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The phrase “the human race” reflects an early racial logic indebted to the heterogeneous strategies of difference-making one sees in ancient Mediterranean literature. This seminar will read Greek, Roman, and Egyptian texts that speak to that heterogeneity. In particular, we will attend to the interconnection of racism with other gendered, ableist, colonial, economic, and speciesist ideologies in the Roman-Imperial world. In addition to ancient literature in translation, readings will include antiracist and posthumanist scholarship that provide complementary responses to the “human race” concept.

LTCO 287

The eighteenth century marked what has been termed the “second phase of accelerated globalization,” following the colonial expansion of Europe in the sixteenth century, and preceding the heyday of European imperialism around 1900 and our present age of instant global communication, mass migration, and ecological catastrophe. While Portugal and Spain spearheaded the first phase, France and England took the lead in the eighteenth century, with German intellectuals reflecting on the significance and ethics of their endeavors. Driven by a combination of curiosity and greed, eighteenth-century intellectuals and imperialists left a decidedly mixed legacy to posterity. The period witnessed the expansion of the international slave trade, the growth of settler colonialism and near-eradication of indigenous peoples, the articulation of racial hierarchies and the emergence of Orientalist ideology. At the same time, political revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic cast off colonial rule and rejected feudal tyranny in the name of universal human rights, movements that inspired calls for the emancipation of women, the abolition of slavery, and anticolonial critiques. This seminar offers an overview of some of the central topics in the global eighteenth century, including settlement, slavery, interracial romance, racial theory, political revolution, ecological awareness, and concepts of world literature. Readings will include literature (e.g. Robinson Crusoe), non-fiction (Adam Smith, Locke, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant, Montaigne, Marx, and Engels), contemporary criticism, and cultural theory. 

LTCS 225

This seminar explores the ways in which queer methodologies have evolved over the past decades. Moving from psychoanalytically-inspired models of subjectivity, identity, and desire to modes of social and political critique, queer theory is now a broad, theoretically amorphous endeavor. What constitutes the “queer” in queer theory? What is the object of its critique? How have new interventions in the field drawn upon or rejected the founding texts of queer studies as an intellectual enterprise and a mode of social critique?  What, at this point, is the relationship between queer theory and related modes of critique (including feminist theory, queer of color critique, and trans studies)?

This is the first in the three-course series of introductory graduate seminars for first-year PhD students in the Literature department. The Proseminar has three main goals: to introduce new PhD students to a wide range of contemporary conversations in literary/critical theory and methodology, to introduce students to the department’s faculty and their fields of study, and to train students in the foundational skills of graduate study.