Sample Syllabi
British Literature before 1789
This course charts the rise of English literature from the few scraps of Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) literature to the eve of the Romantic Period, the Second Great Age of English Lyric Poetry. We study how the literature reflected the politics, society, and economy of the times. Our journey starts with the earliest surviving English lyric poem, Caedmon’s Hymn, and includes writers of established canonicity (the Gawain-Poet, Chaucer, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Dryden, Swift, and Pope) as well as minor and marginalized figures (Lanyer, Wroth, Philips, Marvell, Behn, and Burney).
Women and Power in Shakespeare's Plays
In this class, we pay particular attention to Shakespeare's female characters, examining how his portrayal of women works along and against the conventions of the period. In Shakespeare’s world, are women empowered or devoid of power? How do they act in relation to the power of the state, monarchy, patriarchy? What societal and cultural forces allow or disallow women to assert themselves?
Early Modern Studies: Material Culture and Visual Rhetoric in Shakespeare’s England
Karen Harvey defines material culture as a term that “encapsulates not just the physical attributes of an object, but the myriad and shifting contexts through which it acquires meaning.” These contexts comprise a history of the object as a type, but also the particular story of the object at hand, charging any given material thing with a multitude of emotions, memories, along with a sense of its realized or potential value. In this course, we will use literary works, paintings, and extant material items to examine various categories of objects as well as some things that are very specific and unique. In this course, we trace their histories and interpret the stories they tell us, stories that, in literary texts, are sometimes heard as suppressed murmurs and sometimes become the central points of almost pathological fixation. We also pay attention to the ways meaning is made non-verbally in the early modern culture and ponder how the arguments are made through visual and material media.