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In this course, students read the medieval myths, legends, folklore, travelers' tales, and chronicles that give shape and character to what we now call "the Viking Age" (793-1066 CE). Through our readings of these texts, we will answer the following questions: who were the Vikings? What language did they speak? Who were their gods and what were they like? What stories did they tell, how did these shape their values, and what were their principles of literary art? What did other cultures think of them, and who is responsible for their reputation? Readings?originally in Old English, Old Norse, Latin, Arabic, and more?will be in modern English translation.

In this course, we will consider major landmarks of aesthetic reflection on the meanings of artworks for their audiences, each of which is a landmark of literature in its own right. Authors might include the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Burke, Schiller, Hazlitt, Nietzsche, Woolf, Sontag, Cavell, Irigaray.

Lecture/small-group discussion course exploring the social, ethical, artistic and policy implications of artificial intelligence systems. Includes field trips to the AI Tinkery, AI Playground, Institute for Human--Centered AI and elsewhere, both on and off campus. Engages scholarship on AI and education, decolonial AI, indigenous AI, disability activism AI, feminist AI and the future of work for creative industries across STEM, social sciences and the humanities. This is AI for the Thinking Person. If the scheduled discussion times don't work for you, please don't let that discourage you from enrolling. We're flexible with discussion times.

For a long time, disability studies has focused on the past, early representations of people with disabilities and histories of the movement for disability rights. This course turns toward the future, looking at activism and speculative fiction as critical vehicles for change. Drawing on fiction by Samuel Beckett, Muriel Rukeyser, and Octavia Butler, this course will address the question of the future through an interrogation of the relationship between disability and technology, including assistive technology, genetic testing, organ transplantation.

When we imagine the exemplary global or postcolonial novel, we're likely to think of novels from India. But the current dominance of Indian Anglophone fiction was hardly the tryst with destiny it seems in retrospect. This course offers a perspective on the emergence of the Anglophone novel in India through a conversation with its linguistic and generic others works in the competing modes of short stories, poetry, and film. The course may include writings by Mulk Raj Anand, G.V. Desani, Anita Desai, and Arundhati Roy, as well as selections from the volume A History of the Indian Novel in English.

Modernism as a movement touched on and altered many forms of art from literature to painting and sculpture, to architecture, to dance, to film. It was a highly experimental, sometimes radical, and deeply politically and aesthetically engaged era at the turn of the last century when, as the poet Ezra Pound exclaimed, artists had to 'make it NEW'! What 'it' was and what 'new' meant were up for grabs. Everything about art, life, living, identity, and meaning was up for renovation and remaking. Women writers were especially interested in the possibilities and problems for what it might mean to live anew, without the constraints and formalities of how culture had historically conformed gender, class, racial, and national identities for them. In this course, we will be reading a series of novels, poems, essays, and manifestoes from British and American women writers (1900-1950) that will give you a sense for how different women writers responded to the opportunities and challenges of self-expression in this era, and what resonances their writings continue to have in our own times. Some writers may include: Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Jean Rhys, Djuna Barnes, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Mansfield, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks.

This seminar investigates how Shakespeare become "Shakespeare," how the actor, poet, playwright, and person living and working at the turn of the seventeenth century in England came to be thought of as representing universally across time and space. We will consider the collecting, editing, printing, and marketing of Shakespeare's plays and poems - especially Hamlet, King Lear, Cymbeline, Twelfth Night, and Julius Caesar - alongside changing philosophical, political, and cultural forces that have made and un-made our senses of the most famous writer in English.

What enabled Leonardo da Vinci to excel in over a dozen fields from painting to engineering and to anticipate flight four hundred years before the first aircraft took off? How did Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel Ceiling? What forces and insights led Machiavelli to write "The Prince"? An historical moment and a cultural era, the Italian Renaissance famously saw monumental achievements in literature, art, and architecture, influential developments in science and technology, and the flourishing of multi-talented individuals who contributed profoundly, expertly, and simultaneously to very different fields. In this course on the great thinkers, writers, and achievers of the Italian Renaissance, we will study these "universal geniuses" and their world. Investigating the writings, thought, and lives of such figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Galileo Galilei, we will interrogate historical and contemporary ideas concerning genius, creativity, and the phenomenon of "Renaissance man" known as polymathy. Taught in English. On Tuesdays you meet in your own course, and on Thursday all the HumCore seminars in session that quarter meet together: https://humanitiescore.stanford.edu/.

African American perspectives on the environment have long been suppressed in mainstream ecological discourse, despite the importance of questions of land, labor, and resource to the historical and ongoing experiences of Black people in the United States. Against this exclusion, this course takes up African American literature as a unique site of ecological knowledge and environmental thought. Drawing on texts, art, music, and film from the late nineteenth century to the present, this course considers planetary problems of ecological catastrophe and climatic change in relation to the everyday structures of U.S.-American racial politics. Through close analyses of texts and films set on plantations and steamships, in gardens and coal mines, students will explore the environmental dimensions of African American literature, and gain a deeper understanding of the real-world histories with which these works engage. Texts will include novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Percival Everett, and Toni Morrison, short stories and essays by Charles Chesnutt, Jamaica Kincaid, Katherine McKittrick, and adrienne marie brown, and films and multimedia works by Julie Dash, Stephanie Dinkins, and Jordan Peele. Important topics will include the ecology of the plantation, black feminist ecological thought, and the significance of water in African American life and culture.