public Health)
    • ME.715 (Non-​Departmental)
    • ME.716 (Physical Medicine &​ Rehabilitation)
    • ME.717 (Radiation Oncology)
    • ME.718 (Institute of Genetic Medicine)
    • ME.800 (Interdepartmental)
    • NR (Nursing)
    • PH.120 (Biochemistry and Molecular Biology)
    • PH.140 (Biostatistics)
    • PH.220 (International Health)
    • PH.260 (Molecular Microbiology and Immunology)
    • PH.300 (Health Policy and Management)
    • PH.330 (Mental Health)
    • PH.340 (Epidemiology)
    • PH.380 (Population Family and Reproductive Health)
    • PH.390 (Clinical Investigation)
    • PH.410 (Health Behavior and Society)
    • PH.550 (Extradepartmental Studies)
    • PH.600 (Online Programs for Applied Learning)
    • PH.700 (Berman Institute)
    • PY.010 (Studio Lessons)
    • PY.113 (Recitals)
    • PY.123 (General Studies)
    • PY.123 (Professional Studies)
    • PY.250 (Humanities -​ Language)
    • PY.260 (Humanities -​ Liberal Arts)
    • PY.310 (Composition)
    • PY.320 (New Media)
    • PY.330 (Conducting)
    • PY.350 (Computer Music)
    • PY.380 (Historical Performance)
    • PY.410 (Brass)
    • PY.415 (Percussion)
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    • PY.430 (Woodwinds)
    • PY.450 (Ensemble Arts)
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    • PY.460 (Organ)
    • PY.470 (Guitar)
    • PY.510 (Music Education)
    • PY.520 (Pedagogy)
    • PY.530 (Voice)
    • PY.540 (Opera)
    • PY.550 (Recording Arts and Sciences)
    • PY.570 (Jazz)
    • PY.610 (Musicology)
    • PY.710 (Music Theory)
    • PY.715 (Music Theory -​ ET/​SS)
    • PY.715 (Music Theory -​ Keyboard Studies)
    • PY.800 (Dance)
    • PY.910 (Ensembles -​ Large)
    • PY.950 (Ensembles -​ Small/​Chamber)
    • SA.100 (Core Courses)
    • SA.310 (International Economics)
    • SA.500 (Development, Climate &​ Sustainability)
    • SA.501 (Technology &​ Culture)
    • SA.503 (States Markets Institutions)
    • SA.510 (International Economics, &​ Finance)
    • SA.550 (Africa)
    • SA.551 (The Americas)
    • SA.552 (Asia)
    • SA.553 (China)
    • SA.554 (Europe &​ Eurasia)
    • SA.555 (The Middle East)
    • SA.556 (The United States)
    • SA.600 (International Relations)
    • SA.620 (Global Policy)
    • SA.630 (Global Risk)
    • SA.502 (Security Strategy, &​Statecraft)
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  • Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences›
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  • English
  • Overview
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Department website: http://english.jhu.edu/

The Department of English offers separate undergraduate and graduate programs, each designed to suit the needs of its particular student body. The undergraduate program, in the context of university requirements and elective courses, provides the basis for a liberal education and prepares students for graduate work or professional schools, such as medicine and law, as well as professional teaching and literary scholarship. The graduate program prepares advanced students for professional teaching careers in English literature.

Facilities

In addition to the the Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins students have easy access to the 12 million volumes and innumerable historical manuscripts of the Library of Congress, as well as the library at Dumbarton Oaks, the Folger Library, the Freer Library, the library of the National Gallery, and many other specialized public collections. Students learn about advances in research and criticism and confer with leading American and European scholars and critics through participation in the activities of the Tudor and Stuart Club, the ELH Colloquium, and the department’s other programming.

Programs

  • English, Bachelor of Arts
  • English, Minor
  • English, PhD

For current course information and registration go to https://sis.jhu.edu/classes/

Courses

AS.060.107.  Introduction to Literary Study.  3 Credits.  

This course serves as an introduction to the basic methods of and critical approaches to the study of literature. Some sections may have further individual topic descriptions; please check in SIS when searching for courses.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.108.  Time Travel.  3 Credits.  

Why is time travel such a consistent and perplexing theme in literature and film over the last 150 years? Why is modernity so concerned with peeking backwards or forwards? This course will examine the history of time-travel fiction, from its beginning in utopian fiction through its box-office dominance in the 1980s, and into today. Writers will likely include Mark Twain, Edward Bellamy, Harold Steele Mackay, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick. Movies will include *The Terminator*, *Back to the Future*, and *Primer*.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.109.  Robots, Androids, Slaves.  3 Credits.  

Since the rise of Silicon Valley, tech enthusiasts and futurists have been debating the possibility of what has been called “the singularity” — the moment when artificial intelligence (AI) decisively and irreversibly surpasses human abilities. If this does happen, observers worry, it’s not just that robots will take our jobs; will we become subservient to our new robot masters? Will we become extinct, and not because of climate change? This course explores such questions through the lens of literature and popular media. We will watch several films from the last 15 years or so that depict the rise of AI. We will ask about the roles tat gender, race and class have in our imagination of the work robots do. And we will read a range of short essays that approach the question of labor and technology from different angles than mass media usually do.

Area: Humanities

AS.060.129.  Writing Africa Now.  3 Credits.  

This course surveys post-2000 literary and cultural production from sub-Saharan Africa. Topics will include debates over genre and fiction’s relevance to African experience, legacies of canonical writing about independence, urban Africa as violent or “tragic” landscape, and problems of scale and geographical context. Readings by authors such as Adichie, Wainaina, Duiker, and Vladislavic, and students will be introduced to the main print and online arteries of African intellectual discussion. This class is for non-majors and does not count towards the English major or minor.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.135.  American Nightmares: Burroughs, Highsmith, Dick.  3 Credits.  

These three authors share a common starting point: Patricia Highsmith, William S. Burroughs and Philip K. Dick all began their careers writing mass market genre fiction in pre-Stonewall, pre-civil rights, Cold War 1950s America. Absorbing the stylistic codes of their respective marketplaces of suspense writing and lesbian romance, "drug fiend" confessional, and science fiction, each writer's conformist apprenticeship in pulp resurfaces in increasingly nightmarish forms in the violent and paranoid scenarios that dominate their mature work. Reading broadly in each author's short fiction, novels, and prose, we will sequentially examine Burroughs' "cut-up" techniques and "routines", Highsmith's free indirect discourse gone wrong, and Dick's disorienting temporal experiments as inflamed allergic reactions to generic codes. We will also examine the cinematic afterlives of these authors by looking at key scenes from three adaptations of their work: Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991), and Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly (2006).

Area: Humanities

AS.060.137.  Doctors Without Borders: Literature, Medicine, and the Human Condition.  3 Credits.  

Doctors play a significant role in shaping literary history as both writers and fictional subjects. From Chekhov to Sherlock Holmes, W. Somerset Maugham to Middlemarch, medical practice is imagined to bestow a privileged understanding of humanity in confrontation with questions of life and death. This course explores how writing about medicine connects long-established themes of mortality, authority, and ways of knowing to timely questions of global migration, cultural contact, and social justice. We will read literary writing by physicians as well as writing that depicts their work in detail, by authors including Nawal El Saadawi, Atul Gawande, Abraham Verghese, Damon Galgut, and Taiye Selasi.

Area: Humanities

AS.060.140.  Diaries, Journals, Some Notes.  3 Credits.  

A study of genres of private writings, focusing on the diary form. Readings will likely include diaries by Pepys, Boswell, Frank, Woolf, as well as critical and theoretical texts on the form.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.142.  Indigenous Science Fiction: (Re)making Worlds.  3 Credits.  

This discussion-based seminar will survey science fiction written by indigenous authors in what are now the United States, Canada, and Australia. We will investigate by what means and to what ends this particular genre has been taken up by indigenous peoples both to reflect on their settler-colonial pasts and presents and to imagine decolonial futures. Texts may include: Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead; William Sanders, "The Undiscovered"; Daniel Heath Justice, The Way of Thorn and Thunder; Blake Hausman, Riding the Trail of Tears; Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow; Claire Coleman, Terra Nullius; Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth. Fulfills the Global and Minority Literatures requirement.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.148.  Asian and Latinx American Literatures: Rethinking Empire.  3 Credits.  

This course explores the transnational convergence of Asians/Asian Americans and Latinxs/ Latinx Americans from a history of multiple imperialisms to the neoliberal, globalized present. We will situate the racialization of Asian and Latinx peoples within a larger, global framework and think critically about areas of solidarity and tension between these two multi-ethnic groups through readings in literature, history, and sociology.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.151.  Doubles, Demons, and Dummies: The Literature of the Fantastic.  3 Credits.  

Talking reflections. Dolls with knives. Dancing automatons. They are all part of the strange and dangerous world of the fantastic. This course examines the literature of the fantastic, or what we can refer to as creepy double, demon, and dummy stories. We’ll look at everything from Poe to American Psycho in an attempt to figure out what just happened, why, and how it relates to literary meaning.

Area: Humanities

AS.060.163.  William Faulkner, Race, and Southern Fiction.  3 Credits.  

This course will introduce students to debates in American literary studies around questions of race, politics, and the history of the American South. The course will center around a reading of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! alongside literary history, critical theory, and other pieces of fiction from the American South. We will use these texts to explore the transformations of ra-cial discourses in 19th and 20th century America, with close attention to how they influence the present.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.164.  Cyberpunk: High-Tech, Low Life.  3 Credits.  

This course will examine the science fiction movement of cyberpunk as an aesthetic, narrative, and political reaction to late neoliberalism. We will read and discuss literature, film, and interactive media from this genre to develop an understanding of how cyberpunk texts register, refract, and attempt to reconcile antagonisms central to contemporary life.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.165.  Science Fiction and Climate Change.  3 Credits.  

This course will examine representations of, and confrontations with, climate change in science fiction. Special focus will be given to indigenous futurisms as uniquely valuable perspectives on the climate crisis. We will examine these narratives alongside climate change discourse, literary theory, and literary criticism.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.169.  Literature and Visual Art.  3 Credits.  

We’ll glance at the history of the relations between painting and literature, before turning to the art of the past 200 years. What has drawn writers to place their powers against those of painters (in particular)? How have they managed the comparisons? How might we understand the distinctive powers and limitations of these two modes of responding to human experience? While we may have an exam, writing assignments will constitute most of your grade.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.207.  William Shakespeare.  3 Credits.  

Who was William Shakespeare, and what can his poems, histories, comedies and tragedies tell us about our overlap with, and divergences from, the early modern world?

Area: Humanities

AS.060.208.  English Literature from Chaucer to Behn.  3 Credits.  

This course is a survey of English writing from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Tracing the evolution of vernacular literature in English from the late medieval period to the early modern period and onwards to the threshold of modernity, we will focus intensively upon four key works: Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales,” Book I of Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene”, John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Aphra Behn’s “Oroonoko.” These works will be examined in their formal and generic dimensions as key examples of broader aesthetic changes in the constitution of “literature” as a category. They will also be placed in their political, religious, and social contexts. Through lectures, class discussion, written responses, and longer essay assignments, students will master the fundamentals of English literary history as well as the techniques of critical reading and writing.

Area: Humanities

AS.060.209.  The Literary History of the Devil to 1800.  3 Credits.  

This course reads major works in European literature before 1800 (give or take) depicting the devil. It examines the history of the various social, cultural and political guises under which the devil appears, and the function that representing radical evil performs, in literature and society. Among our readings will be Dante’s Inferno; Milton’s Paradise Lost; Goethe’s Faust, Part One, and many other major Satanic works.

Area: Humanities

AS.060.210.  British Literature II.  3 Credits.  

This course provides a framework for grasping the dazzling variety and explosive innovation of literature in English during the last quarter-millennium. Attending both to textual details and to historical contexts, we will see how Wordsworth, Austen, Keats, Tennyson, Dickens, Wilde, Woolf, Rushdie, and other writers extend and undo tradition, illuminate their times and places as well as our own, and conspire to bring to us the intense experience distinctive to great literary art.

Area: Humanities

AS.060.211.  How Not to be Afraid of Poetry.  3 Credits.  

What is poetry? And why don't we like it? This course will explore what makes poetry turn ordinary language into something extraordinary. Opening up a range of poetry in English, the course will involve reading poetry aloud, thinking about poetry and its forms, and gaining experience in understanding poetry. Assignments will include attending to details small and large in poems, becoming an expert about a single poet, debating aesthetic issues, and composing short analytical papers about poems. There are two required written assignments, a midterm and a final examination.

Area: Humanities

AS.060.212.  British Literature: 18th Century to the Prese.  3 Credits.  

A survey of major authors such as Wordsworth, Keats, Austen, Tennyson, Dickens, Wilde, Woolf, Joyce, and Rushdie. Substantial attention to formal conventions as well as stylistic innovation, to aesthetic value as well as social meaning.

Area: Humanities

AS.060.216.  Zombies.  3 Credits.  

This lecture survey will attempt to answer why the zombie has become such a fixture in contemporary literature and cinema. We will track this figure across its many incarnations--from its late-eighteenth-century appearance in ethnographic fictions growing out of the modern cultures of racialized slavery in the Americas right up to twenty-first-century Hollywood blockbusters in which the origins of the figure in the cultures of racialized slavery are perhaps not overt yet continue to manifest. What are the implications of the zombie's arc from a particular human being targeted for domination by a sorcerer to a living-dead horde created by radiation or epidemic? "Texts" may include: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man Who Was Used Up"; H.P. Lovecraft, "Herbert West--Re-Animator"; Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse; Victor Halperin, dir., White Zombie; George Romero, dir., Dead series; Edgar Wright, dir., Shaun of the Dead; Alejandro Brugués, dir., Juan de los Muertos; Colm McCarthy, dir., The Girl with All the Gifts; Colson Whitehead, Zone One; Jordan Peele, dir., Get Out. Fulfills the Global and Minority Literatures requirement.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.217.  Time Travel.  3 Credits.  

Why is time travel such a consistent and perplexing theme in literature and film over the last 150 years? Why is modernity so concerned with peeking backwards or forwards? This course will examine the history of time-travel fiction, from its beginning in utopian fiction through its box-office dominance in the 1980s, and into today.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.219.  American Literature to 1865.  3 Credits.  

A survey course of American literature from contact to the Civil War.

Area: Humanities

AS.060.220.  Clint Eastwood, Race and the American Western.  3 Credits.  

Drawing from the body of work engaging and recording the Hollywood gunfighter and outlaw folk-hero Clint Eastwood, the course will investigate American cinematic representations of slavery and its absence, the Civil War, and racial formation along the United States’ southwestern frontier in films produced from the 1950s through the contemporary period. A focus on the cultural icon Clint Eastwood enables a close examination of American cinematic fantasies of the frontier, frontier violence and the desire to escape or erase the tensions of race and slavery that have deeply permeated the American cultural consciousness, particularly the creation of American masculine ideals. The course will also take decided note of the national shift from liberal “Great Society Programs” of the 1960s to the conservative “neoliberal” social and cultural ideals in the 1980s and 1990s. Our purpose is to consider the organization and reformation of hegemonic power by way of the complex morality play the western film evokes, typically considering the interstitial geographies between civilization and savagery, belonging and alienation, and metropolitan and colonial outpost. We will privilege in our discussions the contested frontiers of racial dominion.

Area: Humanities

AS.060.221.  The Modernist Novel: Consciousness and Crisis.  3 Credits.  

A course on key novels written in Britain or its former colonies between 1900 and 1960. Major attention to the meanings of modernism across the arts as well as innovations in prose fiction.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.222.  American Literature, 1865 to today.  3 Credits.  

A survey of American literature from 1865 to today.

Area: Humanities

AS.060.232.  Detective Fiction.  3 Credits.  

This lecture will trace the the history of English-language detective fiction through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Why does the figure of the detective appear when it does? How does it change over time, and what can we learn from that? We will pay special attention to the way clues and suspense operate, the role of the reader in figuring out the mystery, and the complicated relationship of the detective with official authority. Authors will likely include some selection of Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammet, and Raymond Chandler.

Area: Humanities

AS.060.265.  Nineteenth Century British Novel.  3 Credits.  

Reading major novelists from the nineteenth century including Austen, C. Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and Conrad. We will pay attention to formal conventions, and relation to social and historical context.

Area: Humanities

AS.060.304.  Large Novels.  3 Credits.  

This course will look at novels that are not only large in size, but which also think about the meaning and methods of trying to capture huge segments of the world into a piece of art. How much can be fit into a novel? What is gained and what is lost? How large is too large? We will read Charles Dickens's Bleak House, Lev Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.308.  The Essay Form and Creative Non-Fiction.  3 Credits.  

We’ll focus on the essay form, with special attention to recent creative non-fiction that responds to art and literature itself. Theoretical, stylistic, and formal issues will all be considered.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.309.  Slavery in Renaissance Literature.  3 Credits.  

Against the backdrop of the rise of the European slave trade, how were slaves represented in early modern English literature? How was the condition of enslavement inflected by emergent nationalism, colonialism and theological constructions of difference? This course puts Renaissance literature into conversation with comparative histories of slavery and critical race theory. Authors include Aristotle, Terence, Epictetus, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Aphra Behn, Orlando Patterson, Kim Hall, Stephen Greenblatt, Mary Nyquist, Moses Finley and others.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.313.  Literature of the Settler Revolution.  3 Credits.  

The nineteenth century saw the creation of an “Angloworld” as a result of what one historian has called “the settler revolution.” In perhaps the largest mass migration in human history, millions of English-speakers (and others) invaded Indigenous worlds in what have consequently come to be known as the United States, Canada, and Australia. This seminar offers an introduction to nineteenth-century Indigenous and settler Anglophone writing in the US, Canada, and Australia with a view to understanding the role of literature in inciting, interrogating, and resisting this settler revolution.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.314.  Social Media Fictions.  3 Credits.  

Writers around the world are now searching for ways to incorporate new modes of social interaction - e.g. Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, and Skype - into their print work. This course explores the various techniques they have adopted for this purpose, with an eye to critically evaluating their implications for narrative structure and its "reality effect." From Teju Cole's very public experiments with the Twitter novel to a Zimbabwean writer's attempt to capture plot turns through SMS, we will discuss the ways in which narrative is helped or hindered by the ubiquity of social media. Writers studied will include Tendai Huchu, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, and Eben Venter.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.315.  Literature of Incarceration.  3 Credits.  

We will take up a history of writing from and about various carceral sites (prison, detention camps, etc-- as well as Circe’ island and Jonah’s whale) to see what they can teach us about larger questions of the movement (or not) of certain populations, the ideology and economies of imprisonment, and campaigns for the abolition of prisons.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.316.  Mapping the Global Metropolis.  3 Credits.  

Cities have long taken on a central role in literature, but much of our reading about urban space is confined to a few Western hubs. And while the city has traditionally been a space for fictional characters to develop into national subjects, much of the most innovative contemporary writing sees the city as a character of its own. This course will address the representational challenges of globalization through fiction and genre-bending memoir about contemporary metropolises that act as its microcosm: Johannesburg, Lagos, Delhi, London, and New York. We will read primary works by Ivan Vladislavic, Chris Abani, Aravind Adiga, Zadie Smith, and Teju Cole, as well as supplementary excerpts from books including Capital, by Rana Dasgupta, Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums, Ato Quayson’s Oxford Street, Accra, and Loren Kruger’s Imagining the Edgy City. Finally, the course will include theoretical readings about globality and representation, such as Fredric Jameson’s essay on “Cognitive Mapping” and Arjun Appadurai’s seminal book Modernity at Large.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.317.  Jane Austen Beyond England.  3 Credits.  

This will be an in-depth study of Austen’s novels with an emphasis on how they have traveled outside of the country of her birth – e.g. to the United States, India, and East Asia—through the work of individuals and the flows of global capitalism. Students will gain perhaps a disorienting sense of what Austen means in different cultures at different historical moments, and conduct individual research to learn more. Knowledge of another language is not necessary but could prove useful. The course will include a field-trip to the Alberta Burke Austen collection at Goucher College.

Prerequisite(s): AS.060.107

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.320.  Icons of Feminism.  3 Credits.  

This course looks at four crucial figures who have haunted feminist thought and responses to feminism over the centuries. Sappho, known as the first female poet, remains an enigmatic icon of feminine desire and creativity; Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus and the heroine of Sophocles’s play Antigone, still inspires feminist analyses of women’s relationship to law, the state and civil society; and Joan of Arc, the militant maid of Orleans, troubles thinking about women and violence as well as women, religion and spirituality. The last figure is Mary Wollstonecraft, often cited as the first modern feminist. The course will examine literary works written about these iconic figures, as well as contemporary feminist writing about their influence and viability as models for the future of feminism.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.326.  Shakespeare: The Novel.  3 Credits.  

What if King Lear had been a mother? What if the we thought about Othello through the lens of the holocaust? What if the indigene Caliban was the hero, not the villain? What if Miranda chose Caliban over her European suitor? (The Tempest) Could a modern-day Kate be tricked into marriage and “tamed” (The Taming of the Shrew)? When contemporary novelists rewrite Shakespeare, they pose questions left hanging in the play and bring the plays into our own world. In this course, we will read Shakespeare plays (King Lear, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Venice) along with contemporary novelists that rewrite – and confront -- those plays (Jane Smiley, Caryl Phillips, J. M. Coetzee, Anne Tyler). Students will take up important literary questions about kinds of literature (plays vs novels), the canon, imitation, adaptation, and also address the themes of power, gender and sexuality, family dynamics, authority, colonization and the environment.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.327.  "All Art is Propaganda".  3 Credits.  

This course will explore black literature written as protest. We will examine how, in the face of threats to black life, Frances E.W. Harper, Richard Wright, Amiri Baraka, and others have realized versions of W.E.B. Du Bois’s objective: “all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists.”

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.328.  Malcolm and Martin: An Introduction to the Lives and Thought of Two Icons of the Black Freedom Struggle.  3 Credits.  

Using their recorded speeches, written lectures and published writings and drawing from their biographies, this course will explore the important life work of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. We intend to upend traditional conversations about political radicalism and ethnic politics by analyzing these spokesmen associated most indelibly with black nationalism and racial integration, respectively.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.331.  The Literature of the Atlantic Slavery.  3 Credits.  

This seminar will trace the historical development of the slavery debate in the Atlantic world through examination of key texts from a host of genres and locations—Quaker religious tracts, political documents like the Haitian Declaration of Independence, Cuban antislavery novels, slave narratives, and “classics” of American literature like Melville’s Benito Cereno. We will consider how the institution of Atlantic slavery was variously represented, justified, and criticized, discovering in the process the deep structures of modern slavery discourse.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.337.  James Joyce's Ulysses.  3 Credits.  

A careful semester-long reading of James Joyce’s masterpeice Ulysses, one of the greatest and most intimidating novels in world literature.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.341.  Milton.  3 Credits.  

This class will study Milton’s poetry and prose across the whole of his writing career, with special attention to Paradise Lost, the great epic poem retelling the story of the fall of humankind. We will consider Milton’s literary background, his contemporary political and social milieu, as well as critical debates that surrounding the poet, who was accused of being ‘of the devil’s party.’ Pre-1800 course.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.342.  Contemporary Novel of Ideas.  3 Credits.  

The novel of ideas is often traced to 18th century French or 19th century Russian writing, but it has come broadly to signify works of robust philosophical contemplation. The inherently slippery term seems to indicate a work in which “form” is subsidiary to “content,” or at least, in which narrative structures adapt to prioritize thought rather than style, image, or even character. But how, exactly, and about what, do novels “think?” In large part, the novel of ideas is now conflated with a rote and recognizable brand of social realism. This course asks what might qualify as a novel of ideas today, both in terms of the novel’s changing relation to geographical space (and thereby the formal spaces in which philosophy might lurk), and of the particular “ideas” it critiques or puts forth. We will read novelists including J.M. Coetzee, Marlene van Niekerk, Jonathan Franzen, Teju Cole, and Ronan Bennett within a longer literary-philosophical tradition, with reference to works such as Candide, War and Peace, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.343.  Marxism and Literature.  3 Credits.  

This course will provide a survey of some of the concepts in Marx’s work, especially those to be found in volume 1 of Capital, that might help us get a clearer sense of 21st-century politics and culture. We will move outward from reading Marx to reading recent and classic texts in the Marxist critical tradition. We will discuss explicitly economic ideas about commodities, surplus value, and concrete and abstract labor, as well as historical and political ideas like “primitive accumulation” and the “uneven and combined development” of nations. We will think about what reading Marx and the Marxist tradition can help us see about colonialism, gender, race, technology, and the environment, as well as how it can clarify the character of economic crises. Toward the end of the term we will turn to literary texts, not necessarily “Marxist” themselves, to help us understand important questions that Marxism cannot tackle by itself, like: who are people, anyway? What do they hope for, when they write? Is there a Marxist idea of beauty, and is it different than everybody else’s? Along with Marx, and anti-colonial, anti-racist and feminist writers in the Marxist tradition, we’ll read work by the novelist NK Jemisin, and the poet Stephanie Young.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.348.  Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury.  3 Credits.  

An exploration of the achievements and investments of one of the most influential coteries in the history of Britain. In addition to delving into key fictions by Virginia Woolf, we will examine novels by Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster, art criticism by Roger Fry and Clive Bell, biographical essays by Lytton Strachey, economic writings by John Maynard Keynes, and poetry by T. S. Eliot.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.350.  Reason and Romance: Literature of the British Eighteenth Century.  3 Credits.  

Any era can be characterized by its oppositions and polarities, but perhaps few were more defined by their contradictions than the eighteenth century in Britain. Reason and passion, honor and ribaldry, skepticism and fantasy, tradition and revolution: in capturing the tensions between these dyads, the wildly energetic literature of the period furnishes a singular lens through which to examine questions of consciousness, gender, celebrity, race, political theater, and even life during a pandemic that continue to shape our lives today. Authors studied may include Frances Burney, Ottobah Cugoano, Daniel Defoe, Olaudah Equiano, John Gay, Samuel Johnson, Charlotte Lennox, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.353.  Margaret Atwood: Imagining Catastrophe.  3 Credits.  

This is the moment for a course on the Canadian climate activist, poet, and novelist Margaret Atwood. Best known for her dystopian The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Atwood's monitory visions in poetry, short stories, non-fiction and novels attend to themes of malevolence, metamorphosis, memory, genetic mutation, totalitarianism, corporate control, feminism, and climate disaster, while rooted in traditions of folktale, myth, and ironic detachment. Among other works, including poetry and non-fiction, we will read novels The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam, exploring Atwood's "writing with intent." Seminar discussion; midterm; class presentations; two short papers and one final project.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.354.  Literature of the Sea.  3 Credits.  

In this course, we will read 19th- and 20th-century American and British literature about the sea, using an approach informed by recent scholarship in what has been called Blue Humanities or Oceanic Studies.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.355.  Poetry and Politics Today.  3 Credits.  

The history of poetry is full of political poems of every kind — odes, epics, dramatic persona poems. And the history of literary criticism is full of denunciations of poetry that gets “too political,” and loses sight of its job to give pleasure. In this course, we will look at a range of contemporary poetry that tackles political issues — things like the causes of climate change; immigration crises; white supremacy; patriarchal gender systems; the legacies of colonialism — and study the ways it accomplishes its goals while still giving us the kinds of surprise in language that poetry has always promised. Reading will include (but not be limited to) work by Tongo Eisen-Martin, Cathy Park Hong, Sandra Simonds, Stephanie Young, and Wendy Trevino.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.358.  Virginia Woolf.  3 Credits.  

Beautiful, acute, and consequential, Woolf’s writing opens onto an extraordinary range of aesthetic, psychological, and political issues. In this seminar, we will read from her novels, essays, and diaries as well as the varied works of art and philosophy that influenced her.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.359.  Slavery in Early Modern Literature.  3 Credits.  

Against the backdrop of the rise of the European slave trade, how were enslaved people represented in early modern English literature? How was the condition of enslavement inflected by emergent nationalism, colonialism and theological constructions of difference? This course puts Renaissance literature into conversation with comparative histories of slavery and critical race theory. Authors include Aristotle, Plautus, Thomas More, Bartolomé de las Casas, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Philip Massinger, John Milton, Aphra Behn, Osman of Timisoara, Stephanie Smallwood, Michael Guasco, Saidiya Hartman, Herman Bennett, Orlando Patterson, Jared Sexton, and Mary Nyquist.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.360.  Politics, History and Autobiography.  3 Credits.  

This is an intensive seminar exploring the political and historical dimensions of personal experience. The class is designed to introduce students to writing critically about their own lives and to understanding the function of autobiographical writing in the lives of black Americans. We function partly as a writers’ workshop and partly as a critical review. The final goal of the seminar is a polished 15-20 page autobiographical essay and a 5-7 page critical review of an autobiography, such as would be found in the New York Review of Books.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.361.  The Politics of Memoir.  3 Credits.  

This course explores the interlocking political and historical dimensions of personal experience, an account of ourselves and our relations (“the quest for competitive advantage between groups, individuals, or societies”) that points us in the direction of what “is ‘common’ to the whole community.” What does it mean for people who are not the chief actors or theoreticians of political movements to construe the record of their experience as an act of political intervention, an aid in our total understanding of the structure of popular belief and behavior? Furthermore, what happens when attempt to historicize and critique these recorded experiences? The class asks its members to focus closely on an episode of autobiographical experience as both an historical fossil and tangible politicized moment, particularly the places where race, gender and economic power are visible. By producing a “critical discourse of everyday life—by turning residual, untheorized everyday experience into communicable experience… one can reframe ostensibly private and individual experiences in terms of a collective struggle.” To help our investigation we will read and analyze closely memoirs, many of them from the African American experience. We function partly as a writers’ workshop and partly as a critical review. The final goal of the seminar is a polished 20-25 page autobiographical essay.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.362.  Medicine in Renaissance Literature.  3 Credits.  

From quacks to plague, from humoralism to hypochondria, this course explores how early modern literature represents and occasionally satirizes medicine. Authors include Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Nashe, Browne and Moliere.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.363.  Henry James.  3 Credits.  

This seminar will focus on the novels and short fiction of one of the most brilliant crafters of prose and plot ever to write in English. Extensive attention will be devoted to the intricacies of James’s language; to his transatlantic situation; to his relationship to other authors; and to his place in the histories of literature, criticism, and theory. In a few instances, we will read his work in relation to writing by his brother, the pioneering philosopher and psychologist William James.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.365.  Malcolm and Martin: An Intro to the Lives and Thought of Two Icons of the Black Freedom Struggle.  3 Credits.  

Using their speeches, written lectures and published writings and drawing from their biographies, this course will explore the important life work of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. We intend to upend traditional conversations about political radicalism and ethnic politics by analyzing these spokesmen associated most indelibly with black nationalism and racial integration, respectively.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.369.  Speculative Slavery and Liberatory Fiction.  3 Credits.  

This course will introduce students to the study and genre of Black speculative fiction and Afrofuturism, through the lens of narratives focused on liberation/freedom. Liberatory fiction pushes the genre of Afrofuturism further to create space for the imagination to envision alternate futures and pasts, that rewrite history to aid in the process of liberation for black lives. The intended outcome of these texts is the liberation of its subjects and, in some cases, its readers to reflect on the contemporary. The liberation of subjects comes in the form of attaining collective or personal freedoms. This course will cover themes such as, gender and the speculative, the haunting of the post-slavery subject, and black apocalypses. All of these themes will be analyzed through reading both theory and narratives including: The Graphic Novel Adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts”, and N.K. Jemisin’s “The City Born Great”.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.374.  Irish Literature.  3 Credits.  

This course will introduce students to the long history of Irish literature, often relegated to a footnote or subsumed under the study of British literature broadly, from the medieval period until the contemporary era. Starting with the medieval Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge [The Cattle Raid of Cooley] and ending with Anna Burns’ 2018 masterpiece Milkman, this course will introduce students to the ways in which a colonial literature changes over time as Ireland, England’s first colony, is conquered and reconquered, rebels and revolts, and continues to confront the legacy of colonization as the nation remains divided between the North and the Republic today. Throughout the course, students will read texts written Jonathan Swift, Brian Ferriman, Peig Sayers, J.M. Synge, James Connolly, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, Edna O’Brien and others. This course will serve as a case study for students interested in literature of conflict, colonial and neo-colonial politics, and the fight for justice globally.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.377.  Edmund Spenser's Fairie Queene.  3 Credits.  

After a diagnostic introduction to his early poetry, this reading intensive seminar will concentrate upon Edmund Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene (1590/1596), which we will read in its entirety.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.381.  The Asian American Novel.  3 Credits.  

This course provides a foundation for reading Asian American novels. We will be discussing the origins of “Asian American” as a political coalition in the 1960s amidst a longer historical narrative of U.S. imperial and military projects and immigration policies that have influenced the racialization of those who identify with this multi-ethnic group. At the same time, we will be examining the limitations of this U.S.-centric perspective by rethinking the geopolitical spaces of both “Asia” and “the Americas” through transpacific and hemispheric lenses. Discussions will center around how the novel form could provide insight into linked social struggles and the new narratives of political community they imagine.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.384.  The Contemporary Novel.  3 Credits.  

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, writers of narrative fiction have been working furiously to keep up with the turbulence that global capitalism has visited on the world — war, political chaos, environmental catastrophe, massive forced migration and displacement — while trying to maintain ties to the techniques of narrative that gave the 19th century reality novel its successes and its prestige. In this course we will read a range of texts, mostly in translation, that stretch and deform those conventions in order to represent the lives and struggles of characters who are caught up in immense historical change. More and more often, novelists are choosing to depict characters drawn from what Marx would have called “surplus populations” — people for whom economic stability and personal safety are out of reach, partly because they are seen as not worth employing (or exploiting). Under these conditions, we will ask, is it only possible to tell tragic stories? What do happy endings look like? What do changes do character development and point of view have to undergo, for instance, to keep up with 21st-century history? Is realism still the best vehicle for telling these stories? Readings will include novels by Sally Rooney, Eduard Louis, Fernanda Melchor, Elena Ferrante, Marlon James, and Manoranjan Byapari, as well as secondary material by Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, Jill Richards, and the Endnotes collective.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.388.  Old World/New World Women.  3 Credits.  

The course considers the transatlantic writing of three women in the early modern period, Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, and Phillis Wheatley. We will consider issues of identity, spatiality, religion, commerce, enforced labor, sexuality, race, and gender, along with literary tradition, formal analysis and poetics. We will read a good deal of these early women writers. Foremost in our mind will be the question of how perceptions of space and time are mediated through the global experiences of early modernity.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.389.  Emily Dickinson.  3 Credits.  

Dickinson’s poetry, more than most, has seemed to prompt creativity in others. In the past two decades, especially, poets, writers, critics, and filmmakers have found their own voices in response to hers. We will focus on the formal, aesthetic, historical and gendered aspects of her poetry as we try to understand, and benefit from, this power to elicit response. Exams are unlikely. Instead, expect close attention to your own writing, as we pay close attention to hers.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.391.  Early American Literature.  3 Credits.  

This course is an introduction to literatures drawn from across the Americas, although primarily the British North American colonies that would eventually become the United States, from first contact in 1492 up through the American wars of independence. Our readings are roughly organized according to chronology and genre. We will think about the adapted and emergent generic forms through which “the New World” was ongoingly invented, including genres like the Indian captivity narrative and the slave narrative that arguably make their debut in world literary history in the Americas during this time frame. We will conclude by attending to the rather late emergence of the novel in American literary history, reading four novels that appeared in the early US national period. The objective of the course is simply to contextualize and analyze a wide array of texts, each of which richly rewards the engaged reader, in order to trace the origins of American literatures. Course texts may include contact narratives (Columbus, Caminha, Smith, Hennepin); conquest narratives (Mather, Las Casas, Poma de Ayala); Indian captivity narratives (Cabeza de Vaca, Rowlandson, Staden); slave narratives (Gronniosaw, Jea, Cugoano); revolutionary polemics (Paine, Bolívar); and the earliest American novels: William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy; Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette; Leonora Sansay, Secret History or, the Horrors of Santo Domingo; Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn. Fulfills the pre-1800 requirement.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.394.  Class Fictions.  3 Credits.  

This seminar investigates one of the central concerns of nineteenth-century fiction: social and economic class. Why did raising oneself from humble beginnings, and falling into poverty, become such familiar stories? And why are they still so familiar today? We will look at how a number of writers approached the topic of class mobility, each with a unique blend of excitement and anxiety. Authors will likely include Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac (in translation), Charles Dickens, and William Dean Howells. In order to understand our topic better, we will also look at a selection of theoretical work on the nature of class.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.397.  Thomas Pynchon.  3 Credits.  

Intensive reading of two major Pynchon novels, along with theories of modernity, postmodernity, etc.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.400.  Billie Holiday’s Baltimore 1870-1960: A Reverse Classroom Journey in the Archives.  3 Credits.  

This course will use the tools of the historical archive to etch a social history of Baltimore during the long Billie Holiday (1915-1959) era from the Reconstruction through post-World War II. Holiday’s remarkable and unique art has earned her the title of the premier jazz singer of all-time, but unknown to most, her voice and experience were strongly shaped by her early life in Baltimore City, the city’s black habitation and migration, its musical culture, its black middle and lower class, its urban density, as well as its cabaret and underworld life. Our task is to examine the city as an unfolding, racializing process, and to glean the evidence from multiple local archival sources to reconstruct some of the rough margins of possibility for the lived experience of Holiday’s grandparents and parents, all born in Baltimore, as well as her own experience as truant, orphan, and sex assault victim in the 1920s. Two questions will occupy our interests intensely. How did the two black communities she lived in extensively evolve from the late 19th through the early 20th centuries? Second, what information can be unearthed about black musical culture--ragtime, marching bands, banjo and fiddle ditties, riverboat music--as it evolved in the post-World War I “jazz” age of sound recording and broadcasting? What was the artist’s relationship to her urban geography? How did it change over space and time? What dimension of shared fate did she have with the community of black Baltimore domestic workers, laborers, artisans, and small business people from the first half of the twentieth century? In what manner did Baltimore’s racial segregation and racism define her life and art? How was her consciousness as a vocal opponent to segregation shaped by her grooming in the city?

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.402.  The Computer in Modern Literature.  3 Credits.  

How have computers, and human interactions with computers, been represented in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature? How have attitudes toward computers changed over that time? Now most books are written on computers, and many are read on them as well: what traces of these forms of production and consumption can we find in literary texts?

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.405.  Psychoanalysis and Literature.  3 Credits.  

In this course we will read some foundational texts by Sigmund Freud, and pair them with a select group of literary works--Sophocles’ “Oedipus the King” and “Oedipus at Colonus”, William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”, Wilhelm Jensen’s “Gradiva”—which have inspired psychoanalytic ideas and generations of psychoanalytic literary interpretation.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.406.  Transfiguring the Renaissance.  3 Credits.  

Tracing the poetics of bodily transformation then and now, this course puts early modern literature into dialogue with medical epistemologies of the sexed body and contemporary critical reflections upon transgender experience, embodiment and transition. Early modern texts might include Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s “Metamorphosis”, John Lyly’s “Gallathea”, Francis Beaumont’s “Salmacis and Hermaphroditus”, Ben Jonson’s “Epicoene, or The Silent Woman”, Middleton & Dekker’s “The Roaring Girl” and John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.501.  Independent Study.  3 Credits.  

Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.

Writing Intensive

AS.060.502.  Independent Study.  1 - 3 Credits.  

Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.

AS.060.509.  Senior Essay.  3 Credits.  

The English Department offers qualified majors the option of writing a senior essay. This is to be a one-semester project undertaken in the fall of the senior year, resulting in an essay of 30-35 pages. The senior essay counts as a three-credit course which can be applied toward the requirements for the major. Each project will be assigned both an advisor and a second reader. In addition, students writing essays will meet as a group with the Director of Undergraduate Study once or twice in the course of the project. The senior essay option is open to all students with a cumulative GPA of 3.6 or higher in English Department courses at the end of the fall term of their junior year. Project descriptions (generally of one to two pages) and a preliminary bibliography should be submitted to a prospective advisor selected by the student from the core faculty. All proposals must be received at least two weeks prior to the beginning of registration period during the spring term of the junior year. Students should meet with the prospective advisor to discuss the project in general terms before submitting a formal proposal. The advisor will determine whether the proposed project is feasible and worthwhile. Individual faculty need not direct more than one approved senior essay per academic year. Acceptance of a proposal will therefore depend on faculty availability as well as on the strength of the proposal itself. When completed, the senior essay will be judged and graded by the advisor in consultation with the second reader. The senior essay will not be part of the Department’s honors program, which will continue to be based solely on a cumulative GPA of 3.6 in English Department courses.

Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.

Writing Intensive

AS.060.602.  Proseminar.  

This course is intended to train students in skills required by the discipline, help prepare them for a range of futures, and integrate them into the university community.

Area: Humanities

AS.060.603.  Secularism & Theory.  

This graduate seminar will construct a history of critical theory through the lens of contemporary narratives about secularization and methodological critiques of secularism.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.604.  Philology.  

An examination of the many ways (both as old and then 'New', but also as the subject of a key 'return') that 'philology' has been claimed as the master category of literary study. The nuts and bolts of older philological procedures as well as the broadest theoretical claims for the term will be attended to.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.607.  Fiction and Doubt After 1888.  

Examines the interrelation between fiction and doubt since the late nineteenth century. Authors may include Ward, Conrad, Joyce, Eliot, Stevens, Woolf, Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, Ishmael Reed, Sefi Atta, R. O. Kwon.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.613.  American Movement.  

This seminar examines representations of people in motion in U.S. writing from 1900 to the present. Migration, international and intranational, will be central to our study, but we’ll also consider other forms of travel, transits of authorial and readerly attention, experiences of vagrancy and acceleration, and predicaments of stasis in primary texts as well as theoretical work around mobility. Authors and directors studied may include Simone de Beauvoir, Henry James, Gayl Jones, Jack Kerouac, Chang-Rae Lee, Claude McKay, Bernadette Mayer, Muriel Rukeyser, and Gertrude Stein.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.614.  Postcolonial/Global/World.  

The field now known as “global Anglophone literature” has emerged from a complicated and rapidly advancing disciplinary lineage. A host of past and present recordings – including postcolonial, Commonwealth, Third World, global, transnational, world, and the Global South – provide a record of the wider profession’s anxieties in relation to non-Western literary traditions. This course prepares graduate students to be able to articulate some of the subtle differences in approach that this nexus of closely related terms may obscure, from the heyday of postcolonial theory in the 1980s and 90s to contemporary subfields like Indian Ocean studies. In addition to key critical texts by theorists including Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Franco Moretti, Peter Hallward, and Emily Apter, students will be introduced to some outstanding recent methodologies and critiques from the adjacent body of work on comparative literature.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.615.  Human Rights Before Human Rights.  

This course asks in what ways did literature mitigate population category distinctions within a pre-history of human rights from the period 1500-1700. We will take the situations of sponsored violence, and in particular, war captivity, in order to explore how premodern concepts of duties, rights, atrocity, inhumanity (and prohibitions against abuse) arise and become a locus of mimetic complexity within the literature of the period. Prospecting a historical transformation between ancient, early modern, and modern conceptions of rights, duties, and the human, readings may include: Euripides, Suppliant Women; Seneca, Trojan Women; Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida; Cicero, Grotius, Gentili, Vitoria, Las Casas, Spenser, Bradstreet, Milton, Dryden, and Behn, as well as literature depicting violence resulting from Britain's East India Company's global intrusions. Splicing apart the "human" from "rights" we consider theoretical material from the liberal tradition and its critique; the problem of 'failed universals'; the historical connection between natural law and human rights; the distinctions drawn around legal and gendered categories of person; and critical race theory, with readings from Asad, Foucault, Moten, Wynter, Cavarero, Brown, Butler, Rawls, Dworkin, Drucilla Cornell, depending on the class's interests.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.616.  Milton.  

A seminar covering the career of John Milton, including all his major poetry and much of his prose. There will be attention to the history of printing, publication and concepts of reading and writing, as well as to current issues and topics within early modern studies that bear on Milton (e.g. materialism, secularization, 'surface' reading, political theology, quantitative vs hermeneutic methods, actor-network theory). As such, the course will also be an introduction to various methods in early modern studies.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.617.  Black Print Culture.  

Students interested in black print culture will engage in intensive archival research, both collaborative and individual, using the Sheridan Library’s Rare Book and Manuscript collections. Texts include poems, printed lectures, pamphlets, novels, periodicals, ephemera, correspondence, etc., alongside relevant critical and theoretical reading.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.618.  Milton: Black and White.  

In Milton: Black and White we will consider Milton and the discourses of racialized categories (poetical, political, and embodied), specifically attending to his role in the historical developments of white identity; concepts of justice; the genre of epic; and universal notions of personhood through the liberal tradition. We will also consider how Black writers have responded to Milton (including Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, the gospel tradition, Toni Morrison, Chris Ofili) through readings of Paradise Lost and selected prose, as well as readings in contemporary critical theory.

Area: Humanities

AS.060.619.  Sentimental Reasons.  

Recent work in cognitive approaches to literature have led critics to return to the sentimental novel of the eighteenth-century as a “laboratory,” in Daniel Goss’s words, for the investigation of human emotion. There is no easy “fit” between these literary narratives and the narratives of cognitive science, nor between them and the regnant moral philosophy of the age (built upon the mechanism of human sympathy or upon “nervous” association). There is rather a discomfort that reveals social inequities as well as alternative possibilities for both thinking and feeling. The sentimental mode took hold in the circuits of the Atlantic world. This course will study several sentimental narratives that traveled promiscuously through those circuits: Bernardin de St. Pierre’s Paul and Virginia, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling; Equiano’s Interesting Narrative; Williams’ Peru; and Brown’s The Power of Sympathy. Alongside these works we will read studies by critics working the seams between affect and cognition, philosophy and literature, rhetoric and science. The course will provide a broad history of the sentimental mode, stretching to reflections on the links between the sentimental and the melodramatic. It will simultaneously attend to the experience of reading for sentiment, to forms of feeling and what those feelings know.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.620.  Thinking with Scale: Frameworks in Early Modernity.  

Concepts include expansion, crowding, data collection, the miniscule, temporality, the planetary and the cosmic in the first age of European mercantile activity and colonial expansion. With readings from world-systems theory and theories of the anthropocene, our case studies will comprise pre-modern English literary texts, including Milton, Paradise Lost, Anne Bradstreet, The Four Monarchies, early modern science (Hooke, Newton), Defoe, The Storm, and early British and colonial American holdings in the Garrett Library. The class will be hands-on, working with material from Special Collections, and will include working towards a digital project (no digital project background necessary).

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.625.  Theory of the Novel.  

This course will look at the development of novel theory from the eighteenth century until the present. Authors will include Scott, Barbauld, Dallas, Lewes, Eliot, James, Shklovsky, Tomashevsky, Jakobson, Bakhtin, Lukács, Auerbach, Barthes, Jameson, Girard, Sedgwick, Moretti, Armstrong, Miller, Hale, Lynch, and Woloch. Novelists will likely include Madame de Lafayette, Austen, Goethe, and Wolfe.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.627.  Poetry and Performance.  

This course will be devoted to the histories and theories of 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century poetry and performance, beginning with William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. Upon hearing the poets read, William Hazlitt remarked that “[t]here is a chaunt in the recitation both of Coleridge and Wordsworth, which acts as a spell upon the hearer, and disarms the judgment.” This early instance of reception history will provide the backdrop for our discussion throughout the semester. Besides Wordsworth and Coleridge, our reading list will include verse, theory, and criticism by Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Pritchard, Amiri Baraka, Tracie Morris, Christian Bök, Lisa Gitelman, Frederich Kittler, Peter Middleton, John M. Picker, Susan Stewart, and others.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.628.  Literature and Human Rights: 1500-1720.  

Today human rights and capabilities are two intertwined concepts. In the early modern period, these were much debated and literature was a key site for the development of these imperfect, variable and contested discourses. Reading literary works from the European tradition, in particular in Europeans' engagement with dissident groups both within and outside Europe, we will explore themes of embodiment, power, risk, vulnerability and the languages and practices of equivalence and domination in the variable discourses of humanitarianism, natural law, and rights in authors including Shakespeare, Grotius, Montaigne, Hobbes, Milton, Behn, Locke, Swift, Montagu and Defoe.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.629.  The History of the Book.  

The course will account for the major transformations in the media used for writing from the scroll to the web as well as the rich account of this history and its theorizations.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.636.  Settler Colonialism: Theory, History, Literature.  

This seminar offers an introduction to a key concept in contemporary critical theory and literary and cultural studies: settler colonialism, understood as a specific form of colonialism focused on the appropriation of land rather than the exploitation of labor and thereby involving the attempted elimination and replacement of indigenous polities and societies by an invading force. The course will have a dual focus: 1) tracing the theoretical distinction of settler colonialism from other forms of colonialism and tracking the critique implicit in this distinction of dominant forms of leftism that arguably presuppose a settler-colonial frame of reference; 2) tracking the history of what James Belich has called the “Anglo settler revolution” of the nineteenth century and engaging in a comparative analysis of the literatures produced in the course of that revolution in what are now Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere in the Pacific. We will especially attend to narrative fictions—often (self-) identified as “romances”—that chronicle settlement and register the temporal disruption of indigenous persistence and resistance. Secondary texts may include: Belich, Replenishing the Earth; Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks; Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive; Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”; Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. Primary texts may include: Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; S. Alice Callahan, A Child of the Forest; Marcus Clarke, His Natural Life; Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush; Herman Melville, Typee; Sydney Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl; Simon Pokagon, Ogimawkwe Mitigwaki (Queen of the Woods); John Richardson, Wacousta or, The Prophecy; Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; and the FX television series, Taboo.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.637.  Counterfactual Literature.  

This course will focus on the formal, affective, ethical, and conceptual issues associated with forking-path texts—poems, fictions and films that openly offer alternative paths to the experience of individuals.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.638.  Whitman and the Whitmanian.  

This course will take the occasion of the bicentennial of the birth of Walt Whitman as an occasion to think about the legacies of his poetry in American literary history, especially in contemporary poetry. We will read key texts of Whitman’s then move to more recent writing, paying attention to the key scholarship on Whitman from the last few decades, as well as to recent scholarship on poetry that is in dialog with the questions of democracy, capitalism, on the one hand, and form and address, on the other, that have shaped our reading of Whitman and of poetry in the Whitmanian mode.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.639.  The American Renaissance: History of a Field.  

This seminar will provide an intensive introduction to antebellum nineteenth-century U.S. literature by way of tracking a critical formulation foundational to the field of American studies as whole: "the American Renaissance." Coined by F.O. Matthiessen in 1941, "the American Renaissance" initially referred to a canon of five white male writers (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman) alleged to have produced work of distinction in two interrelated senses--the first specifically "American" literature deserving of academic study. We will follow the fortunes of this critical formulation, tracing how some of the authors in Matthiessen's canon have subsequently been reinterpreted and repositioned as well as how "the American Renaissance" canon has been expanded and its very conceptualization contested. Primary authors whose work may be examined include William Apess, William Wells Brown, Lydia Maria Child, Frederick Douglass, Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, Harriet Jacobs, Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the anonymous author of Xicotencatl. Secondary works may include: Matthiessen, The American Renaissance (1941); Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance (1988); Michaels and Pease, The American Renaissance Reconsidered (1989); Crews, "Whose American Renaissance?" (1988); Colacurcio, "The American-Renaissance Renaissance" (1991); Avallone, "What American Renaissance?" (1997); Grossman, Reconstituting the American Renaissance (2003); Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations (2004); Fluck, Romance with America (2009); Hager and Marrs, "Against 1865" (2013).

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.641.  Close Reading, Exhaustive Reading, and the Novel.  

How much can you say about a novel? How much of a novel can a critic interpret? The large scale of the novel form seems to resist the interpretive techniques of literary criticism, which look closely at a small number of textual examples. But what if we tried to read every word of a novel, and see it in all its forms: genre, structure, history, politics, biography, and so on? This seminar will look closely at a small number of Victorian novels (probably Dickens' *David Copperfield* and Eliot's *Daniel Deronda*, subject to change). We will approach these novels through a variety of theroetical lenses. There will be a special emphasis placed on the relations between form, history, and politics. This seminar will also offer students a chance to apply theories of literature and the novel often considered in abstract.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.642.  Reading Capital Now.  

Since the 2008 financial crash, there’s been rising popular consciousness of capitalism’s crisis-bound character and, therefore, its vulnerability. But finance isn’t the only thing that capitalism has brought to a boiling point: for attentive readers of Marx, the mounting climate disaster, the COVID pandemic, and the struggle for Black Lives have only further highlighted the complex interconnections among our energy and food infrastructures, histories of racist and settler-colonial violence, the patriarchal organization of sexuality, and the maintenance of capitalist profitability no matter the social cost. The aim of this seminar is, first, to show how a thorough reading of the first volume of Marx’s Capital goes a long way toward helping us see all these histories and crises as part of a single, many-faceted dynamic, and second, to highlight 20th- and 21st-century Marxist work that takes Marx in new directions, from critiques of racial capitalism, colonialism, and the patriarchy of the wage, to studies of climate crisis and the global recomposition of the labor pool. Along with Marx, we’ll read work by WEB DuBois, James Boggs, Silvia Federici, Thiti Bhattacharya, Jairus Banaji, Nikhil Singh, Andreas Malm, the Endnotes collective, James Parisot, and others.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.644.  Oceanic Studies & the Black Diaspora.  

In this course, we take up Hester Blum’s blunt observation that “the sea is not a metaphor” in order to consider the visions and hopes black writers have associated with the sea, as well as the despair and trauma transatlantic slavery has left “in the wake,” to quote Christina Sharpe.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.645.  What was Literary Character?.  

What role did literary character play along the passage from ancient theories of dramatic action to contemporary theories of subjectivity and personhood? What role, specifically, did Shakespearean personhood play in the theorization of literature’s capacity to stage and represent a portable, exemplary “self”? How do group categories of race, gender and class qualify and inflect the ostensive individuation of character outcomes? As test cases, in this course we will consider an array of early modern literary persons from before and after Shakespeare as depicted in poetry, drama and prose : Heywood’s Lucrece, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Cleopatra, Middleton’s Timon, Moliere’s Alceste, Milton’s Christ and Behn’s Oroonoko. This course will range widely across theorists of literary character and the reader/character relationship, considering Aristotle, Theophrastus, Sir Thomas Overbury, Sigmund Freud, Aaron Kunin, Blakey Vermeule, Toril Moi, Rita Felski, Amanda Anderson, and Thomas Metzinger, among others.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.649.  The Essay Form & Academic Prose.  

While we will spend some time with the history and theory of the essay, much of our time will be spent considering the contemporary essay and its form. Across the past decade, academics have increasingly published essays designed for non-specialists. We’ll study many of them, both as objects of critical attention and of practical value. Writing assignments will include the option to write essays.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.650.  Character Studies.  

What are literary characters? Can we imagine literature without them? And how do they relate to questions of form and society? Starting with Aristotle, and moving through 20th- and 21st-century critics such as Lukacs, Barthes, and Woloch. We will pay special attention to the historical relationship between theories of character and approaches to the novel.

Area: Humanities

AS.060.651.  The Sensorium of Reading c. 1800.  

This seminar aims to think hard about the embodied reader and the material realm of reading. Our work will position reading less as a strict function of cognition and more as a matter of phenomenology, sensation, and material structures. Though we will attend to question of vision (and loss of vision) we will also highlight other senses: hearing, touch, smell, taste and bodily proprioception. Course materials will include recent studies that link reading and the senses, as well as texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century, a moment when the idea of Literature emerged alongside a theorizing of media and mediation, and investigations linking aesthetics and phenomenology. Samuel Taylor Coleridge will be one guide for the seminar, but so will the ballad revival and the literature of abolition. Seminar participants are invited to target other periods and places in their own research projects for the seminar.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.652.  The Time and Space of Capital.  

This course will look at the relationship between the logical and historical aspects of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, which special emphasis on key arguments in volumes 2 and 3 of Capitalism. We will ask questions about capital’s use of time and space in the service of accumulation, and read more recent secondary material all term from anti-colonial, feminist, queer, Indigenous, and Black radical traditions, in order to develop a fresh picture of the complex interrelation or different types of oppression and exploitation across capitalist history. Some familiarity with the concepts and argument of Capital, volume 1 will be helpful, but are not required.

Area: Humanities

AS.060.653.  Dark Conceits: Allegory, Interpretation, and Psychoanalysis.  

Bringing theological commentary and psychoanalytic diagnosis into conversation with historicism, formalism, sexuality studies and premodern critical race studies, this course uses Edmund Spenser’s “Fairie Queene” to re-open the question of hermeneutics.

Writing Intensive

AS.060.654.  The Romance.  

This graduate seminar takes a long view of the romance—the genre of literary imagination, par excellence—as originating and recurring in the Anglo world as a crucial technology of settler indigenization on stolen land and also of Indigenous resistance to settler fantasies of realization, from twelfth-century Norman England and Ireland to nineteenth-century North America and Australasia. Texts may include: Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain; Wace, Roman de Brut; Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; Joseph Smith, The Book of Mormon; Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; Simon Pokagon, Queen of the Woods; Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.658.  1922 and Its Neighbors.  

A course focusing on works published in the _annus mirabilis_ of modernism, 1922, and the years nearby. In addition to reading these texts in detail, we’ll consider what it means to periodize at a granular level and how our primary texts and theoretical readings take up the problem of the neighbor as well as questions of of hospitality, community, social obligation, and domesticity.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.668.  The Slavery Debate in the Atlantic World.  

This graduate seminar will trace the historical development of the slavery debate in the Atlantic world through examination of key texts from a host of genres and locations—Quaker religious tracts, political documents like the Haitian Declaration of Independence, Cuban antislavery novels, slave narratives, and “classics” of “American” literature like Melville’s Benito Cereno. Our historical investigations into the rhetorical field of anti- and proslavery will be framed by a theoretical interest in political theology. How might critical reflection on sovereignty, recent and not so recent—from Derrida back to Bodin (widely acknowledged as having provided one of the first philosophical defenses of antislavery)—help us recast the intellectual history of the slavery debate and Atlantic radicalism, more generally?

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.060.800.  Independent Study.  

This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.

AS.060.893.  Individual Work.  
AS.060.894.  Independent Reading.  

Area: Humanities

AS.060.895.  Journal Club.  
SA.903.728.  English for Academic Purposes I.  
SA.903.729.  English for Academic Purposes II.  
SA.903.994.  English Language Placement Test.  
SA.903.995.  English Listening Proficiency.  

Prerequisite(s): SA.903.741[C] OR SA.903.743[C] OR SA.903.745[C] OR SA.903.740[C] OR SA.903.742[C] OR SA.903.744[C] OR SA.903.994[C]

SA.903.996.  English Speaking Proficiency.  

Prerequisite(s): SA.903.741[C] OR SA.903.743[C] OR SA.903.745[C] OR SA.903.740[C] OR SA.903.742[C] OR SA.903.744[C] OR SA.903.994[C] OR SA.903.994[C]

SA.903.997.  English Reading Proficiency.  

Prerequisite(s): SA.903.740[C] OR SA.903.742[C] OR SA.903.744[C] OR SA.903.741[C] OR SA.903.743[C] OR SA.903.745[C] OR SA.903.994[C]

SA.903.998.  English Writing Proficiency.  

Prerequisite(s): SA.903.740[C] OR SA.903.742[C] OR SA.903.744[C] OR SA.903.741[C] OR SA.903.743[C] OR SA.903.745[C] OR SA.903.994[C]

Cross Listed Courses

Agora Institute

AS.196.364.  This is Not Propaganda.  3 Credits.  

We live in an era of disinformation’ mass persuasion and media manipulation run amok. More information was meant to improve democracy and undermine authoritarian regimes- instead the opposite seems to be happening. This course will take you from Russia to South Asia, Europe to the US, to analyze how our information environment has been transformed, why our old formulae for resisting manipulation are failing, and what needs to be done to create a model where deliberative democracy can flourish.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Center for Africana Studies

AS.362.111.  Introduction to African American Studies.  3 Credits.  

This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of African American Studies, with attention to the literature, film, culture, history, and politics of black life in the United States. Our reading list will likely include texts by David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Frances E.W. Harper, Sutton Griggs, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, and others.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS.362.201.  African American Poetry and Poetics.  3 Credits.  

In this course, we will follow the development of black poetry primarily as it has evolved in the United States. Beginning with the first published African American writers of the eighteenth century and ending with several important poets writing and performing today, we will consider the shape of the African American poetic tradition as commonly anthologized and as defined by our own theoretically-informed readings of the assigned literature. Attention will be given to both canonical and neglected literary movements and groups. Readings will include poetry and essays by Frances E.W. Harper, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Harryette Mullen, Tracie Morris, and others.

AS.362.305.  Black Periodical Studies.  3 Credits.  

This course explores the ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century black periodical culture fostered (and, at times, hampered) the literary and cultural production of the African diaspora. Authors will likely include Frederick Douglass, “Ethiop (William J. Wilson),” Frances E.W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Richard Bruce Nugent, and others.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.362.311.  Black Utopias.  3 Credits.  

In this course, we will read literary and historical texts that present visions of black utopia. Authors include “Ethiop” (William J. Wilson), Marcus Garvey, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and others.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Classics

AS.040.145.  Story and Argument from Homer to Petrarch.  3 Credits.  

Stories entertain us, but we also tell them to make a point. This course will explore the ways that stories were used to make points by Greek and Latin authors from Homer to Petrarch, while also looking at, and comparing them to, the techniques of argument contemporaneous thinkers were developing. This is a course about narrative and rhetoric but also about how and in what way stories matter.

Area: Humanities

AS.040.626.  Plato and Poetry.  

This graduate seminar will explore Plato’s contributions to the “old quarrel” between poetry and philosophy, encompassing such topics as the relationship between poetic inspiration and human reason, the role of literature in pedagogy, and the metaphysical implications of poetic fiction. We will focus on several Greek texts from the Platonic corpus related to these themes, as well as some later sources that engage with Platonic ideas.

Comparative Thought and Literature

AS.300.319.  The Modernist Novel: Mann, Woolf, and Joyce.  3 Credits.  

In this course, we will survey the major works of three of the greatest, most relentless innovators of the twentieth century – Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce – who explored and exploded narrative techniques for depicting what Woolf called the “luminous halo” of life.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.300.323.  Shakespeare and Ibsen.  3 Credits.  

William Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen are the two most frequently performed playwrights in history, and both have been credited with reinventing drama: Shakespeare for the Elizabethan stage and Ibsen for the modern. In this course we will pair together plays by each author – those that stand in an explicit relation of influence as well as those that share a significant set of concerns – in order to investigate how each takes up and transform key problems in the literary, political, and philosophical tradition for their own historical moment. Plays to be studied: by Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, A Winter’s Tale; by Ibsen, St. John’s Night, Hedda Gabler, Rosmersholm, The Wild Duck, The Master Builder, When We Dead Awaken.

Area: Humanities

AS.300.336.  Forms of Moral Community: The Contemporary World Novel.  3 Credits.  

Literary and philosophical imaginations of moral community in the post-WWII period. Texts include: Coetzee, Disgrace; McEwan, Atonement; Achebe,Things Fall Apart; Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World; Roy, The God of Small Things; Lessing, The Grass is Singing; Mistry, A Fine Balance; Morrison, Beloved; and essays by Levi, Strawson, Adorno, Murdoch, and Beauvoir on the deep uncertainty over moral community after the crisis of World War II. Close attention to novelistic style and narrative will inform our study of the philosophical questions that animate these works. What does it mean to acknowledge another person’s humanity? Who are the members of a moral community? Why do we hold one another responsible for our actions? How do fundamental moral emotions such as contempt, humiliation, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, and regret reveal the limits of a moral community?

Area: Humanities

AS.300.337.  The Tragic Tradition.  3 Credits.  

This course offers a broad survey of tragic drama in the Western tradition, from its origins in ancient Greece to the twentieth century. In weekly lectures and discussion sections, we will study the specific literary features and historical contexts of a range of different works, and trace the continuities and transformations that shape them into a unified tradition. Key questions and themes throughout the semester will include what counts as tragic, the tragedy of social and political conflict, the bearing of tragedy on the meaning and value of life, the antagonistic relation between world and humans, the promises and dangers of tragedy for contemporary culture. Authors to be studied: Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Shakespeare, Racine, Goethe, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekov, Brecht, Pirandello, and Beckett.

Area: Humanities

AS.300.339.  Introduction to Comparative Literature.  3 Credits.  

This course offers an introduction to the history, theory, and praxis of comparative literature. We will read texts from some of the founding figures of the discipline and look at the most recent debates in the field, including translation studies, literary theory, and world literature, among others. Particular attention will be given to the methodologies and problems of studying literatures in different linguistic traditions and the relation between literature and other areas of thought and culture, such as philosophy, art history, and psychoanalysis. Case studies in comparative approaches to literature will provide concrete examples to our discussions.

Area: Humanities

AS.300.340.  Literature and Film of Unintended Consequences.  3 Credits.  

Sometimes brilliant ideas and plans don’t work as anticipated, or go very badly—for example, empowering the “invisible hand” of the market, building a huge hydroelectric dam, or plotting a double murder by two strangers. This course explores these and other fascinating literary instances of unintended consequences—the unanticipated results of actions that people planned ending up a very different way. Reading or watching mainly twentieth-century American literature and movies, as well as some essays and poetry, we will follow a range of different creators as they think about unplanned effects and why they matter. What can these works tell us about how we intend, act, or make meaning at the limits of our control? Texts will include films by Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder, and Alfred Hitchcock, poetry or fiction by Wallace Stevens, Patricia Highsmith, and Zadie Smith.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.300.347.  Imagining Climate Change.  3 Credits.  

Climate change poses an existential threat to human civilization. Yet the attention and concern it receives in ordinary life and culture is nowhere near what science tells us is required. What are the causes of this mismatch between crisis and response? What accounts for our collective inability to imagine and grasp this new reality, and how can it be overcome? In pursuit of these questions, we will pair literary works and films with texts from politics, philosophy, literary theory, and religion, that frame climate change as a fundamental challenge to our ways of making sense of the human condition.

Area: Humanities

AS.300.348.  Modern Drama.  3 Credits.  

This course offers a survey of modern drama, from the mid nineteenth century to the present. We will sample a broad range of dramatic styles and movements in order to uncover the variety of ways theatre has made sense of the human experience over the past two hundred years.

Area: Humanities

AS.300.349.  Capitalism and Tragedy: from the 18th Century to Climate Change.  3 Credits.  

In contemporary discussions of climate change, it is an increasingly prevalent view that capitalism will lead to the destruction of civilization as we know it. The notion that capitalism is hostile to what makes human life worth living, however, is one that stretches back at least to the early eighteenth century. In this class, we will examine key moments in the history of this idea in works of literature, philosophy, and politics, from the birth of bourgeois tragedy in the 1720s, through topics such as imperialism and economic exploitation, to the prospects of our ecological future today. Authors to be studied: George Lillo, Balzac, Dickens, Marx and Engels, Ibsen, Weber, Brecht, Arthur Miller, Steinbeck, Pope Francis, and contemporary fiction, politics and philosophy on climate change.

Area: Humanities

AS.300.402.  What is a Person? Humans, Corporations, Robots, Trees.  3 Credits.  

Knowing who or what counts as a person seems straightforward, until we consider the many kinds of creatures, objects, and artificial beings that have been granted—or demanded or denied—that status. This course explores recent debates on being a person in culture, law, and philosophy. Questions examined will include: Should trees have standing? Can corporations have religious beliefs? Could a robot sign a contract? Materials examined will be wide-ranging, including essays, philosophy, novels, science fiction, television, film. No special background is required.

Area: Humanities

AS.300.418.  The Modernist Novel: James, Woolf, and Joyce.  3 Credits.  

In this course, we will survey the major works of three of the greatest, most relentless innovators of the twentieth century – Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce – who explored and exploded narrative techniques for depicting what Woolf called the “luminous halo” of life.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.300.437.  Literature and Philosophy of the Everyday.  3 Credits.  

The ordinary, the common, the everyday: why does literary realism consider the experiences of the average individual to be worthy of serious contemplation? In this course, we will read closely a set of novels by Flaubert, Mann, Dickens, Eliot, Zola,Tolstoy, and Woolf from the period between 1850 and 1950 in which the development of realism reaches it climax. These novels transform the conventions for the representation of lives of lower and middle class subjects, revealing such lives as capable of prompting reflection upon deep and serious questions of human existence. Theoretical and philosophical texts on the everyday by Auerbach, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, Lefebvre, Certeau, and Wittgenstein will accompany our discussions.

Area: Humanities

AS.300.618.  What is a Person? Humans, Corporations, Robots, Trees..  

Knowing who or what counts as a person seems straightforward, until we consider the many kinds of creatures, objects, and artificial beings that have been granted—or demanded or denied—that status. This course explores recent debates on being a person in culture, law, and philosophy. Questions examined will include: Should trees have standing? Can corporations have religious beliefs? Could a robot sign a contract? Materials examined will be wide-ranging, including essays, philosophy, novels, science fiction, television, film. No special background is required.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.300.629.  Theory, Now and Then: Autonomy, Form, Critique.  

This course explores recent developments and disputes in critical theory in relation to their longer philosophical genealogies. The three topics—form, autonomy, and critique—have been the subject of much recent debate, contention, and new analysis, yet each was also a source of critical and philosophical interest in years past. Our aim will be to make sense of today’s interventions in conversation with earlier theory. “Historical” theory writing will include Adorno, Lukács, Cavell, and Jameson; contemporary theory will include Nicholas Brown, Rita Felski, Caroline Levine, Mark McGurl, and Toril Moi.

Area: Humanities

AS.300.639.  Literature and Philosophy of the Everyday.  

The ordinary, the common, the everyday: why does literary realism consider the experiences of the average individual to be worthy of serious contemplation? In this course, we will read closely a set of novels by Flaubert, Mann, Dickens, Eliot, Zola,Tolstoy, and Woolf from the period between 1850 and 1950 in which the development of realism reaches it climax. These novels transform the conventions for the representation of lives of lower and middle class subjects, revealing such lives as capable of prompting reflection upon deep and serious questions of human existence. Theoretical and philosophical texts on the everyday by Auerbach, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, Lefebvre, Certeau, and Wittgenstein will accompany our discussions.

First Year Seminars

AS.001.100.  FYS: What is the Common Good?.  3 Credits.  

What is “the common good”? How do individuals consider this idea, this question, and how are societies led, or misled, by its pursuit? Together, we will explore sources from a range of perspectives: What can the story of Noah, for example, teach us about the question of the common good? Or the engineering of Baltimore public transportation, the notion of meritocracy in higher education, access to vaccines, the perniciousness of pandemics, prohibition of nuclear weapons, or data sharing among scientists? Drawing from movies, interviews, and readings (authors include Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Bong Joon-ho, Spike Lee, Michael Sandel, and more), this course is as much about how we ask and interrogate hard questions as it is about the answers themselves. Engaging deeply with the sources and each other, students will discuss the texts in class, write short responses, and give occasional oral presentations. The course will culminate in a final, collaborative research project that seeks to map the common good and move the conversation forward.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS.001.134.  FYS: Great Books at Hopkins - a closer reading.  3 Credits.  

Modeled after Johns Hopkin’s longstanding Great Books course, this Freshman seminar offers a more focused selection of texts to allow in-depth reading and discussion, with greater attention to historical context. Texts will include: The Odyssey, Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, written by himself, with excerpts from additional slave narratives. In-class lectures and discussions will be supplemented by occasional guest lectures and exhibits from the archives of Eisenhower Libraries. Prior attendance in Great Books at Hopkins is not required; upper class students who have previously taken Great Books may be admitted with permission of instructor.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.001.163.  FYS: Black Baltimore Archives - From Frederick Douglass to Billie Holiday.  3 Credits.  

Black Baltimore Archives is an intense exploration (and excavation) of local African American history and narrative. Using the lives of Baltimore's most prominent artists-Frederick Douglass and Billie Holiday-this First-Year Seminar will explore questions connected to creating the historical record, assembling visual and sonic representations of black life, and the challenges that access and preservation pose to sustaining black community. We will visit the Afro-American Newspaper archives, the Maryland Center for History and Culture, the Maryland State Archives, and Morgan State University special collections, among other key archival repositories. Students will participate in a national conference and a local jazz event.

Area: Humanities

AS.001.172.  FYS: Privacy and Surveillance.  3 Credits.  

Few topics are more pressing to contemporary society as the right to privacy, in the face of both state and corporate and state surveillance. But the idea of a "right to privacy" has not always been with us. As E. L. Godkin put it in 1890, "Privacy is a distinctly modern product." Indeed, even 300 years ago, many of our own expectations of privacy would have been unheard of. This First-Year Seminar looks at the relation of privacy to modernity, through the lenses of literature, law, and social practices. How can works of art and thought from the past help us understand our own present?

Area: Humanities

History

AS.100.240.  American Cultural Criticism.  3 Credits.  

This course explores 20th century U.S. history through the works of writers and artists. We will ask how essays, novels, performance, and art can function as cultural and social criticism.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

AS.100.275.  Passing in American Culture.  3 Credits.  

This course explores passing narratives – stories that feature people who cross race, class, ethnic, or gender boundaries. We will consider what passing narratives can teach us about power and identity, especially as power is presumed to reside in the self and race is presumed to no longer matter.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS.100.326.  From Blood Feud to Black Death: European Society in the High Middle Ages, 1000-1400.  3 Credits.  

Explores the development of society and institutions in the medieval west including kingship and law, religion and difference, gender and ideology. Looks closely at social responses to change and adversity.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS.100.354.  Playing in the White: Black Writers, the Literary Colorline and Writing Whiteness.  3 Credits.  

This course will turn to known and not-so-known black writers during the early to mid-twentieth century who defied literary expectation and wrote stories that featured or focused on whiteness. We will consider what whiteness offered black writers and the political work that their literary experimentations did for a white American publishing industry.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS.100.373.  Crime, Punishment, Felony and Freedom: Law and Society in Pre-Modern England.  3 Credits.  

Using legal texts as a window into English society, we will address the changing nature of royal power, trial by jury, treason, felony, and the freedoms enshrined in the Magna Carta.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS.100.672.  Medieval Materialities: Objects, Ontologies, Texts and Contexts.  

We will use the meanings and methodologies of “materiality” to examine the medieval world, by analyzing objects, texts, networks, patterns of circulation and appropriation, aesthetics and enshrinement, production and knowledge communities.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS.100.682.  Introductory Topics in Computation for Scholarship in the Humanities.  

The first half of this seminar course consists of non-mathematical introductions to, and discussions of, the fundamental motivations, vocabulary, and methods behind computational techniques of particular use for humanistic research. The second half combines selected readings chosen to address specific questions raised by these discussions with hands-on application to students' research goals. Each participant will lead discussion for one of the selected readings relevant to their interests.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS.100.725.  Sex and Slavery II.  

Research and methods in the field of sexuality and slavery studies. Part 2: Caribbean & African Continent.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Interdepartmental

AS.360.133.  Freshman Seminar: Great Books at Hopkins.  3 Credits.  

Students attend lectures by an interdepartmental group of Hopkins faculty and meet for discussion in smaller seminar groups; each of these seminars is led by one of the course faculty. In lectures, panels, multimedia presentations, and curatorial sessions among the University's rare book holdings, we will explore some of the greatest works of the literary and philosophical traditions in Europe and the Americas. Close reading and intensive writing instruction are hallmarks of this course; authors for Fall 2020 include Homer, Plato, Dante, John Donne, George Herbert, Christina Rosetti, Mary Shelley, Friederick Nietzsche, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Frederick Douglass.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Modern Languages and Literatures

AS.211.203.  Propaganda: From Blut und Boden to Post-Fact.  3 Credits.  

This course taught by Writing Seminars professor Wayne Biddle and Media Studies professor Bernadette Wegenstein covers the 20th-century history of propaganda with special focus on its visual techniques, on censorship, and how media serve as sites of both control and resistance to power. We will pay particular attention to the influence of misinformation abetted by the new media revolution, and both the rise of the political rhetoric of “fake news” and the massive dissemination of actual fake news since the 2016 election. Students will write papers pegged to current issues and events using the critical framework developed in class. Cap 30 students. Reader: Jason Stanley: How Propaganda Works, Princeton University Press, 2015.

Writing Intensive

AS.211.301.  Nietzsche and Literature.  3 Credits.  

Nietzsche and Literature is devoted to exploring the philosophy and literary works of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and studying his impact on literature and literary modernism. Readings will include works by Nietzsche and by the literary writers he influenced, including Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, and William Butler Yeats, and Else Lasker-Schüler.

Area: Humanities

AS.211.325.  Representing Otherness in Literature and Film.  3 Credits.  

The term 'Otherness' is known to be rooted in the Self-Other opposition as it emerged in German Idealism, adopted by psychoanalysis and transformed to Post-Colonial and Feminist theories. This theoretical framework will allow us to explore the role of the Other in literature and cinema. Students will become familiar with the historical development of the notion of the “stranger” through reading and analyzing various contemporary works of prose, poetry and cinema from various countries. We will analyze the ways in which these works depict Otherness and will investigate questions regarding their social, political and philosophical framework as well as the literary and cinematographic devices they employ. The course will have a comparative nature with the aim of learning more about the differences between the literary and cinematic representations.

Area: Humanities

AS.211.333.  Representing the Holocaust.  3 Credits.  

How has the Holocaust been represented in literature and film? Are there special challenges posed by genocide to the traditions of visual and literary representation? Where does the Holocaust fit in to the array of concerns that the visual arts and literature express? And where do art and literature fit in to the commemoration of communal tragedy and the working through of individual trauma entailed by thinking about and representing the Holocaust? These questions will guide our consideration of a range of texts — nonfiction, novels, poetry — in Yiddish, German, English, French and other languages (including works by Primo Levi and Isaac Bashevis Singer), as well as films from French documentaries to Hollywood blockbusters (including films by Alain Resnais, Claude Lanzmann, and Steven Spielberg). All readings in English.

Prerequisite(s): Cannot be taken by anyone who previously took AS.213.361

Area: Humanities

AS.211.361.  Narratives of Dissent in Israeli Society and Culture.  3 Credits.  

In this course we will study and analyze the notion of dissent in Israeli society and culture on its various literary and artistic forms. We will examine the emergence and the formation of various political and social protest movements, such as the Israeli Black Panthers, Israeli feminism and the 2011 Social Justice protest. We will discuss at length the history and the nature of dissent in the military and in relation to Israeli wars and will track changes in these relation. Significant portion of the course will be dedicated to the literary, cinematic and artistic aspects of Israeli protest and their influence on Israeli discourse. We will explore the nature and role of specific genres and media such as the Israeli satire, Israeli television, newspaper op-ed and the recent emergence of social media. Students wishing to work in English exclusively for 3 credits should enroll in section one. Students who are fluent in Hebrew and are wishing to attend an additional hour-long Hebrew discussion session per week with Professor Cohen (time TBD in consultation with enrolled students) for 4 credits should enroll in section 2.

Area: Humanities

AS.211.477.  Renaissance Witches and Demonology.  3 Credits.  

Who were the witches? Why were they persecuted for hundreds of years? Why were women identified as the witches par excellence? How many witches were put to death between 1400 and 1800? What traits did European witch-mythologies share with other societies? After the witch-hunts ended, how did “The Witch” go from being “monstrous” to being “admirable” and even “sexy”? Answers are found in history and anthropology, but also in medicine, theology, literature, folklore, music, and the visual arts, including cinema.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken AS.214.171 cannot take AS.211.477.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.211.479.  Dante's Journey through the Afterlife.  3 Credits.  

Dante's Divine Comedy presents a complete picture of the medieval world-view in all its aspects: physical (the structure of the cosmos), historical (the major actors from Adam to Dante himself) and moral (a complete system of right and wrong). Dante shows how the Christian religion portrayed itself, other religions, the nature of God, humans, angels and devils, and human society. We will explore these topics both from the viewpoint of Dante's own time, and in terms of its relevance to our own societal and cultural concerns.

Prerequisite(s): AS.214.479

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.211.480.  Religious Themes in Film and Literature.  3 Credits.  

This course would be of interest to anyone who would like to learn about the intersection of religion and modern culture. At the center of the course will stand a close study of the representation of religious themes and their role in modern literature and cinema. The works which we will deal with are not considered religious and yet they include religious themes as part of their narrative, images, language or symbolic meaning. We will trace in various works from various countries and genre, themes such as: divine justice, providence, creation, revelation, the apocalypse, prophecy, sacrifice and religious devotion. We will also study the ways in which Biblical and New Testament stories and figures are represented in these works. The course will have a comparative nature with the aim of learning more about the differences between the literary and cinematic representations.

Area: Humanities

AS.211.754.  Modernist Primitivism.  

This course will explore the aesthetics and politics of primitivism in European modernity, focusing on the visual arts and literature in German and Yiddish, but looking at the wider European context, including France and Russia. We will begin with the backgrounds of primitivism in Romanticism, looking especially at its ethnographic and colonial sources. We will then focus on the presence of anthropological and ethnographic discourses within various registers of modernist thought, literature, and visual culture, with special attention to visual and literary primitivism. Our central concerns will include: the attempt to create a modernist aesthetics grounded in ethnography; the primitivist critique of modernity; the place of primitivism in the historical avant-garde; the development of the notion of “culture” in modernity; and the aesthetics of modern ethnic and national identity.  Key thinkers, artists, and writers to be considered include Herder; Gauguin; Picasso; Wilhelm Worringer; Carl Einstein; Hannah Höch; and Emil Nolde.

Area: Humanities

AS.211.777.  The Critical Unconscious.  

Criticism in the 21st century has tended to relegate psychoanalysis to a dustbin of fads that proliferated at the end of the prior century but that today are of interest only to balkanized cliques of devotees. Bucking this trend, this seminar will examine the intellectual history and abiding influence of psychoanalysis’s key critical concept: the unconscious. Basing our discussions on in-depth readings from key thinkers in the analytic tradition such as Freud, Lacan, and Klein, as well as the post-analytic philosophical tradition, including Zizek, Butler, Laclau and Mouffe, Deleuze and Guattari, and Jameson, we will work to distill an understanding of the unconscious as essential to the practice of criticism tout court, and as inhering even in those discourses that have sought most stridently to distance themselves from it. Seminar discussions will take place in English; readings will be available in the original as well as in translation.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.213.321.  Bodies and Pleasures.  3 Credits.  

This course traces a literary history of sexuality from the Middle Ages to contemporary women’s writing. We will analyze how sexual pleasure changed over time. In particular, we will discuss what role literature plays in the reproduction and transformation of bodily pleasures. The course explores how the pleasures of bodies are imagined in and through literature, but also whether words are bodies that give pleasure and perhaps even have their own pleasures.

Area: Humanities

AS.213.328.  German Literary Modernism.  3 Credits.  

Taught in English. German Literary Modernism focuses on modernist works of literature between 1900-1930, considering central modernist authors against the backdrop of dramatic changes and events in European culture and society, including urbanization, technological change, the First World War, and social and artistic movements. Students will engage literary works--by such authors as Kafka, Rilke, Hofmannsthal and Thomas Mann--that express a sense of crisis about modern life, or provoke questions about the nature of reality, the human self, the reliability of perception, and the possibilities of language and art. ?Students have the option of an additional hour of German discussion and doing all the assignments in German for German-language credit (3+1) towards the major or minor. Students interested in that option should register for section 2.

Area: Humanities

AS.213.374.  Existentialism in Literature and Philosophy.  3 Credits.  

What does it mean to exist, and to be able to reflect on this fact? What is it mean to be a self? This course explores the themes of existentialism in literature and philosophy, including the meaning of existence, the nature of the self, authenticity and inauthenticity, the inescapability of death, the experience of time, anxiety, absurdity, freedom and responsibility to others. It will be examined why these philosophical ideas often seem to demand literary expression or bear a close relation to literary works. Readings may include writings by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Rilke, Kafka, Simmel, Jaspers, Buber, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, and Daoud.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.213.407.  German Media Theory.  3 Credits.  

German Media Theory is an advanced course for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, giving an introduction and overview of the specifically German version of Media Studies that first gained traction in the 1980s. The term media refers not just to mass media but more broadly to devices that process, transfer and store information, reaching from the alphabet that changed the culture of writing, or the printing press made famous as the foundation of the ‘Gutenberg galaxy’ to computers and smart phones dominating our current lives. In this course we will cut across disciplinary boundaries to explore the multifaceted roots and formations of German media theory which combine literary poststructuralism, histories of science and technology, psychoanalysis, cybernetics, art history, and philosophy among other fields. Readings include works by Friedrich Kittler, Bernhard Siegert, Cornelia Vismann, Wolfgang Ernst, Walter Benjamin, Niklas Luhmann, Michel Foucault, Marshall McLuhan and many others. The course will be taught in English and all readings will be available in English.

Area: Humanities

AS.213.446.  Nature and Ecology in German Literature and Thought.  3 Credits.  

Nature and Ecology in German Literature and Thought considers the understanding and representation of the natural world in literary works and aesthetic theory from the 18th to the 20th centuries. We will consider such topics as poetic reverence for nature, anthropocentric representations of nature in literature, the thematization of landscape, the representation of animal life, the distinction between the human and animal as explored by literary writers, and ecologically-oriented critique of human consciousness. Readings may include works by such writers and thinkers as Goethe, Kant, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rilke, and Kafka, and more recent works of literary ecocriticism.

Area: Humanities

AS.213.623.  Poetry and Philosophy.  

This course will trace the tensions, antagonisms, and collaborations between poetry and philosophy as distinctive but fundamental expressions of human thought and experience. We will engage poetry as a form of artistic expression that compliments, completes, or challenges other forms of knowledge, and consider the range of philosophy's responses to poetry and poetics. Readings will include works by philosophical poets and poetic philosophers including Hölderlin, Schlegel, Rilke, Bachmann, Celan, Stevens, Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Valéry, Wittgenstein, and Agamben.

AS.213.639.  On the Difficulty of Saying I.  

This course takes as its point of departure the position that language carries within it the traces of something that exceeds the cognitive grasp of the subject and to this extent undoes any claim to knowledge the subject might make. This position has been central to twentieth and twenty-first century thought from psychoanalysis and poststructuralism to media theory and new materialism. This course will not take issue with this position. It will examine instead how this position evolved from the Idealism of Fichte to the eerily inhuman, if not mechanical, talking figures in texts by Novalis (“Monolog”), Poe (“Maelzel’s Chess Player”), Hoffmann (“Die Automate”), Büchner (Leonce und Lena), and Kafka (“Ein Bericht für eine Akademie”). We will explore the literature of the personal and impersonal in romantic and modernist texts in order to ask what moves and motivates works in which the first-person narrator would seem to be nothing more than a fiction—a staged phenomenon or a mechanical device.

Area: Humanities

AS.213.643.  Franz Kafka in Philosophical and Literary Perspective.  

This course is devoted to close study of the writings of Franz Kafka from both philosophical and literary perspectives. Writings will include Kafka’s short prose works and novels along with philosophical and literary critical interpretations thereof. Readings may include commentaries by Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Giles Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben. Primary texts for students from the German section will be in original; any other students may read Kafka in translation.

AS.213.687.  Imagination in Philosophy and Literary Theory.  

Imagination in Philosophy and Literary Theory is devoted to studying theories of imagination in the history of philosophy and literary theory, from the ancient Greeks to the present day. We will study philosophical conceptions of the role of imagination in memory, cognition, perception, and creativity, and assess traditional philosophical oppositions between imagination and reason, the imaginary and the real. Readings may include selections from Aristotle, Kant, Coleridge, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Dufrenne, Stevens, Iser, Ricoeur, Ryle, Wittgenstein, and Nussbaum.

Area: Humanities

AS.214.479.  Dante Visits the Afterlife.  3 Credits.  

One of the greatest works of literature of all times, the Divine Comedy leads us down into the torture-pits of Hell, up the steep mountain terrain of Purgatory, through the “virtual” space of Paradise, and then back to where we began: our own earthly lives. We accompany Dante on his journey, building along the way knowledge of medieval Italian history, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion. The course also focuses on the arts of reading deeply, asking questions of a text, and interpreting literary and scholarly works through discussion and critical writing. Conducted in English.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.215.290.  Latin American Critical Perspectives on Colonialism: From the 'World Upside Down' to the 'Coloniality of Power'.  3 Credits.  

This course, taught in English, examines how indigenous and local (postcolonial) intellectuals in Latin America responded to the ideology and practices of Spanish Colonialism in the earliest post-conquest years (1532), continued to battle colonialism during the period of the wars of independence, and finally arrived at the production of an analysis that shows how modernity is but the other face of colonialism. Among key works to be discussed are Guaman Poma's illustrated sixteenth-century chronicles, D.F. Sarramiento's _Civilization and Barbarism_ (1845), and Anibal Quijano's "Coloniality of Power" (2000).

Writing Intensive

AS.215.406.  Novelist Intellectuals.  3 Credits.  

What does a novelist’s op-ed about economics have to do with her literary writing? In what ways does a fiction writer’s essays on the environment inform how we read her novels? What happens when we find the political opinions of a writer objectionable? This undergraduate seminar will consider what the Spanish writer Francisco Ayala termed “novelist intellectuals,” that is, literary writers who actively participate in a society’s public sphere. Considering writers from Madrid to New York, from London to Buenos Aires, we will ask how one should hold a novelist’s fictional and non-fictional writings in the balance and explore ways of reading that allow us to consider the public intellectual side and the aesthetic side of a novelist together.

Area: Humanities

AS.215.417.  Literature of the Great Recession.  3 Credits.  

The Great Recession—sometimes called the financial crisis or the economic crisis of 2008—brought financial markets to a halt and created significant political turmoil across the North Atlantic. But its impact on culture, and literature especially, has often been ignored. This seminar will travel across Europe, from Dublin to Madrid, from London to Reykjavík in order to examine how literature has registered this most recent economic crisis. We will focus on how crisis is narrated and the ways in which literary works have managed to provide a voice for marginalized social, economic, and political demands.

Area: Humanities

AS.215.718.  Contemporaneity and Crisis.  

How should one study contemporary literature and culture? Is “the contemporary” a period in and of itself? Does it require a distinct conceptual approach? This graduate seminar will examine various approaches that have emerged since Michel Foucault called his genealogies a “history of the present.” We will pay special attention to contemporary literature and culture’s most distinguishing feature today: crisis. Considering theories of crisis and “the contemporary” together, the course will explore how living in a time of overlapping crises—economic, political, social, cultural, environmental, and others—affects the way we interpret the world.

Area: Humanities

AS.215.747.  Borges in Theory.  

The course engages close readings of Borges critical essays and some of his fiction in order to establish the points of interpellation that Post-modern theory takes from or shares with Borges's meditation on the problem of writing.

Political Science

AS.191.310.  Sex(uality) and Race as the Politics of the Beat Generation.  3 Credits.  

This course focuses on the literature of the Beat Generation writers (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Snyder, Kaufman) of the late 1940s through the 1950s and 1960s. The Beats were a group of nomadic writers traveling the North American continent between San Francisco and New York with memorable stops in Denver and St. Louis, Missouri. Beat literature revolted against the constraining normalizing values of post war USA and celebrated freedom of expression, wanderlust, and the search for euphoria of body and mind in stream-of-consciousness narration. The course examines the relationship between society’s dominant mores and beliefs (both contemporary and those of the 50’s and 60’s) and the counterculture, non-conformist philosophy as espoused by The Beats. The course focuses on Beat depictions of sexuality, gender and race in order to understand if these identity markers are but symptoms of social structures of oppression (racism, patriarchy, heterosexism) or if, alternatively, they can also signal, express and enact a new and different understanding of politics. Can the Beats help us envision new forms of (non-toxic) masculinity? Can they help us think of race in non-racist ways?

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Program in Museums and Society

AS.389.329.  Author/Canon/Archive.  3 Credits.  

Why are some literary works from the past reprinted, anthologized, and considered worthy of study, but not others? Why are some works “lost” and some “rediscovered,” while others simply fall out of favor? Focusing on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literary culture, we will use rare books and archival materials from JHU collections to examine Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, and Zora Neale Hurston, along with a few authors you’ve never heard of, in terms of the relationship between authorship, stewardship, and status.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS.389.346.  Scribbling Women in the Literary Archive.  3 Credits.  

Students examine select texts and archival materials related to Emily Dickinson, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Edith Wharton, Ida B. Wells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sui Sin Far, Alice Duer Miller, and Zora Neale Hurston. Students interrogate how these writers navigated the constraints of gender, as informed by race and class, in the decades before and after the 19th Amendment and consider literary collecting in relation to gendered cultural politics.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality

AS.363.226.  Women writers and the sonnet from the European Renaissance to the Harlem Renaissance.  3 Credits.  

Shakespeare's description of his lover's eyes as 'nothing like the sun' is both an homage and a sendup of the 300-year-old Petrarchan tradition in which the male poetic persona remains forever enraptured by an unattainable female beloved, who never speaks. Beginning with a review of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence and selections from Petrarch’s sonnets to an elusive Laura, we will read a series of fifteenth-and sixteenth-century women writers who inserted their own voices into this evolving tradition by allowing “Laura” to talk back. These include Vittoria Colonna (and her interactive sonnets with Michelangelo), Veronica Gambara, and Gaspara Stampa; dueling personas in sonnets by French poets Pernette du Guillet and Maurice Scéve, and sonnets by more familiar Shakespearean contemporaries Lady Mary Wroth and Sir Philip Sidney (both of whom reflect back on Petrarch but from quite different viewpoints). In the final section of the course we will apply our newly acquired historical perspective to selections from a more recently available corpus of female-authored sonnets from the Harlem Renaissance. All continental works will be read in translation; no previous familiarity with the topic is required.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.363.338.  The Poetics and Politics of Sex: Feminist Utopia in Theory and Fiction.  3 Credits.  

This course examines the historical development of feminist utopia in theory and fiction. Readings will center Indigenous, Black, postcolonial, diasporic, and transnational perspectives that engage the topic of feminist utopia.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

AS.363.445.  Reading Judith Shakespeare: Women and Gender in Elizabethan England.  3 Credits.  

If Shakespeare had a sister who went to London to be a writer, what would she write? Virginia Woolf’s account of the thwarted career of Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister, Judith, in A Room of One’s Own frames our reading of plays and poetry by Shakespeare and contemporary women writers, including Isabella Whitney, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Sidney, Aemelia Lanyer, and Mary Wroth. Working within a selected historical context, students will create fictional biographies of “Judith Shakespeare,” including her perspective on our identified authors and a sample or description of Judith’s own literary accomplishments. Secondary course readings will reflect contemporary economic, political, and religious contexts.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Theatre Arts & Studies

AS.225.318.  21st Century Female Playwrights.  3 Credits.  

This is a writing intensive class exploring the current wealth of women playwrights, including Pulitzer Prize winners: Wendy Wasserstein, Paula Vogel, Lynn Nottage, and Jackie Sibblies Drury (2019 Prize for FAIRVIEW). We will discuss Script Analysis and read (and see) plays by numerous writers including Claire Barron, Kia Corthron, Theresa Rebeck, Sarah Ruhl, Danai Gurira, Caleen Sinnette Jennings, and Hansol Jung. This class will include a mid-term and a Final Paper.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

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