English
The Harlem Renaissance
English
The Harlem Renaissance
Harlem, New York. 1920s. A constellation of African American writers, artists, performers and thinkers are changing American and world culture, pollinating African American art and literature. Between WWI and the Great Depression, Harlem was distinctly in...
Theater of War
English
Theater of War
Representation matters. Representation on the page and on the stage – paired with power — have material consequences. This course examines representations of race and religion in the context of war and empire in classical, early modern and...
Page to Screen: Film Adaptations
English
Page to Screen: Film Adaptations
Students read novels, short stories, essays and plays and study their transformation into films. Through these comparisons and a short study of key film techniques and perspectives such as auteur theory, students learn how to “read” a film. The...
Shakespeare Now
English
Shakespeare Now
Poet Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare that he “was not of his age, but for all time.” But what does a poet playwright, dead now some 400 years, have to say that speaks to this moment of the human experience? In this class we will read and discuss...
Documentary Poetics
English
Documentary Poetics
Documentary poetry is the poetry of witness, of weaving together public and personal history to give voice to the silenced, a reckoning to the dead and disappeared, and to honor and celebrate human joy and struggle. It is a poetry that captures historical...
Jane Austen
English
Jane Austen
In this course, we will study Austen’s novels with a focus on her use of language to show the universal tension between raw desire – for money, power and love – and the restrictions placed on that desire by social conventions and internal...
James Baldwin
English
James Baldwin
If ever there was a time to celebrate Baldwin, it is now. “Only an artist can tell what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it,” he said. This course will explore Baldwin’s early life in Harlem, New York City, in the...
Samuel Beckett
English
Samuel Beckett
Nobel Prize-winning Irish author Samuel Beckett once said, “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” And yet his words have proven central – necessary even – to the way many have come to experience and...
Looking for Zora
English
Looking for Zora
In this course, we will examine the life and work of Zora Neale Hurston, “A Genius of the South.” While she is best known for the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, she published more than 50 short stories, essays and plays. She was also an...
Kazuo Ishiguro
English
Kazuo Ishiguro
Topically, the fiction of Japanese-born British Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro is elusive, whether he is evoking the complexity and trauma of post-war Japan, improvising with Arthurian legend or flirting with dystopian science fiction. He’s a...