Special Topic Fall 2023: Shakespeare in the 21st Century

This course is designed to introduce you to issues and practices that have become central to Shakespeare criticism and performance in the past twenty-five years. We'll examine the ways in which cross-gender and cross-racial casting has reshaped Shakespeare performance, the rise of Shakespearean adaptation and same-language "translation," the globalization of Shakespeare, festival performance, screen Shakespeare (especially the small screen), efforts to bring decolonization and social justice to the fore in teaching and performance, and the vexed question of "canceling" Shakespeare, among other issues. In addition to delving deep into several Shakespeare plays, we will read a range of essays and view many different kinds of Shakespeare performances. This course will assume that you have some previous familiarity with Shakespeare; it is an ideal follow-up to ENGL 657, "Introduction to Shakespeare." Requirements will include short writing assignments, a class presentation, and a final research paper. 

Fall 2023 Detailed Description: American Literature 1815-1865

Antebellum writers tried to shape the nation through their texts, as they expressed the struggles over power and identity that led to the Civil War—and that continue to define U.S. discourses today. We encounter the genres—novels, oratory, poetry, appeals, slave narratives, essays, and nature writing—that authors used to grapple with slavery, social reform, environmental transformation, and aesthetics. Writers include William Apess (Pequot), Margaret Fuller, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Elizabeth Stoddard, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Harriet Wilson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. We’ll consider critical debates on antebellum literature by reading selected scholarly essays, and we’ll dip into antebellum visual culture, too. This course emphasizes research; students develop their interpretations of what we read by building on the criticism and cultural history about the period.