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This course will introduce students to the emerging field of Queer Ecology, which combines eco-criticism and queer theory to emphasize the interconnectedness of discourses on nature and the embodied politics of sexuality/gender/race. We will discuss queer-ecological intersections across literature, cultural theory, media, popular culture and performance, including, for example, key works by Jose Esteban Muñoz, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Samuel Delaney. In so doing, we will critically examine how narrative can help us understand our environments outside heteronormative and extractivist frameworks. In addition to critical analysis, our methodologies will include experiments with experiential learning such as zine-making and community engagement.

This course traces the ways in which female writers negotiated a series of literary, social, and intellectual movements, from abolitionism and sentimentalism in the nineteenth century to Progressivism and avant-garde modernism in the twentieth. Authors include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Rebecca Harding Davis, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

How have American writers tried to expose and illuminate racism and sexism through fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, and poetry? How have they tried to focus our attention on discrimination and prejudice based on race, gender, ethnicity, class, religion and national origin? What writing strategies can break through apathy and ignorance? What role, if any, can humor play in this process?

Jacobean tragedy refers to the high-water mark of English tragedy achieved during the reign of James I. Think Othello and Macbeth. During these years (1603-25) Shakespeare and his talented contemporaries unflinchingly examined the role played by lust, violence, political intrigue, revenge ('a wild kind of justice'), and the certitude of death in constituting the meaning of human existence. We will read classic examples of this 'theater of cruelty' by Shakespeare and his rivals and collaborators Thomas Heywood, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster.

This course serves as an introductory exploration of writings by Latinx authors in the United States, highlighting the shared and distinct experiences among various Latinx communities. We will concentrate on literary production of the four major U.S. Latinx groups: Mexican Americans (Chicanos), Puerto Ricans (Nuyoricans), Dominican Americans, and Cuban Americans, spanning the 20th and 21st centuries. Through critical examination of fiction and poetry, the course delves into key themes and issues that shape the cultural expression of these communities. Discussion topics will include identity formation and negotiation regarding language, race, gender, sexuality, and class; the colonial subject; diaspora; and emigration, among other relevant subjects.

Who is most hurt by ongoing planetary ecocide and who benefits? How can humanities scholarship, literary texts, popular culture, and activist practices help us analyze environmental injustice, consider alternatives and participate in change-making? Together we will unpack the intersections of climate crisis, violent settler world-making, and systemic racial, gendered and class-based injustice.

Over the last several decades, there has been an astounding proliferation of trans literature, while debates over trans people's rights to exist have taken centerstage in the U.S. political landscape. Literature plays a foundational role in the formations of trans identities and histories, and trans identities and histories invite us to consider the conventions of literary storytelling anew. The time has come to ask: what kinds of trans stories can we tell, and how? In this introductory undergraduate seminar, we will read trans texts from different genres, including novels, short stories, case studies, poetry, graphic novels as well as film and music to think about trans experiences, embodiments, transitions, and histories. We will read trans literature from various places and times in order to ask how gender, sexuality, race, desire, place, and history shape and are shaped by works of trans literature in a global context. No prior knowledge of trans studies is required for participation in this course.

Using an interdisciplinary approach that includes humanities scholarship, literary texts, popular media, and contemporary social science, this class will investigate the myriad relations between nonhuman animals (or "animals"), humans, and human social orders. Together we will unpack speciesist assumptions embedded in the Western humanist tradition (and represented across Western media and literature) and explore alternative texts that present nonhumancentric views of and strategies for living and adapting in our rapidly changing world, such as works by Donna Haraway, Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing, and Kim TallBear. We'll approach nonhuman animals as agential subjects (rather than merely objects for human study), and practice thinking with "assemblages" or networks rather than in subject-object relations.

How do contemporary British novelists represent dramatic changes in culture, class, demography, generation, economy, gender, race, and national identity following the allied victory in the Second World War (1939-1945)? Focusing on writers born between 1948 and 1975, we examine the structuring of historical consciousness in novels by Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, Julian Barnes, Ali Smith, and Hilary Mantel.