Credits: 1.0 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: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts CORE: None
Graduate-level independent study projects under the supervision of staff members. Outlines of the projects must be prepared and approved in advance by the department chair.
Credits: variable Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts CORE: None
Students complete a graduate-level research project (special project or a thesis) on a significant problem in education. A special project demonstrates a substantial grasp of relevant theory and methodology as it relates to a pedagogical or institutionally based set of questions. The special project can take multiple forms depending on the student intent and areas of interest. A thesis is intended to be more academically focused in reviewing relevant literature, in gathering and interpreting data or facts, or in applying principles or evidence to the analysis of a special problem. Topics for either may be centered in the student’s area of specialization or in some problem of a professional nature.
Credits: 1.0 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts CORE: None
Works by prominent British writers, from Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century to Seamus Heaney in the twenty-first. Emphasis is on the analytical and critical skills of reading and writing. Required of all majors, normally in their first or sophomore year.
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
An introduction to American literature exploring the relations among key texts and various contexts, both critical and historical. The course engages a wide range of issues in American literary history, from the age of discovery through the colonial period and Revolution to debates over slavery and race in the decades before and after the Civil War. The diverse authors studied include Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Ouloudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Mark Twain. Required of all majors, normally in the first or sophomore year.
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 202 - Justice and Power in Postcolonial Literature
An introduction to significant debates and texts in the field of postcolonial literatures. This course explores how the field engages with questions of race, gender, sexuality, class, caste, and migration. It considers how writers located in the global south or in the West as migrants navigate their spaces when faced with inequality and marginalization. The course examines both the legacies that empires have left and the nature of new empires that are being constructed.
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
An introduction to literary study focusing on the nature of literary tradition and its relationship to cultural and historical contexts. The rich, varied, and enduring tradition connected with the figure of King Arthur is explored through a consideration of English, French, and Welsh texts written between the early Middle Ages and the 15th century, although some more modern works may also be considered. The course is concerned with (among other topics) how different cultures, historical epochs, and individual authors have adapted Arthurian tradition to meet their own needs and concerns and with what has made Arthurian tradition a compelling source of material for so many different interests right up to the present.
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
An introduction to literary study focusing on the question of what it means to identify a national tradition of literature. This course examines Native American authors of the late 20th century in relation to the works of some of their contemporaries, including works by Linda Hogan, Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Simon Ortiz.
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
An introduction to literary study focusing on narratives of 20th-century American immigration. What does it mean to say “America is a nation of immigrants”? As a literary form, the American immigrant narrative describes the process of migration, Americanization, and (un)settlement. In this course, students pay particular attention to how race, gender, class, and sexuality, as well as the changing character of American cities, shape the immigrant experience. Is ethnicity in opposition to Americanness? How is identity transformed by migration? How and why is home remembered? How is coming of age paralleled with migration? What narrative strategies are deployed? Finally, what are the constitutive tropes of American immigrant fiction?
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
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
A course for freshman and sophomores, dedicated to The Booker Prize. The Booker is awarded annually to one new novel published in English, in the UK. Students follow the year’s Booker Prize proceedings, and the class schedule is 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 dissect the evolving aesthetics and politics of the prize and also consider prize culture in the arts more generally. Why is the Booker a cultural phenomenon in England and how do the legacies of colonization and the former “Empire” manifest in these texts? What roles do the judges, the sponsors, and the British and international reading public have? What novels are being celebrated in this particular moment in time, and why? 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 consider 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.
Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, No Senior Recommended: Students intending to major/minor in theater usually take either
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.
Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior Recommended: Students intending to major/minor in theater usually take either
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. The readings reveal the increasingly fluid and fraught categories of race, class, and gender from the earliest medieval writings to the beginnings of the Renaissance. (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
A study of women’s roles in fiction written in English from the eighteenth century to the present.
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 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. Students trace 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
ENGL 314 - Foundations of African American Literature
A study of African American writing from the 18th and 19th centuries. Drawing on the history of slavery and its immediate aftermath, students examine how African Americans negotiated the promises and the limitations of freedom, gendered experiences of slavery, debates around Reconstruction, political representation, and discourses of revolution and abolition. Students will discuss topics including religion, labor, sentimental novels and historical romances, and the slave narrative. Students will also consider how writings by these authors circulated in the United States and abroad. Authors may include the following: Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Harriet Jacobs, Solomon Northrup, Frederick Douglass, Maria Stewart, William Wells Brown, Anna Julia Cooper, and Charles Chesnutt, among others.
Credits: 1.0 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
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
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 examination of the vibrant London theater scene, from the 1580s through the forced closure of the playhouses in 1649, including the work of Marlowe, Jonson, Kyd, Middleton, and Tourneur. Aspects of the historical, cultural, and material framework of the playhouses are also taken into consideration. Among other topics for examination are the discoveries of modern playhouse archaeology, the private lives of actors and theater owners, the formation of theater companies and their travel routes (both in and out of England), the commercial workings of theaters as businesses, playhouses as movable construction, the theaters as part of a much larger entertainment network, and, finally, the changing political position of the theaters that led ultimately to their demise. (Pre-1800 course)
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-Year Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None Formerly: ENGL 458
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
A survey of African American literature after 1900. Reading across time, space, and genre, students examine how African American writers have developed traditions of protest and political dissent, navigated the evolution of racial discourse after Reconstruction, and explored the terms of freedom, citizenship and belonging in the United States. Students also engage African American literary production across a variety of forms to consider how African American writers respond to social and cultural movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. Topics include the artistic renaissance in Harlem and Chicago, the Civil Rights movement, the Black Arts movement, the emergence of the New Black Aesthetic, and Black writing in the age of Black Lives Matter. Authors may include the following: Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, August Wilson, Toni Morrison, and Percival Everett, among others.
Credits: 1.0 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.
Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements
A master class in how works of literature come to be. Students study nine to eleven works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama by contemporary writers. Each year, the list is carefully curated to bring a diversity of perspectives. In a typical week, students discuss one of the works on the syllabus with the professor on Tuesday afternoon, then meet the author on Thursday afternoon. Attendance at literary readings outside of normal class time is required.
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 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 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.
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
An introduction to literatures, films, and critical theory from the South Asian diasporas in North America, England, and South Africa. Student understandings of the fields of Ethnic and Diaspora Studies are enhanced. Focused on participants in the diasporas, emphasizing their different histories of arrival, their place as hyphenated identities, and their shared struggles with other oppressed groups within a framework of segregation at home and empire abroad. Readings focus on texts from the early colonial periods, Jim Crow/apartheid, the Post-WWII reconstruction of England, and the War on Terror. Authors/film-makers may include, Sam Selvon, Mira Nair, Rayda Jacobs, Imraan Coorvadia, Salman Rushdie, Achmat Dangor, Hanif Kureishi, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Amitav Ghosh, Jumpa Lahiri, and H.M. Naqvi.
Credits: 1.0 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A workshop-based course in the theory and practice of personal writing.
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
: 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 the history, theory and practice of literary journalism, also known as the art of fact. Students complete creative as well as analytical assignments.
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 three-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 <em>The Snow Leopard</em> by Peter Matthiessen and <em>Into Thin Air</em> 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?
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
ENGL 386 - Poetry, Prose, and Drama in the Century of the English Revolutions, 1600-1700
A study of the impact of Renaissance science and political and economic turmoil on English literature through the revolution of mid-century. Works include prose, poetry, and drama of the “metaphysical” and “cavalier” schools: Donne, Jonson, Webster, Herbert, Herrick, Browne, Marvell, and their 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. Students consider 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: No First-Year 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: No First-Year 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: No First-Year Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
ENGL 412 - Jane Austen and the Rise of the Woman Novelist
A reconsideration of the history of the novel in the 18th century, using contemporary critical approaches to early women novelists. Jane Austen has held an unchallenged place in a great tradition of 19th-century authors, but has only recently been read in the context of her female predecessors. Reading Maria Edgeworth, Fanny Burney, and Charlotte Lennox gives students a new way to read Austen; reading among the many current critical theories about women as producers and consumers of fiction in the 18th century helps raise more general questions about the literary canon and how it has been formed. (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: No First-Year 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: No First-Year 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. Students 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: No First-Year 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: No First-Year 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
A study of several of the author’s major works, including Ulysses.
Credits: 1.00 Corequisite: None Prerequisites: None Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year, Sophomore Recommended: Prior course work in Shakespeare, 19th- or 20th-century narrative 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. Students explore the relations of literary form to convictions about the nature and limits of human knowledge, habits of reading, and its uses in life. Students follow 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: No First-Year 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: No First-Year 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: No First-Year Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts CORE: None
A study of the major novels and selected short stories of William Faulkner.
Credits: 1.0 Corequisite: None 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: Only Senior 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.
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
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)
Led by the faculty director of Colgate’s study abroad program to the University of Wollongong, offered each fall semester by the program in Environmental Studies and the Department of Geography. Australia’s unique characteristics and history provide a rich setting for the interdisciplinary study of topics in environmental studies and geography. Through class lectures and discussion, critical reading, independent research papers, and field trips, students consider a broad range of historical and contemporary human-environment relationships. A series of field excursions planned and led by the faculty director allow students to experience Australia’s rich and diverse flora and fauna, its environmental and cultural heritage, and illustrate environmental policy challenges for 21st-century Australia.
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.
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.