Secularism & Theory
AS.060.603 (01)

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

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times: W 1:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room:  
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 12/12

Thinking with Scale: Frameworks in Early Modernity
AS.060.620 (01)

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

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times: T 1:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Achinstein, Sharon
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/8

Reading Capital Now
AS.060.642 (01)

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

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times: F 10:00AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: Nealon, Christopher
• Room:  
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 1/8

Independent Study
AS.060.800 (03)

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

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nealon, Christopher
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5

Oceanic Studies & the Black Diaspora
AS.060.644 (01)

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

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times: Th 1:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/8

Settler Colonialism: Theory, History, Literature
AS.060.636 (01)

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

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times: W 1:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/8

Jane Austen and the Novel
AS.060.640 (01)

A seminar which uses the work and legacy of Austen’s fiction to consider the history of the novel, realism and romance, as well as new approaches to the study of the novel.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times: W 9:30AM - 12:30PM
• Instructor: Favret, Mary
• Room:  
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 8/8

Independent Study
AS.060.800 (01)

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

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Cannon, Christopher
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5

Independent Study
AS.060.800 (02)

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

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Mao, Douglas
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5

Individual Work
AS.060.893 (01)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times:
• Instructor:
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 27/40

Independent Reading
AS.060.894 (01)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times:
• Instructor:
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/10

Journal Club
AS.060.895 (01)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/5

Franz Kafka in Philosophical and Literary Perspective
AS.213.643 (01)

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

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times: W 1:00PM - 3:00PM
• Instructor: Gosetti, Jennifer Anna
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/15

Theory, Now and Then: Autonomy, Form, Critique
AS.300.629 (01)

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

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Siraganian, Lisa Michele
• Room: Hodson 316
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/12