English

Courses Taught

• ENG 253 The World in Translation: Intro to World Literature
  This class will read a number of Nobel prize-winning authors to consider how translation shapes how they are interpreted across the world. Reading Han Kang, Pablo Neruda, Orhan Pamuk, Kazuo Ishiguro and José Saramago, among others, we will consider how their place in world literature is mediated by literary prizes, academic syllabi, and popular circulation in the literary market. We will ask how the dominance of English is the implicit structuring condition for a global literature to emerge. The class will also provide the option of creating your own translations. Knowledge of other languages is welcome but not required.
• ENG 255 Coming of Age: The Global Bildungsroman
  Bildungsroman as a genre defined by the novelistic development of a character, from youth to maturity, and their imbrication into a set of social relations. Its rise has been associated with modernity and the nation-state in Europe in the eighteenth century, although it has come to be a global genre. This course considers how the bildungsroman is adapted across a range of settings spanning the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, as well as postcolonial Britain, Ireland and Italy.
• ENG 299 Critical Methods
  Introduction to advanced literary study. Attention is placed on close reading, using the library and electronic resources and incorporating scholarly perspectives. Course also considers a variety of theoretical approaches to literature and their place within contemporary literary scholarship. Offered regularly.
• ENG 350 Topics in 20th & 21st Century Literature
  Advanced study of a variety of authors, themes, genres, and movements during the 20th and/or early 21st centuries. Courses may cover American, British, transnational, and/or post-colonial literatures. Fulfills Humanities requirement
• FYS 123-4 Alienation, Revolution, and In-Between: The Hidden Costs of Endless Labor
  Why do we need to work? What counts as work? How does the work we do shape our identities and our relation to the world around us? We will read novels, poetry, artwork, and philosophical and critical texts drawn from a wide range of literary traditions how individuals and their social relations are formed by various kinds of work, including agricultural, industrial, reproductive, artisanal, and creative, labor. The course aims to get students to think critically about their relationship to work. We will read a number of texts that portray the different attachments that people develop for the work they do—whether in the form of a job or not. The course will consider how alienated labor under capitalism produces certain kinds of workplaces and workers, allowing students to read Marxist conceptions of the evolution of labor under capitalism. We will also linger on forms of work--reproductive and emotional labor, creative work, idleness, the desire for a different relation to the material world—which appear to exceed the commodification of the capitalist workplace, while also inevitably coming under its sway. Finally, we will think about how we might theorize other categories to understand our relationship to the work we perform.