Introduces features of what might be called a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer literary and theoretical tradition. Uses classical, Renaissance, modern, and contemporary literature, criticism, and film to examine the complicated status and experience of non-majority sexualities and genders. Considers writers, theorists and activists who have explored the relationships among sexuality, gender, knowledge, and literature, including Alison Bechdel, Plato, Michel Foucault, bell hooks, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Oscar Wilde, Nella Larsen.

How can literature’s imagined worlds help us better understand climate and climate change? In this course, we’ll consider how literature represents climate and how thinking about climate can help us better understand how literature makes meaning. How are climatological terms like atmosphere and scale helpful for reading literature? What does a genre like climate fiction, or cli-fi, ask us to consider? Does global catastrophic climate change mean humans are now at the whim of a threatening natural world, or is this the ultimate expression of human control over their environment? Topics we’ll consider include the breakdown of the split between nature and culture; environmental justice; toxicity and pollution; and the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological epoch in which the human species can now be considered a geological force.

Hybrid Bodies, Hybrid Voices in Borderland Literatures Borderlands are not only geographical but also political and social spaces. Boundaries blur, cross-cultural exchanges evolve, cultures interlayer in these contact zones. Borderlands introduce complex matrices of identity and power negotiated across time through historical and literary memory. This course focuses on literary texts, from ancient to contemporary, that grow out of these liminal, hybrid spaces. We’ll read plays, fiction, poems (narrative, lyric, dub, spoken word), that represent a spectrum of cultures and contact zones. How do these texts give voice to different histories of invasion, colonization, assimilation, migration/immigration? How do they (re)imagine and (re)present identities across time? What different questions do they raise about class, gender, race? Reading selections will draw on texts from contact zones in Ancient Greece, Anglo Saxon England, the Welsh Marches as well as colonial encounters in Mexico, Algeria, India, the Caribbean (the Windrush Generation), Nigeria, South Africa.

Introduces features of what might be called a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer literary and theoretical tradition. Uses classical, Renaissance, modern, and contemporary literature, criticism, and film to examine the complicated status and experience of non-majority sexualities and genders. Considers writers, theorists and activists who have explored the relationships among sexuality, gender, knowledge, and literature, including Alison Bechdel, Plato, Michel Foucault, bell hooks, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Oscar Wilde, Nella Larsen.

An introduction to literary analysis, close reading, and form across an array of historical periods, genres, and traditions. This specific course will use the framework of childhood and race to guide our readings and thinking.