The Senior Seminar allows English majors in their final year to pursue in depth a subject, genre or author(s) not normally covered in other English courses, or to explore material from a new perspective. All full-time English faculty will teach the course on a rotating basis. Topics will vary from year to year. Examples of past seminars are: Literature of World War I; T. S. Eliot; Melville and Wharton; Hamlet; Shakespeare's Roman Plays.
This course focuses on selected topics in English, and is designed to provide students with an opportunity for in-depth study of some topic having current professional or public interest that is not thoroughly addressed within the context of regular College offerings. Topics may differ each time a course is offered. Students should consult the course offering schedule and their academic advisor each semester.
This course raises the question, "what does it mean to be human in a digital world?" Through the examination of multimodal digital production, students will think about what is and can be communicated about society in digital spaces. In addition to defining the interdisciplinary scope of digital humanities, this course will show how the field of digital humanities encourages new ways of thinking. Through critical inquiry, students will analyze how and why content is expressed globally across digital platforms. This course covers theories of digital humanities, including thinking about technology through a postcolonial lens; ethics and technology; methods of digital creation; and digital research. In this course, students will also examine methods of expression and communication through digital tools with consideration of audience. The course includes a culminating project where students will experiment with digital tools and create a digital product based on society and/or artistic expression. This project will involve research, design and communication in a digital space.
This course has a global exposure by covering the works of a variety of women writers all over the world. In its diversity, it examines the works of these writers specifically as "women's work," i.e., discussing their works in light of Feminist criticism. Another objective is to identify the common threads in women's writings, and to explore their work as a unique contribution to literature. The works of these writers will be analyzed in the context of their respective cultures and time periods. The course will focus on writers from antiquity to the Victorian period: Sappho, Sei Shonagon, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, George Sand, and Emily Dickinson, as well as writers from the Modern period: Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Nadine Gordimer, Anna Akhmatova, Toni Morrison, and others. Fiction, poetry, the polemical essay, and autobiographical writings are featured.
What can superheroes teach us about society? In this course, students will closely examine various superheroes and superheroines and reflect on the social messages and values conveyed in popular culture. Students will be asked to think critically about representations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and disability through analysis of comics and film. This course asks students to look at comics and films as cultural artifacts that can provide insight to social dynamics and politics in the real world. Considering historical contexts also allows for deeper insight into the evolution and shifts in social and cultural representation. Finally, this course will ask students to think globally about the impact of superheroes and the influences on storytelling in comics and film.