Historical Materialism, Interpretation, Intersectionality. The seminar will consider how Marxist theory, critical theory, and historical/cultural materialism can serve as the theoretical basis for an intersectional praxis. We will begin by going back to the formation of cultural studies, looking at foundational texts by Frankfurt School theorists and figures like Stuart Hall, then go on to discuss more recent theorists. Employing this historical materialist framework for interpretation, the seminar will address questions of gender, race, species, and planetary eco-crisis in a variety of texts. Students will pursue their own projects while drawing on this important critical tradition, its methods, concepts, and interpretive frameworks. The seminar is designed to be useful and empowering for a praxis in any field, language, or culture (and any temporal “period”) that contends with cultural artifacts produced under the various stages of capitalism.

The video essay blurs the boundaries between academic analysis and creative approaches to film criticism. Taking the meaning of essay (“to attempt” or “to try”) seriously, the course encourages experimentation and play with form, style, structure, and mode of address. Our research-creations will draw on multiple senses of the essay: descriptive, poetic, personal, reflective, open-ended, and provisional. We seek to hold in tension the theoretical and experiential, visual and tactile, conventional and idiosyncratic, or didactic and meditative. This multimodal course combines scholarly research with artistic practice in the study and production of the video essay. Course readings include texts by scholars, critics, and filmmakers from different genres, periods, and national contexts. Films and videos range from didactic and scholarly to poetic and personal approaches and encompass documentary and avant-garde traditions. Viewings may include work by Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, Harun Farocki, Trinh T.
Minh-Ha, Isaac Julien, Agnes Varda, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Kogonada, Matthias Müller, Cauleen Smith, Walid Raad, Catherine Grant, Hito Steyerl, Kevin B. Lee, and Chloé Galibert-Laîné.

This graduate seminar examines the construction of race and ethnicity in the ancient world and its continued appropriation in shaping racial ideologies in colonial and modern contexts. Designed for students in Literature and Cultural Studies who may or may not specialize in antiquity, this course equips participants with a critical framework for analyzing how the classical past has been mobilized to reinforce—and sometimes resist—racial hierarchies. It will be particularly useful for those who may teach general education courses in universities and community college settings, where the reception of antiquity often surfaces in discussions of “Western civilization”, and world and literary history.

The seminar will explore key ancient texts and material evidence from ancient China, Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, to interrogate how ancient societies articulated identity and difference. At the same time, we will examine the ways ancient categories have been reinterpreted in modern racial discourses, particularly in European colonialism, U.S. racial politics, and contemporary media. Topics include the role of classical antiquity in justifications of modern slavery, the racialization of antiquity in film and digital culture, and the counter-readings of Greco-Roman traditions by Black, Latinx, and Indigenous scholars and artists.

Through interdisciplinary readings in critical race studies, postcolonial theory, and classical reception, students will gain tools for deconstructing the ideological uses of the past in present-day debates on race, nation, and identity. Final projects will encourage engagement with contemporary cultural production, including film, museum narratives, social media discourse, and AI-generated depictions of antiquity.

This seminar meets the Literature PhD program's historical breadth requirement

This course aims to highlight the ways in which the eighteenth century was and is queer—certainly in literary form, and too, in content. We will be pairing eighteenth-century texts with contemporary reimaginings in order to more deeply examine both the original as well as the text’s afterlives. We will also be thinking about these texts alongside works of queer theory. Examples of such pairings may include: ace studies and Jane Austen’s Emma, and Frankenstein and its adaptations, Jonathan Swift and RF Kuang’s Babel.

LTEN 231

In this seminar, we will engage questions of Latinidad in the United States as shaped by the interdisciplinary formations offered in Latinx studies. With recent calls to problematize the field, we will consider how contemporary scholarship and cultural work on Latinidad is both disrupted by and disrupts hegemonic notions of race, gender, class, nation, sex, and sexuality. Towards that end, we will take up disruption as an aesthetic and political framework that challenges efforts to regulate Latinidad.

This seminar will focus on contemporary issues in Latin America. We will focus in particular on how the ‘problem’ of difference is articulated in Latin American Literary and Cultural Theory. Students will read an array of material, moving from postmodern, postcolonial, cultural studies, and decolonial studies. We will work through the debates around orality/literacy, translation, form, tradition, epistemology, as well as representative novels.

World Literatures: Engaging with Recent Scholarship

Please contact instructor for course description.