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This course will introduce students to the core skills required to derive meaning from medieval manuscripts and documents. We shall explore the materiality of the physical object and its digital aspect (codicology); learn how to date and describe early scripts (palaeography); and acquire sufficient basic expertise to transcribe and read early texts using pertinent automated tools. This will be slow, deliberate scholarship over two quarters on alternating Fridays. Tea and cakes will provide additional inspiration.

Since the 1970s in the United States, there has been an attempt to forge a causal relationship between personal identity and public politics. In the case of gender identity, this has led to an increasingly complicated political knot, leading to the formal declaration in 2025, via Executive Order, that there are two genders in the United States. This course will consider the role of the feminist movement in the 1970s, the legal battles about reproduction from Roe v. Wade (1973) to Dobbs v. Jackson (2022). and the larger role of feminist and trans thinking and the backlash to these claims in producing this outcome. Please note this is an interdisciplinary course: we will be reading and interpreting feminist poetry (Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde), feminist art (Womanhouse and Judy Chicago's Dinner Party), feminist/queer theory (Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick), and feminist legal theory (Crenshaw, MacKinnon, Dworkin). All material will be at the introductory level, but openness to different modes of thinking is required.

Austen's finely wrought novels were unlike any previous fiction, offering an intensely realized example of literary originality. This class focuses on Austen's major writing, all published in a remarkable ten year period. These novels - including Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion - have had a profound impact on the development and understanding of the novel as an art form. We'll take the measure of Austen's inventiveness and her subtle, engrossing experiments in narrative voice, fictional character, representation and literary form. Our two goals will be to closely engage each novel (looking at the major interpretative and aesthetic questions that are generated) and to track the rich dialogue that takes place between her different texts when they are read together.

What's `culture'? There is no such thing as `British culture' as a coherent singular phenomenon, but `culture' can be a useful lens to think about a place, its entanglement with the past and the rest of the world. In this class we can understand how the ideas and social relations that constitute the common-sense fiction of British culture and the very notions of `Britishness', `Englishness', etc. came about historically and are sustained in contemporary contexts. As well as learn how to use `culture' as a heuristic-critical tool to make sense of a particular place's entanglement in history, politics, and cultural production.

Is there a difference between being moral and being good? Does it matter? Does knowing the difference matter at all to how a person should conduct him or herself in close relationships, in social groups, in professional life, in politics? The answer to all these questions is a resounding yes. This class will explore human moral psychology: the intuitions we have about right and wrong, fair and unfair, harm, justice, loyalty, authority, sanctity, freedom and oppression. We will then relate these intuitions to systematic ethical theories of right and wrong. We will do so by immersing ourselves in a somewhat surprising source - the greatest hits of Mafia movies from Little Caesar to The Sopranos. We will also consider recent findings in experimental moral psychology.

Preference to freshmen. Mark Twain defined the rhythms of our prose and the contours of our moral map. He recognized our extravagant promise and stunning failures, our comic foibles and tragic flaws. He is viewed as the most American of American authors--and as one of the most universal. How does his work illuminate his society's (and our society's) responses to such issues as race, gender, technology, heredity vs. environment, religion, education, art, imperialism, animal welfare, and what it means to be "American"?

"TV's Lost Weekends," a recent headline says, referring to the modern habit of binge-watching television shows. Such news stories debate the right way to watch TV. They also echo longstanding arguments about how to read books. This course juxtaposes contemporary television with classic serial novels in order to explore different ways of experiencing longform narratives. How do we read or watch when we're forced to wait before the next episode---or, conversely, given the opportunity to binge?

In this course, we'll explore a range of philosophical questions that have been raised both about and within literature. Some of these questions concern the metaphysical status of literary characters and indeed works of literature themselves, some concern our cognitive engagement with literature, and some concern classic philosophical topics like good and evil, free will and responsibility, faith and doubt, and irrationality, self-harm, and the search for fulfillment. We will approach these questions by reading works of contemporary philosophy alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. This pairing will allow us to appreciate what is gained - and what is lost - when philosophical ideas are presented in works of fiction rather than in discursive prose. Throughout the course, we will engage the Socratic method of learning through guided questioning and shared inquiry, analyzing philosophical arguments as they emerge within narrative form. (This is the required gateway course for the Philosophy and Literature major tracks. Majors should register in their home department.)