An introduction to literary study using the relationship between sexuality, literature and the history of global cities as a jumping off point for considering the problems, practices, and possibilities of literary study. The course undertakes close reading of modern texts to discover how urban settings influence our understandings of racial and ethnic identity, gender roles, and multiple forms of sexual relationships. It also addresses the ways that the cosmopolitan city provides new forms and content for both modern identities and post-modern narratives. Works of literature are contextualized by a variety of critical and historical works from the modernist and post-modernist periods.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENGL 217 - Introductory Workshop in Creative Writing
An introduction to the reading and writing of fiction, non-fiction, or poetry. In a given term, the emphasis is determined by the instructor.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENGL 219 - American Literature and the Environment
An introduction to literary study that focuses on human responses to their environments and ecologies. This course explores representations of relationships between people, places, and animals in American fiction, poetry, and non-fiction from the early American Renaissance to the postmodern period. Questions of how environments are inflected by gender and racial positions, as well as literature’s insights into issues of environmental justice and sustainability, are addressed through works by writers such as Wendell Berry, Charles Chesnutt, Annie Dillard, William Faulkner, bell hooks, Aldo Leopold, Marilynne Robinson, Wallace Stevens, and Jean Toomer.
Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENGL 220 - The Booker Prize: Examining a Prize, Examining an Empire
The Booker Prize is awarded annually to a new novel published in the UK by an author from the UK or a former territory of the British Empire. Recently the prize has also been opened to American authors, a source of great controversy. Students follow the year’s Booker Prize proceedings, and the class schedule will be built live alongside developments in the prize season over the course of the fall semester. In addition to analyzing these texts as works of literature, students will dissect the evolving aesthetics and politics of the prize. Why is the Booker a cultural phenomenon in England and what does it mean to consider the former “Empire” through these texts? What roles do the judges, the sponsors, and the British and international reading public have? Students read one novel from the Booker longlist, all six novels on the shortlist, as well as supplementary critical essays relevant to the texts at hand.
Credits: 1.00 Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
Latina/os have been present in the United States ever since the country’s founding, and beyond. Yet, their contributions to the culture and literary life of the country have only been recognized all too recently. Moreover, despite being one of the fastest growing minority groups in the U.S., Latina/ os have often been sidelined by discrimination and xenophobia. Students considers these issues, and the vibrant and diverse role Latina/as have played in U.S. literature and culture. Taking a broadly historical approach, and paying particularly close attention to contemporary Latinx fiction, memoir, and poetry, it considers questions relating to place, politics, race, history, and gender. Major figures to be considered include Jose Marti, William Carlos Williams, Gloria Andalzua, Natalie Diaz, and Justin Torres.
Credits: 1.0 Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
A survey of theater history and dramatic literature from ancient Athens through the early 19th century. Plays include not only classics of Western drama but also exemplary theater texts from around the world.
Credits: 1.00 Crosslisted:THEA 266 When Offered: Usually in the fall semester
Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Restrictions: Students with credit for ENGL 211 may not receive credit for ENGL 266 Recommended: Students intending to major/minor in theater usually take either THEA 266 or THEA 267 by the end of sophomore year. Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A survey of the new theatrical styles to emerge around the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. Course readings closely consider the relationship between a play’s literary form and its realization in performance, as well as theater’s response to the emergence of film, television, and new media.
Credits: 1.00 Crosslisted:THEA 267 When Offered: Usually in the spring semester
Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior Recommended: Students intending to major/minor in theater usually take either THEA 266 or THEA 267 by the end of sophomore year. Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
Required of and limited to participants in the London English Study Group and is taken the term before the group’s departure.
Credits: 0.25 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts CORE: None
Opportunity for individual study in areas not covered by formal course offerings, under the guidance of a member of the faculty.
Credits: variable Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A study of the historical development of the English language from the first written records of the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. The course is concerned both with the linguistic “laws” governing the development of English and with the political, economic, and cultural factors that have helped to determine the character of the language spoken today. Students engage in some close study of earlier forms of English. (Pre-1800 course.)
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENGL 302 - The Literature of the Early Middle Ages
A study of early medieval literature, focusing mainly on the great tales and poems of the Germanic and Celtic traditions. Readings include such representative major works as Beowulf, the Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Welsh Mabinogi, and selected Icelandic sagas. By approaching these texts both as literary works and as characteristic expressions of their respective cultures, the course works toward situating Old English literature in a broader European context. Texts are in translation, with some exposure to original languages for interested students. (Pre-1800 course.)
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENGL 303 - Medieval Merchants, Knights, and Pilgrims
A study of engagements with the world in medieval English accounts of history, adventure, travel, and pilgrimage, suggesting the sense of challenge, opportunity, and threat that the world beyond Britain’s watery borders seemed to offer. (Pre-1800 course.)
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
ENGL 304 - Introduction to Early Medieval Languages of Britain and Ireland
An introduction to the languages, literatures, and history of the early medieval cultures of Britain and Ireland. Depending on the semester, the course may concentrate on Old English, Old Irish, or Middle Welsh. The heart of the course is an intensive study of the chosen language, combining thorough and systematic instruction in the basic elements of the language with translation of selected readings from texts by early medieval authors. The course examines the cultural and historical backgrounds of early medieval literature; students work on developing the philological expertise to be able to address such topics as the heroic ethos, the impact of Christianity on the pagan peoples of western Europe, and the roles of women in early medieval society. (Pre-1800 course.)
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A study of women’s roles in British and American fiction in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
A study of representative works by 19th- and 20th-century American novelists.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A study of narrative fiction. Students should consult the department and registration material to learn what specific topic will be considered during a given term.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A study of public and private African American humor as entertainment and survival, as well as a vivid expression of the black experience in America. The course traces African American humor from its African roots, through slavery, minstrelsy or blackface entertainment, vaudeville, early silent movies, and radio, on to television and today’s more explicit expressions in concerts, comedy clubs, and motion pictures.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A study of literature of the U.S. South with attention to texts ranging from the colonial period to the contemporary moment. By assessing “southern literature” as a category with a particular history, students approach texts that issue from a region at a crossroads of circum-Atlantic commerce and culture, oppression and hope. Students explore texts in a variety of media and theorize them from a range of perspectives. Major figures include Frances Harper, Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Jesmyn Ward.
Credits: 1 Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENGL 313 - Restoration and 18th-Century Literature and Culture
Works of John Dryden, John Milton, Mary Astell, Daniel Defoe, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope analyzed in light of their political, religious, and literary background. Figures from the cultural context of the period - Wren, Handel, Hogarth - are also studied. (Pre-1800 course.)
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
An intensive introduction to the momentous literary historical period (from the late 18th Century through the early 19th Century) identified retrospectively as Romanticism. The course considers how Romantic poets and essayists employ the literary medium to figure, participate in, process, and/or respond to intertwined developments in history, aesthetics, philosophy, and literature itself. Readings include works by Edmund Burke, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De
Quincey, William Hazlitt, John Keats, Charles Lamb, William Wordsworth, the Shelleys, Charlotte Smith, and more.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A study of books banned in the United States and/or elsewhere in the world. This course will examine the controversies that have surrounded these works and consider why historical and sociopolitical episodes led to acts of censorship. The course will interrogate arguments for and against free speech. What is intellectual freedom? How and why have various pressure groups protested? Should there be limits on a citizen’s freedom to read and/or publish work that does not accord with the religious or political beliefs of another person or interest group? Students will engage complex works of literature that have been called obscene, irreligious, racist, sexually explicit, and/or graphically violent. Writers to be studied may include Richard Wright, Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, Ken Kesey, and Alison Bechdel.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A study of selected Shakespeare plays examined through modern and historical, social and political, theoretical and performance perspectives. Students can count both ENGL 321 and
for credit toward the concentration, although only one can be counted for pre-1800 credit. (Pre-1800 course.)
Credits: 1.00 Crosslisted:THEA 321 When Offered: Fall semester only
Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year, Sophomore Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A study of selected Shakespeare plays examined through modern and historical, social and political, theoretical and performance perspectives. Students can count both
and ENGL 322 courses for credit toward the concentration, although only one can be counted for pre-1800 credit. (Pre-1800 course.)
Credits: 1.00 Crosslisted:THEA 322 When Offered: Spring semester only
Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year, Sophomore Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENGL 323 - Periods in British Literature (London Study group)
A detailed study of works chosen to illustrate the historical development of literature in Great Britain. Counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for the English major and minor. Taught in London.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
ENGL 324 - Periods in British Literature (London Study group)
A detailed study of works chosen to illustrate the historical development of literature in Great Britain. Taught in London.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
A study of the works of Milton with emphasis on the early poems and the epic Paradise Lost. The course includes close reading of the texts and an examination of their relationship to the art and ideas of the period. (Pre-1800 course.)
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
An introduction to the field of Irish Studies. Begins by considering a few influential works of earlier Irish literature and then moves on to pay close attention to the Irish Revolution and the “Easter Rebellion,” particularly the explosion of creativity in the literary and dramatic arts during the Irish Literary Revival, with a special focus on the poetic work of its leader, the towering figure of W.B. Yeats, and the wide shadow his influence would cast over the work of later poets, like Nuala Ní Dhomhnail, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. Students are grounded in the history of Ireland, its conflicted colonial relationship with Britain, and the outsized influence of this small island on global and postcolonial literatures. May be offered as an extended study.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENGL 331 - Modern British Literature (London Study Group)
A study of British fiction, poetry, and drama of the 20th century. This course is taught in London.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A study of drama, both classic and modern, as it is represented in current London productions. This course is taught in London.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
Narratives by African, African American, and African Caribbean women writers. The focus of this course is the concept of the African diaspora with its broad cultural, social, political, and economic implications. Students explore how these texts represent women’s experience cross-culturally. How does the condition of each nation-state, with its attendant hierarchy of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, shape the (dis)continuities in these texts? Ultimately, they question whether these narratives can cohere under the rubric of African/diaspora women’s literature.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A study of works by and about black Americans. Short fiction, the novel, drama, poetry, and the essay are examined with an eye for determining the nature of the black American’s role, as writer and as subject, in the context of American literature as a whole.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENGL 335 - Searching for Home in South Asian Literatures: Gender, Nation, Narration
An exploration of what South Asia is and how it has been described/defined using key literary texts and theoretical arguments from writers who both reside inside and outside the region. Students critically examine the different representations of South Asia from the colonial period to the present moment. The course begins by examining classical texts that were revived during British colonialism, moves to exploring colonial representations of countries in the region, and concludes by discussing contemporary postcolonial texts. The gendered nature of colonial, postcolonial, and global processes is an important part of this course.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
A study of literature by First Nations peoples. Works of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry are studied with emphasis on the combination of, and oftentimes conflict between, different expressive traditions. Can an oral tradition become part of a written literature? What is the function of “story” within different cultural traditions? Writers include N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Simon Ortiz, Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, Luci Tapahonso, Irvin Morris, Esther Belin, and Craig Womack.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
A survey of African literature written in English in the decolonizing, post-colonial, and neo-colonial eras. This course examines a number of outstanding novels and critical writing by African writers, with a particular focus on the ways literary aesthetics change to reflect dynamic national, cultural, and subjective identities.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
A study of selected British and American poets active between 1900 and 1950. Amidst all the discourse about the “postmodern,” it becomes increasingly clear that there is no consensus on what it is “post.” More recent versions of the “postmodern” argue that it is not a period but a mode - one coeval with Modernism itself. Modernity and postmodernity can thus be understood only in relation to one another. This course pursues that relation by focusing on poets like W.H. Auden, Sterling Brown, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Muriel Rukeyser, Wallace Stevens, Melvin Tolson, or William Carlos Williams.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENGL 340 - Critical Theory: Language, Semiotics, and Form
A survey of important developments in the formation of literary criticism as a modern discipline. Topics may include Freudian, feminist, deconstructive, Marxist, semiotic, and historical approaches.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
An examination of the forms that British fiction took during the era commonly known as the Victorian age (roughly 1837-1901). Texts include works by such writers as Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Egerton, and George Gissing. Attention is paid to the many forms that Victorian fiction took, and to the variety of topics that it addressed. There are opportunities to consider such subjects as Victorian publishing practices, fiction as a vehicle for social criticism, the relationship of fiction to other cultural forms, and the growing frankness of mainstream fiction.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A close study of works by British poets and essayists of the Victorian era (1837-1901), with emphasis on their place in 19th-century thought and art and on their varied responses to the period’s sweeping political, economic, scientific and technological transformations. Authors studied include Tennyson, the Brownings, Arnold, Mill, Carlyle, Ruskin, the pre-Raphaelites, Lewis Carroll, Pater, Swinburne, Hopkins, Housman, and Wilde.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
An exploration of Asian, African, intercultural, and postcolonial performance traditions, spanning theater, dance, ritual, and everyday life. Course materials include both classic and contemporary play texts along with selected readings in history, anthropology, and performance studies.
Credits: 1.00 Crosslisted:THEA 349 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
Asks how we perform our American identities, both onstage and off. Readings include Euro-American, African American, Asian American and Latinx plays from the 19th century to the present along with selected readings in theater history and performance theory.
Credits: 1.00 Crosslisted:THEA 351 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
An examination of how serious writing is achieved. The focus of Living Writers is on contemporary fiction writers, who will be present in this class at Colgate each fall. The course is taught by one or more faculty with guest lecturers from across the university. Students read stories and novels by each writer on the syllabus. Each week the writer whose work has been under discussion visits the class. The presentation is followed by a public reading.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
The social, political, and cultural background to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales capture the liveliness and precision of Middle English and the variety of late medieval English life. In them Chaucer explores issues of community, gender, identity, and authority as the pilgrims tell tales, quarrel with one another, and assert themselves. Through their narratives, the pilgrims attempt to make sense of the social, religious, and political challenges of a world at least as confusing as our own. (Pre-1800 course.)
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year, Sophomore Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A study of very recent short and long fiction by writers both renowned and slightly secret. Students should consult the department and registration material to learn what specific topic will be considered during a given term.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
ENGL 365 - Fugitive Mobilities: Migration and Environmental Imagination in 20th-Century America
A study of American literature in the 20th century with a focus on the aesthetic, environmental, and cultural meanings of mobility, particularly as practiced by figures that move - or refuse to move - in defiance of the dominant culture: vagabonds, migrant laborers, fugitives. To uncover the racial and political meanings of twentieth-century mobilities in the Americas, we will explore texts in a variety of media - narrative fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, photography, sound recordings, and film - and theorize these mediums from a range of perspectives. Major figures include Dorothea Lange, William Faulkner, Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Ida B. Wells, Louise Erdrich, and Richard Wright.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENGL 367 - Jamaica in the Literary Imagination (Study Group)
An introduction to Jamaican literature from the plantation to the diaspora, spanning a period from 1930 to the present. While this historical framing is central to the organization of the course, the study is not strictly a historical survey, but rather an attempt to read Jamaican literature produced at different historical moments, in rural and urban, global and local spaces, and across perspectives mediated by differences and convergences of race, gender, sexuality, and location. Writers may include Claude McKay, Roger Mais, Erna Brodber, Curdella Forbes, Margaret Cezair-Thompson, among others. Students examine how the historical forces of colonialism, nation building, migration, and the information age have helped to shape how the selected writers from different spaces and identities imagine Jamaica’s culture, cultural products, and geopolitical relations in the global world.
Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
ENGL 368 - After Genocide: Memory and Representation
An investigation of the impact of genocide on the self and the imagination’s representations in literature, film, and art. Primary texts include poetry, memoir, video testimony, film, and visual art. Scholarly methodology involves readings of literary criticism and theoretical work in the study of trauma, literary theory, and testimony. Among the questions the course asks are: How does trauma shape imagination and open up access to the site of disaster that is now carried in fragments which inform memory? How do representations of violence shape and inflect aesthetic orientations and literary and artistic forms? The course concerns itself with the aftermath of two 20th-century genocides–that of the Armenians in Turkey during World War I and of the Jews in Europe during World War II–both seminal events of the 20th century that, in various ways, became models for ensuing genocides.
Credits: 1.00 Crosslisted:PCON 368 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENGL 370 - Prophecy and Doubt: Romantic and Victorian British Poetry
Deeply troubled by accelerating change and alarming social upheaval, 19th century British poetry veers between prophecy and doubt, neither entirely sure of its vision nor willing to surrender hope. Perhaps even more than ourselves, the poets of this era felt keenly the forces of social fragmentation and the constriction of the human spirit by machinery and technology. Students start with fiery seers like William Blake or Percy Shelly, observe poets like Tennyson, Barrett-Browning, Arnold or the Rossettis wrestling with the role of the poet in modern society, and follow the self-described “last of the Romantics,” the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, as he prepares the way for modernism precisely by digging deeper yet into tradition.
Credits: 1 Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A workshop in the reading and writing of creative nonfiction, especially the memoir and the personal essay.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: Instructor approval on the basis of writing samples Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
Building on playwriting skills and techniques introduced and practiced in THEA 276: Playwriting, students will study and practice the art and craft of writing and revising the one-act play (45-60 minutes in length). The course will be run as a workshop and is intended for students with playwriting experience.
A workshop in the writing of prose fiction. The course includes study of other writers’ work, with group analysis of students’ work and individual conferences.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: Instructor approval on the basis of writing samples Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
An advanced workshop in the writing of poetry; includes group analysis and criticism.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: Instructor approval on the basis of writing samples Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A course in canonical and cutting-edge works from the 1930s to the present. When journalists borrow the tools of fiction writers to craft compelling true stories, we call them literary. Students read and analyze texts by such writers as Joseph Mitchell, Calvin Trillin, John Hershey, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Michael Herr, Tracy Kidder, Jane Kramer, Susan Orlean, and Alex Wilkinson.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A 3-week extended study from Kathmandu, Nepal, to Mt. Everest base camp. Students study the art and craft of writing about far-flung places, as well as recent news stories about Mt. Everest. Texts also include such classics as The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen and Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. In conversation with the professor, each student composes a work of creative nonfiction that might consider, among other possibilities, what constitutes the 21st century sublime: What, if anything, does it mean to stand near the top of the Earth?
Credits: 0.5 Prerequisites: ENGL 374 or ENGL 379 Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENGL 385 - Drama, Fiction, and Poetry of Tudor England
Courtly and popular writing in England, 1485-1603. Writers studied include the canonized greats (Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare) and their equally flamboyant contemporaries. (Pre-1800 course.)
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A study of representative works, from the early novel through the Victorian period. Readings include novels by such writers as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Austen, Brontë, Eliot, and Dickens.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
Opportunity for individual study in areas not covered by formal course offerings, under the guidance of a member of the faculty.
Credits: variable Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A study of selected texts from the medieval Welsh and Irish literary traditions. Readings span the period from the 7th to the 15th centuries and include such works as the Irish epic Tain Bo Cuailnge (“The Cattle Raid of Cooley”), the Welshmythological stories of The Mabinogi, and the love and nature poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym. The course considers these works as cultural and historical artifacts, and also explores their accessibility to more modern critical and theoretical approaches. (Pre-1800 course.)
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A consideration of the major works of the Brontës: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. This seminar also examines Brontë biography, taking Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë as its point of departure. Students gain an understanding of the Brontës’ literary and social contexts; they also gain an appreciation of the powerful myth that has grown up around these three sisters.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A study of key medieval texts from the 12th to the 15th centuries in which the authors attempt to articulate individual identity in relation to the medieval social codes and expectations that shaped their experience. Students consider such issues as love, gender, religious vocation, and court and town life. (Pre-1800 course.)
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
An advanced seminar in a topic - author, genre, or theme - in American literature.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A study of the two major figures of American transcendentalism in their social, political, and religious context. The course focuses on the major writings of Emerson and Thoreau, with some attention to related works by their contemporaries.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENGL 422 - Confession and Rebellion: American Literature in the 1950s
An investigation of the innovative forces of post-World War II American literature. The course will review the tumultuous decade of the 1950s during which time the United States was catapulted into a Cold War with the Soviet Union and a congruent episode of anticommunist hysteria known as McCarthyism. This initiated the new nuclear age created with the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. It was also a decade defined by the struggle with Jim Crow racism and the emergence of a new Civil Rights movement, the birth of the second wave of feminism, and the emergence of a rich range of cultural criticism focused on issues including the social construction of the American family, corporate and suburban conformism, sexual repression, and the destructive capacities of the new military industrial complex. Out of this charged political and cultural situation, writers created some of the most innovative literary works in modern American history.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENGL 431 - Ethnographic Fictions: Travel Writing, Bearing Witness, and Human Rights
Helps students navigate fiction’s complex relationship with representation and reality. Scans a broad spectrum of texts, beginning with 18th- and 19th-century European novels, and continue onto contemporary writings from the postcolonial world. Students discuss the complex ways in which fiction documents the social world, produces historical archives, bears witness to trauma and violence, and memorializes loss, but also rejects and/or makes readers critically aware of realism’s positivist impulses. Also guides students in reading theoretical texts on the topic. Possible authors include Daniel Defoe, Rudyard Kipling, Leonard Woolf, Bertolt Brecht, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Michael Ondaatje, and David Henry Hwang.
Credits: 1.00 Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
A study of the literature and culture of the Caribbean through prose and poetry written in English. Topics vary from term to term. They include routes and roots, Caribbean women writers, and Caribbean identities.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year, Sophomore Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
An advanced seminar in the work of one or several authors, examining the relations between modernist literary experiment and its cultural contexts.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Recommended: One course in 19th-century poetry is recommended. Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
Developing from the “wisdom literatures” of both Greco-Roman and Hebrew tradition, the modern aphorism is characterized by its brief and often pointed expression of an observation or precept. It differs from, say, maxims, proverbs, or apothegms in that it turns on paradox and antithesis; it differs from earlier forms in the ways it undermines rather than supports certainty. This seminar explores the relations of literary form to convictions about the nature and limits of human knowledge, habits of reading, and its uses in life. The course follows the transformation of the aphorism both as form and as impulse as it is reinvented in the Modern period-chiefly following the example of Friedrich Nietzsche-and explores its character as a lyrical corrective to overly definitive and linear ways of organizing and writing about experience.
Credits: 1.00 Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
How do we tell stories about people? What historical and cultural elements shape our narratives about them? What materials do we have with which to build these portraits? This course is an exploration of biography, as non-fiction narrative, practiced both by modern writers and Renaissance writers. The subjects, ranging across a variety of countries, include a statesmen and an impersonator, an alchemist and a painter, a noblewoman and an executioner. Materials include original letters, diaries, autobiographies, travel journals, and legal records. (Pre-1800 course.)
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year, Sophomore Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
An advanced seminar in a topic - author, genre, or theme - in medieval British literature. (Pre-1800 course.)
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
An advanced seminar in a topic - author, genre, or theme - in English literature, 1580-1660. (Pre-1800 course.)
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year, Sophomore Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
An intensive study of the works of one or two writers, as announced. (Post-1800 course.)
Credits: 1 Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
An advanced workshop in the writing of fiction, poetry, and/or creative nonfiction. Depending on the semester and the instructor, the course may be structured around a topic, a genre, or both. It will always include the study of literary texts, discussion of student work, and one-on-one conferences. Preference is given to students who have already taken at least one 300-level creative writing workshop and who are majoring in English with an emphasis in creative writing. While this course is required for all students pursuing honors in creative writing, it is also open to students who are not pursuing honors. This course does not fulfill the major requirement for a 400-level seminar in literature.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: Instructor approval on the basis of writing samples Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENGL 489 - Preparation for Honors in English Literature
This seminar, taken in the senior year, is required of all English majors pursuing a scholarly honors project. The course has a twofold purpose. First, on a theoretical level, it problematizes familiar attitudes about and approaches to literary texts and contexts, while introducing students to the methodologies of twenty-first-century scholarship. Second, it inaugurates honors research, requiring the completion of essential preliminary tasks for the thesis that will be written in the spring.
Credits: 0.25 When Offered: Fall semester only
Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: Only Senior Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts CORE: None
Writing the honors essay. This course must be taken in addition to the nine courses required for the major in English literature and the eleven courses required for the major in English with an emphasis in creative writing.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
Opportunity for individual study in areas not covered by formal course offerings, under the guidance of a member of the faculty.
Credits: variable Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
Individually supervised studies for students selected by the department.
Credits: 0.50 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
An introduction to the field of environmental ethics. Several key figures and philosophies in the environmental movement are studied and critically analyzed, with a particular emphasis on ethical reasoning and its influences on environmental policies and practices. Topics to be discussed include animal rights and the ethical treatment of animals, intrinsic and instrumental evaluations of the natural world and its inhabitants, the value(s) of species and ecosystems, the nature and extent of our obligations to address climate change, as well as central questions of consumption and population ethics in the context of sustainability.
Credits: 1.00 Crosslisted:PHIL 202 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENST 219 - American Literature and the Environment
An introduction to literary study that focuses on human responses to their environments and ecologies. This course explores representations of relationships between people, places, and animals in American fiction, poetry, and non-fiction from the early American Renaissance to the postmodern period. Questions of how environments are inflected by gender and racial positions, as well as literature’s insights into issues of environmental justice and sustainability, are addressed through works by writers such as Wendell Berry, Charles Chesnutt, Annie Dillard, William Faulkner, bell hooks, Aldo Leopold, Marilynne Robinson, Wallace Stevens, and Jean Toomer.
Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
In the wake of the environmental movement and the civil rights movement rose a crosscurrent of issues combining problems of social justice and environmental issues. During the past four decades, this crosscurrent has swelled to produce a new social movement: the environmental justice movement. This course explores the terms and ideas of environmental justice by addressing the key issues of environmental racism, distributive justice, procedural justice, and justice as recognition, and the ways in which these concepts explain environmental inequality. It embraces the deep interrogation of the historical context of environmental problems and the ways in which systems of oppression contribute to environmental issues. These issues are introduced and discussed mainly in the context of the U.S. environmental justice movement, with some international context highlighted periodically.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts CORE: None
Environmental health is a field of interdisciplinary study that integrates human society and behavior with ecological processes to understand environmental dimensions of human health. This course focuses on knowledge generated in the natural and social sciences that concerns human-environmental interactions and its implications for human health risk. It introduces students to the conceptual and empirical underpinnings of the direct and indirect relationships between environment and health, approaches to measuring these relationships, and the ways in which health policies, programs, and clinical practices have been organized to reduce risk at various geographic scales: locally, nationally, and internationally. Regional implications of global climate and other global processes provide an important context for the course. This course also explicitly demonstrates the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to investigating questions in global environmental health and the complexity of environmental analysis.
Credits: 0.50 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENST 234 - Case Studies in Global Environmental Health
Environmental health is a field of interdisciplinary study that integrates human society and behavior with ecological processes to understand environmental dimensions of human health. Students focus on not only knowledge generated in the natural and social sciences that concerns human-environmental interactions and its implications for human health risk, but also includes an extensive case study on various emergent issues in public health. Case Studies in Global Environmental Health Issues introduces students to the conceptual and empirical underpinning of the direct and indirect relationships between environment and health, approaches to measuring these relationships, and the ways in which health policies, programs and clinical practices have been organized to reduce risk at various geographic scales: locally, nationally and internationally. Students have an opportunity to complete an extensive research project on issues of environmental health during the second half of the semester.
Credits: 1 Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Restrictions: Not open to students who have taken ENST 233 and ENST333 Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts CORE: None
Using scientific evidence and tools, this course presents sustainability issues and solutions through environmental science and engineering perspectives. Students will learn about the theories and evidence behind major environmental phenomena, and students will use scientifically-grounded arguments to think critically about complex environmental challenges and possible sustainable solutions. Topics to be discussed include dependency on fossil fuels, the stress of population growth and consumption on the environment, and recycling. Students will also have the opportunity to conduct several hands-on experiments and to analyze data using statistics.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Senior Area of Inquiry: Natural Sciences & Mathematics Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENST 241 - Sustainability and Climate Action Planning
Explores the initiatives, programs and policies being implemented at the local and regional government level to promote sustainability and address climate change. Students will investigate diverse policy pathways from national and local case studies. Whenever possible, students work in groups with community partners, including those in the upstate New York region, to solve complex challenges facing local governments and organizations trying to enact meaningful climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, and sustainability-related policy. These projects will be informed by different theoretical orientations to sustainability, allowing students to gain practical experience in civic engagement and policy making.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts CORE: None
Explores the theories and methods of policy analysis as applied to U.S. environmental policymaking. Policy analysis is an applied social science that draws on diverse methods to generate information designed to be used in political settings and inform policy decisions. Students explore specific environmental issues such as pollution regulation, wildlife and ecosystem management, and climate/energy issues. Students learn, among other skills, to: define problems using data to describe environmental change, construct policy alternatives using various analytical techniques, define evaluative criteria, assess the alternatives, and draw conclusions.
Credits: 1.00 Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts CORE: None
Opportunity for individual study in areas not covered by formal course offerings, under the guidance of a member of the faculty.
Credits: variable Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENST 309 - Australian Environmental Issues (Study Group)
Covers key geographic and environmental issues in Australia with a particular focus on environmental diversity. Through class lectures and discussion, critical reading, independent research papers, and field trips, students consider how the geologic and environmental history of Australia shaped biodiversity, and how humans have affected these natural communities. Field excursions will introduce students to Australia’s rich and diverse flora and fauna, its environmental and cultural heritage, and illustrate current challenges in environmental protection and management. Trips within New South Wales include: Sydney, Canberra, Jervis Bay, Royal National Park, Budderoo National Park and Port Kembla. An additional 5 day trip takes the group to Queensland to visit the Atherton Tablelands, tropical rainforests and the Great Barrier Reef.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
ENST 313 - Environmental Problems and Environmental Activism in the People’s Republic of China
Students explore China’s complex environmental issues, their historical roots, and social implications. Also examines the rise of environmental social activism in China. Using pedagogical methods from InterGroup Dialogues (IGD), students are provided with the intellectual tools to analyze issues of power, privilege, and identity and by extension, their own position in the world in relation to these environmental issues. This course is linked to an extended study to China. Students travel to the People’s Republic of China, where they will examine sites of environmental problems, but also meet activists and see their work in progress. The trip will also bring to the forefront some of the issues of power, privilege, and race issues that were discussed in the course.
& SOCI 313 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
. Students will travel to the People’s Republic of China, where they will examine sites of environmental problems, but also meet activists and see their work in progress. The trip will also bring to the forefront some of the issues of power, privilege, and race issues that were discussed in the course.
ENST 313L - Environmental Problems and Environmental Activism in the People’s Republic of China Lab
Examines the rise of environmental social activism in China; the historical, political, cultural, and economic roots of China’s current environmental problems, including deforestation, air pollution, water pollution, and species loss. Students learn theories of environmental justice and explore the rise of environmental activism in the PRC. The course will utilize pedagogical methods from InterGroup Dialogue (IGD) to provide students with the intellectual tools to analyze issues of power, privilege, and identity and by extension, their own position in the world in relation to these environmental issues.
ENST 316 - Nature, Technology, and the Human Prospect
Explores the complex interrelationships among Nature, technology, and people, especially the interactions that reconfigure what it means to be human. The aggregate significance of modern technologies is radically transforming the natural and human-built world in good and bad ways, even within remote societies and ecosystems. How do technologies control or influence the ways people value parts of the world over other parts, the ways they value the moment over the future and the past, the ways they value rapid change and innovation over long-standing traditions and slow-changing landscapes? These are some of the complex moral issues raised by the technological enhancement across the globe that is examined by careful reading, writing, argumentative discourse.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
Food is fundamental — it sustains us and is essential for our survival — but food is more than just what we eat. Food is also a commodity with complex global markets and ecological impacts; it is highly regulated through our political processes and institutions; and it forms a key part of our culture and the social rhythms of everyday life. This course explores these many dimensions of food, focusing especially on key questions about where it comes from, how it is produced, and how it is embedded in our economic, political, and cultural institutions. Students participate in a service learning internship at Common Thread Community Farm in Madison, NY. The course also involves field trips to and guest speakers from local food and farming communities.
or (SOCI 201 or SOAN 204) or (SOCI 250 or SOAN 210) and students must have an open morning (no other enrolled courses) on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, from 8 a.m. until 12 p.m., in order to accommodate the farm internship component of the course. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
Global environmental justice examines both procedural and distributive inequities as well as injustices in political relationships among nation states. Additionally, it places emphasis on a variety of global political issues, which have evolved from environmental concerns that transcend national boundaries. This intermediate course expounds on the concepts and theories of environmental justice from an international perspective. It evaluates the international frame of environmental justice from a human rights perspective and its applicability to different case studies. A close examination of the theoretical North-South relationship, in terms of dependency and exploitation of peripheral (South) countries by core (North) countries, is central to the course. It analyzes a constellation of issues labeled as global environmental justice, such as tribal exterminations, dislocations of marginalized communities, and resource conflicts. Real world examples of environmental justice cases are critically assessed to develop an understanding of the complex relationships among actors that lead to environmental injustices.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
Historically, hunting for food has represented one of the most direct ways in which people have engaged with nature. Some scholars even believe that the “hunting instinct” is a fundamental aspect of human identity. People in modern industrialized societies, however, often have little idea about the origins of the flesh they consume, most of which is raised and slaughtered on an industrial-scale. While the majority continue to eat meat, poultry, and/or fish, a minority have chosen to become vegetarians or even vegans for ethical, religious, cultural, health-oriented, or environmental reasons. Others continue to hunt and fish but within ecosystems dramatically altered by human intervention and amidst cultural landscapes complicated by commercialized and trophy hunting. Drawing upon a wide range of sources including literature, artistic and documentary films, works of popular culture, autobiographical accounts, online hunting (and anti-hunting) forums, diverse web resources, self-reflective essays, and scholarly approaches ranging from animal studies to humanistic ecocriticism, this course investigates the intertwined themes of hunting, industrial versus small-scale farming and fishing, eating, vegetarianism, and the ethical and existential choices they present to members of modern industrialized societies.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
Public policies to protect the environment are among the most important and controversial issues in local, state, and national government. This course analyzes the politics of environmental protection in the United States through the use of social science theory and a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods. The course introduces frameworks for understanding environmental policy problems and reviews several important American environmental laws. Readings include social science “classics” on the environment, as well as recent scholarship on environmental politics and emerging environmental issues. Topics covered in the course include the politics of environmental science, environmentalism as a social movement, environmental lawmaking in Congress, bureaucracy and environmental regulation, federalism, environmental law, and environmental justice.
ENST 340 - Environmental Cleanup: Methods and Regulation
Introduces students to the major hazardous environmental pollution problems in the US and the regulatory framework within which these problems are managed. Students will be challenged to examine the processes and structures that lead to hazardous environmental pollution, the strategies that are used to clean up environmentally polluted spaces and determine the major hazardous pollutants that are of highest concern for federal regulators. Additionally, students will critically assess the current regulatory framework for environmental pollution control, determining the strengths and weaknesses of these statues. Finally students will be presented with the opportunity to research and develop cleanup plans for a specific contaminated site based on field trips to local sites.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENST 345 - Water Pollution: Chemistry and Environmental Engineering
Examines how chemical properties affect water contaminants’ movement in aquatic systems. Using principles of science and engineering, students will examine the toxicity of different manmade and naturally occurring chemicals, applying polynomials and chemistry principles to real world environmental conditions. Students develop scientific analytical skills that will help them to understand the broader field of environmental chemistry. Students explore a range of topics including the acidity (pH) of water and its effect on chemicals’ solubility, oxidation-reduction (redox) reactions, and the dissolution of gasses such as carbon dioxide (C02).
Our world is facing unprecedented pressures from global warming, habitat loss, pollution and a myriad of other anthropogenic drivers that are negatively impacting species and ecosystems. The biological discipline that addresses the impacts of these drivers on biodiversity and ecosystem function is Conservation Biology. The step after the identification of a conservation issue is to determine conservation priorities for addressing it, and then formulating evidence-based policy. Students learn the sustainable management of socio-ecological systems using conservation biology and policy studies. Framed around a case study, a long-term research project in the Cardelus lab on the myriad impacts of high deer density on the Village and Town of Hamilton.
Credits: 1 Corequisite: ENST 389L Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: Only Environmental Studies, Environmental Geology, Environmental Geography, Environmental Biology, Environmental Economics Majors and Minors Class Restriction: None Recommended: ENST 202, ENST 232 Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts CORE: None
Credits: 0.25 Corequisite: ENST 389 Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENST 390 - Community-based Study of Environmental Issues
This project-based, interdisciplinary course examines current environmental issues in the context of community-based learning. Topics for investigation are selected by faculty, usually in conjunction with the campus sustainability coordinator, the Upstate Institute, or directly with local and regional agencies or organizations. Students get practical experience working in interdisciplinary teams to examine environmental issues with a goal of developing relevant recommendations.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: At least two courses related to environmental studies Major/Minor Restrictions: Only Environmental Biology, Environmental Economics, Environmental Geology, Environmental Geography, Environmental Studies Majors Class Restriction: None Recommended:
Opportunity for individual study in areas not covered by formal course offerings, under the guidance of a member of the faculty.
Credits: variable Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts CORE: None
In this senior seminar, students discuss the relevant literature (from multiple disciplines) and do research on one or more selected environmental issue or issues, chosen by the instructor. Topics differ from year to year. The goal is to achieve an advanced, interdisciplinary understanding of contemporary environmental issues.
Major/Minor Restrictions: Only Environmental Studies, Environmental Geology, Environmental Geography, Environmental Biology, Environmental Economics Majors and Minors Class Restriction: Only Senior Restrictions: Senior ENST majors & minors only; others by permission Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts CORE: None