Course Descriptions

ECO 339S - Economics of Multinational Firms

Multinational firms with operations spanning national boundaries are some of the most powerful companies in the world. Why do some firms go global? What prevents others from internationalizing their operations? How do multinationals innovate? Do they benefit the countries where they operate? Answers to these questions will provide key insights about the world we live in, and we will use economics to examine these and other issues to learn how firms respond to the pressures of globalization and how the global presence of these firms affects the well-being of citizens in rich and poor countries.

Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
Economics 203

ECO 380 - Seminar in Economics (ECO 380-384)

Reading, research, papers, and discussion on selected topics in economics. Particular topic or area of the seminar and course number will be announced in advance of registration.

Prerequisites & Notes
Economics 202 or 203 or 205 and permission of the instructor.

ECO 395 - Individual Research

Designed for the major who desires to pursue some special interest in economics. A research proposal must be approved in advance by the faculty member who supervises the student and determines the means of evaluation as well as the Department Chair.

Prerequisites & Notes
Economics 202 or 203 or 205 and permission of the instructor.

ECO 401 - Honors Research

Independent research designed to formulate a written proposal for an honors thesis. The proposal will encompass a review of recent literature, development of a theoretical framework and research hypotheses, and the preparation of an annotated bibliography. An oral defense of the written proposal is required. Graded on a Pass/Fail basis. 

Not for major or minor credit in Economics.

Prerequisites & Notes
Permission of the Department Chair. (Fall)

ECO 402 - Honors Thesis

Completion of the honors research proposed in Economics 401. Oral defense of the thesis is required.

Prerequisites & Notes
Pass in Economics 401 and permission of the Department Chair. (Spring)

ECO 495 - Senior Session

Required of all seniors majoring in economics. Students participate in colloquia on economic problems, theory, and policy; prepare projects on economic issues; and take comprehensive examinations that include the ETS Major Field Test in economics, an oral exam and written examinations in economic theory and analysis.

Prerequisites:  Economics 202, 203, and 205 or permission of the instructor. (Spring)

Group Projects: One part of the Senior Session experience requires each student to participate in a group project. Each student should register in one of five group projects described below. Space in each section is limited.

ECO 495A: TAX SYSTEM DESIGN FOR PERU
GROUP ADVISOR: BAKER
Students will have the opportunity to develop a system of taxation for a country. You will start with a clean slate. It is incumbent upon your group to design a system of taxation that you feel is equitable and has a realistic chance of functioning. You will use Peru as your subject country. You have been hired as consultants by the Peruvian government to propose a revised system of taxation. You will research the country to learn about its history, culture, national budgets/priorities, and economy. You will determine the level of funding needed by the country to meet the goals established by its government. You will research various systems of taxation from which you can choose. 

ECO 495B: EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM 
GROUP ADVISOR: FITZ 
Effective altruism acknowledges that many individuals want to help others while emphasizing the importance of finding the most effective ways to do good. As a result, this growing movement draws heavily upon the empirical findings of development economists. Through a debate of various causes (including, for example, direct cash transfers, deworming, malaria prevention, women’s empowerment, or even asteroid prevention), this Senior Session will determine which charities are the best recipients of our marginal charitable donations. 

ECO 495C: THE EUROPEAN UNION: CHALLENGES AHEAD 
GROUP ADVISOR: KUMAR 
Brexit - the recent British vote to exit the European Union, and Grexit - the perennial question of Greece’s membership in it, are symptoms of the difficulties facing Europe’s economic and monetary unions.  This group will examine and report on the economic challenges, and their socio-political causes and consequences, as the European Union charts a course correction. Sub-groups will represent the core, Southern and Eastern European countries.   

ECO 495D: ECONOMIC ADVICE TO THE 45th PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
GROUP ADVISOR: ROSS 
This senior session group will look at the economic policy alternatives likely to be proposed by the 45th President of the United States. We will look at issues associated with taxation, expenditure policy, employment, international trade, migration, and financial regulation. For these six issues, sub-groups will present the alternative(s) most likely to be advanced by the new President. As a group we will discuss the likely effects of such policies and their internal coherence.

ECO 495E: REGULATING FINANCE 
GROUP ADVISOR: STROUP 
What regulations make finance work for society? This project will study policies proposed by the new U.S. president aimed at improving the functioning of America’s financial sector. To do this, the group will choose a financial regulation (or deregulation) proposed by the new U.S. president and will analyze the proposal using economic theory and available evidence. The group may also propose an alternate, or improved, policy that might achieve the same goals, and will use economic theory and evidence to defend the alternate proposal.

EDU 121 - History of Educational Theory and Practice

Satisfies the Liberal Studies distribution requirement.
 

Prerequisites & Notes
(Fall and Spring)

EDU 131 - Schools, Cinema, and American Culture

This course explores how “school films” have become authoritative texts on what counts as good education.  We will examine how students, educators, and school communities are represented in film, particularly in regard to race, nation, class, gender, sexuality, and disability.  We will interrogate implicit assumptions and hidden messages in cinematic portrayals of school life with a focus on teachers’ lives, work and careers.  We will re-imagine the cinematic role in shaping educational practices, policies, and law.  Students will write analytical papers and complete a major research project.

Satisfies the Liberal Studies distribution requirement.

EDU 141 - Introduction to Philosophy of Education

A study of classic and contemporary documents in Philosophy of Education. Includes readings, discussions, and analyses of approximately twenty different philosophers from the fifth century BCE to the twenty-first century.

Satisfies Philosophical and Religious Perspectives distribution requirement.

EDU 210 - Inclusive Education: An Intergroup Dialogue on Race

This course is based on the intergroup dialogue model where two facilitators of differing social identity groups encourage dialogue among class members about persistent social issues and conflicts related to race, racism, and its intersections with other social identities such as class, gender, sexual orientation, religion and immigration/migration background.  The intergroup dialogue approach to teaching about race and racism in the United States is pedagogically unique. The class is balanced with approximately half of the students self-identifying as White and the other half identifying as Students of Color or racial minorities in the United States and at Davidson College. Classroom diversity, balance and size is critical for building the trust and safety necessary for a racially diverse class to deeply engage the topic of race and multicultural education as a practice. Through interactive activities, in-class dialogues, course readings, and self-reflective writing assignments, students will learn about important issues and perspectives facing the participating populations on campus and in the United States. This course is by permission only and a pre-registration survey must be completed before the instructors determine the final class roster.

Satisfies a Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.
Satisfies a cultural diversity requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
This course is by permission only and a pre-registration survey must be completed before the instructors determine the final class roster.

EDU 221 - Schools and Society

EDU 234 - Child Psychopathology (=HHV 244 and PSY 234)

 An overview of the psychological disorders of childhood, including their description, classification, etiology, assessment and treatment. Emphasis will be placed on the theoretical and empirical bases of these disorders, focusing on relevant research methods and findings as well as case history material.

Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.

Educational Studies minor credit.

Health and Human Values interdisciplinary minor credit.

Psychology Major credit (Clinical column)

Prerequisites & Notes
PSY 101

EDU 241 - Child Development (= PSY 241)

Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement. 
 

Prerequisites & Notes
Psychology 101. (Fall)

EDU 242 - Educational Psychology (= PSY 242)

Satisfies Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.
 

Prerequisites & Notes
(Not offered 2015-16.)

EDU 243 - Adolescent Development (= PSY 243)

Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
Psychology 101

EDU 250 - Multicultural Education

This course examines the ways in which schools and society in the United States engage with diverse individuals and groups, as well as how obstacles to ever-increasing multiculturalism are rooted in behaviors, assumptions, values, thinking and communication styles.  The course will be taught using the intergroup dialogue model where two facilitators of differing social identity groups encourage dialogue among students about persistent social issues and conflicts related to race, racism, and the intersections of class, gender, sexual orientation, religion and immigration/migration background.  The intergroup dialogue approach to teaching multicultural education is pedagogically unique.  The class is balanced with approximately half of the students self-identifying as White and the other half identifying as Students of Color or racial minorities in the United States and at Davidson College.

Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Satisfies Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement. 

Prerequisites & Notes

 

EDU 260 - Oppression & Education (=SOC 261)

(Cross-listed as SOC 261.) This course examines various manifestations of oppression in the United States and the questions they raise about inequality and social justice within educational institutions.  We will apply methods of critical analysis drawn from anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and psychology to an examination of social issues in the United States educational system.  We will examine education as a central site of conflict over the gap between the United States’ egalitarian mission and its unequal structure, processes, and outcomes.  Students will rethink contemporary solutions to social diversity in education, develop a social justice framework which emphasizes inequality, and design an institutional ethnographic project as a critical intervention in schools and society.

Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.
 

EDU 270 - Democracy and Education

Democracy and Education examines philosophical and theoretical positions which contend that education is a public good and is essential to the cultivation of a democratic civil society. Through critical analysis and scrutiny, students investigate the notion that public schooling in the United States should be based on principles of equitable access and that every individual has a right to educational opportunities which are just, fair, and democratic.  

Satisfies the Philosophical and Religious Perspectives distribution requirement.

EDU 280 - Introduction to Educational Policy

This course is designed to introduce students to current issues in educational policy, and help them develop rigorous policy analysis skills. We will examine the goals, institutions, and actors that shape the American K-12 education system in order to understand recent reform efforts and their consequences for students.  Our inquiry will be grounded in seminal theories of the policy process such as agenda setting (Kingdon & Thurber, 1984), power (Lukes, 1974), and the advocacy coalition framework (Sabatier, 1988). Too much of the public discourse on education is polarized by reflexive reactions to particular policy proposals, whereas rigorous policy analysis lies in understanding the details of specific proposals and using conceptual models and strong evidence to evaluate their potential impact on educational stakeholders.

The primary goal of this course is to develop students’ ability to engage current education policy debates using systematic and rigorous methods. As such, a substantial portion of the course will require that students apply theories of the policy process and tools of policy analysis to specific reforms such as the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the Common Core State Standards, teacher workforce policies, and the growing presence of charter schools, especially in urban areas.  Students will engage these topics through in-class discussions, case studies, presentations, and through the creation of work products such as policy memos, issue briefs, and op-ed articles.

Satisfies a Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.
Satisfies a major requirement in the CIS major in Educational Studies & Public Policy Studies.
Satisfies a minor requirement in Educational Studies.

EDU 290 - Oral History: Problems, Perspectives, & Possibilities

In this hands-on methods course, students will build interdisciplinary research skills focused on the theory and practice of oral history.  We will explore the theories, methods, and debates surrounding one of the oldest research tools: oral testimony.  Students will learn to critically evaluate oral sources and use oral histories in conjunction with other forms of research.  Students will engage with the practical aspects of oral history by completing and transcribing two oral history interviews.  In addition, students will gain a sophisticated understanding of individual and collective memory and the questions that both raise for writing oral history.  Each student will participate in a class oral history project.

Satisfies a major requirement in Africana Studies

Satisfies a major requirement in Sociology

Satisfies a major requirement in CIS Educational Studies

Satisfies a minor requirement in Educational Studies

Satisfies the Historical Thought distribution requirement

EDU 291 - Data in Education

Educational data and quantitative data analyses have come to play a powerful role in the way we govern our schools. In this course, students will learn to be critical consumers and skilled producers of such analyses. In the applied portion of this class, students will learn data management, analysis, and visualization strategies by working with real data gathered in educational settings to answer research questions of policy and practical interest.

Satisfies a requirement in the Eduational Studies minor.
Satisfies a requirement in the Digital Studies interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies a Mathematical and Quantitative Thought distribution requirement.

EDU 301 - Independent Study in Education

EDU 302 - Field Placement in Education

EDU 320 - Growing up Jim Crow (= AFR 320, SOC 320)

Examines how a generation learned race and racism in the Age of Jim Crow.  Through multiple and intersecting lenses, students will examine texts, such as oral histories, literary narratives, and visual representations of various topics.  Topics will include Jim Crow schooling, white supremacy, disenfranchisement, lynching, rape, resistance, interracial harmony, and desegregation.

Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Satisfies the Historical Thought distribution requirement.
 

EDU 330 - Sociology of Education (=SOC 330)

(Cross-listed as SOC 330.) An introduction to the sociological study of education in the United States, including an examination of the school as an organization within a larger environment. Explores the link between schools and social stratification by analyzing the mutually generative functions of schools and considers how processes within schools can lead to different outcomes for stakeholders.

Provides major credit in Sociology.
Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.
Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
(Fall)

EDU 340 - Education in African American Society (=SOC 340)

EDU 350 - Latino(a) Education in the United States

This course will examine the schooling experiences and educational attainment of Latinos & Latinas in the United States.  We will explore the impact of culture, gender, class, and immigration on Latino/a educational experiences, as well as the impact structures and settings, activism and advocacy, and politics and economics can have on educational attainment.

Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.

EDU 360 - Seminar in Second Language Acquisition

This course provides an introduction to second language acquisition theories and research, exploring the limits and possibilities of instructed and natural contexts. Topics include the nature of language, the role of the native language, second language acquisition universals, theoretical and pedagogical approaches, nonlanguage influences, instructed second language learning, and linguistic data analysis. Students will engage in critical discussions of the readings and observations of foreign/second language classes, and either produce a research-based instructional intervention or linguistic fieldwork analysis.

Satisfies a Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
Students must have fulfilled Davidson’s foreign language requirement or its equivalent before enrolling in the course.

EDU 361 - Bilingualism, literacy and schooling

In this seminar course, we will devote time inside of class and in our local community to the study of bilingualism and literacy development in immigrant school-aged children and youth. Although we will focus on teaching English literacy to students, we will consider ways to do so that honor students’ home languages and cultures. We will meet one afternoon per week (Tuesdays, 1:40-4:20pm) to discuss theoretical and practice-oriented research literature.  Students will also be required to commit either Mondays or Wednesdays (3:30-4:20) to tutoring ELLs at Cornelius Elementary School.  Although not required, a background in second language acquisition, psychology, and/or sociology is recommended.

Satisfies a minor requirement in Educational Studies

Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement

Satisfies the Cultural diversity requirement

EDU 370 - War, Peace, & Education

War, Peace, and Education confronts the complex relationship most Americans have with war by detecting components of the hidden curriculum in schools that serve to endorse war.  The course will focus on five such components:  masculinity and hero worship, patriotism, hatred, religion’s frequent support of war, and war as an arena for supplying existential meaning.

Satisfies the Philosophical & Religious Perspectives distribution requirement

EDU 371 - Critical Race Theory (=SOC 371, =AFR 371)

This course introduces students to the development of critical race theory as a specific theoretical framework to explain or to investigate how race and racism are organized and operate within the United States.  The course will have a sociological focus with emphasis on critical race scholarship that includes, but is not limited to, an analysis of double consciousness, colorblindness, intersectionality, whiteness as property, racial microaggressions, and structures of power.  Students will also explore central tenets and key writings advanced in the 1990s primarily by African American, Latino/a, and Asian American scholars in law, education, and public policy.  The course is both reading intensive and extensive with a major writing assignment that addresses a theoretical problem that grows out of the course topics and discussions. 

Satisfies a major requirement in Sociology and Africana Studies.
Satisfies a Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.

EDU 380 - Evaluating Educational Innovations for Youth

This course will survey selected social innovations aimed at improving social and educational outcomes for youth, and introduce students to theoretical and empirical approaches to assessing the effectiveness of innovations. Following the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, a social innovation is defined as “a novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just than present solutions and for which the value created accrues primarily to society as a whole rather than private individuals.” Examples of innovations include novel programs like Communities in Schools and new approaches to learning like Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). We will also explore the role of philanthropy and venture capital in generating and sustaining innovation efforts.

Through the course, students will understand the evaluative needs of different stages of innovation, learn to connect appropriate research designs, and become critical consumers of research that examines social and educational innovation. Course participants will also have the opportunity to interact with local and national social entrepreneurs through a series of in-person and remote guest lectures. In addition, students will engage in intensive case study of select social innovations, and design an evaluation plan for a new or existing innovation. Finally, the course will seek to integrate applicable programming from Davidson’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative as well.

Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.
Satisfies a major requirement in the CIS major Educational Studies & Public Policy Studies.
Satisfies a minor requirement in Educational Studies.

ENG 110 - Course list for Introduction to Literature

FALL 2016

ENG 110 A Shakespeare & Sports
Instructor
Lewis

Contemporary sports and Elizabethan theater have much in common. Both present spectacles, before a rowdy audience, in an arena. Both involve rehersal and scripted performance. Both require guides, whether a director or a coach. Both create rivalry, whether between teams or acting companies. Most important, both center on stories that thrive on the essential, exhilarating, and painful human experience. Like Shakespeare’s plays, sports history yields instances of extraordinary heroism and of heart-breaking mistakes. Real athletes find reflection in many of Shakespeare’s best known characters. Take, for instance, Dale Earrnhardt, Jr., whose larger-than-life father haunts him as King Hamlet’s ghost haunts his son. Andre Agassi’s second chance at tennis recalls The Tempest’s Prospero, who is exiled from and returns to dominate another court. This class explores how such moments and people in sports find reflection in Shakespeare’s works.

ENG 110 B  Literature & Medicine
Instructor
Vaz

Science and medicine have indelibly influenced how we understand and respond to the physical and mental state of being human.  We will consider how an appreciation of literary texts and the questions they broach give us a different insight into the human condition and affect our awareness of health, addiction, illness, disease, suffering, recovery, and death.  In doing so, we will also pay close attention to the cultural coding of these issues, as we examine how gender, class, race, sexual orientation, or other cultural biases color our perceptions of health, disease, suffering and death.

Counts for the Health and Human Values Interdisciplinary Minor

ENG 110 C Introduction to Environmental Literature (=ENV 210)
Instructor
Mangrum

(Cross-listed as Environmental 210.)  An introduction to global environmental literature.  We’ll focus primarily on short fiction, novels, and non-fiction prose.  The course will introduce students to environmental justice issues as well as contemporary trends in global literature.  Literary and environmental topics include toxicity, waste, food, inequality, the idea of “wilderness,” and activism.  No prior experience studying literature is required.

Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Humanities Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
 

Future section topics:

ENG110 - Graphic Medicine:  Drawing Disability
Instructor
Fox

Why is the graphic novel literary? And why has it become an immensely popular site for the representation of illness, disability, and medicine?  In this Introduction to Literature class, we’ll start with the premise that the unique intersection of word, color, image, text, and juxtaposition offered by the graphic novel offers authors singular opportunities for storytelling. We will further ask: what do comics, zines, and graphic novels have to teach us about our varied kinds of embodiment, particularly about disabled bodies? We will consider how these visual texts teach us about how bodies engage with the social and medical contexts surrounding them. Encompassing everything from bipolar disorder to cancer, depression to HIV/AIDS, epilepsy to deafness, and end-of-life issues to amputation, possible course works may include Epileptic, Cancer Vixen, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, and Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michaelangelo, and Me. 

Counts as an innovation course for the major.

Counts for the Health and Human Values Interdisciplinary Minor

ENG110 - Introduction to Comedy
Instructor
Ingram

This course offers an overview of the comic tradition in English, from the Middle Ages to the present, from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Arrested Development.  Although humor will be a recurring feature of some texts and of most class meetings, this course traces how comedies respond to inescapable challenges of human life:  social and political structures as apparent obstacles to the desires of individuals; the body and its failings, to the point of death; art, particularly comedy, as a reassuring (or maybe deceptive) refuge of happy endings that can seem elusive in life.  Different eras respond differently to those challenges, so the course offers a broad survey of literary and cultural history.  Over the semester, students and professor alike will look for comedy in surprising places, including in the form of the course itself, certain to end happily, before it has even begun.

ENG 110 - Introduction to Environmental Literature: Food Literature (= ENV 210)
Instructor
Merrill

(Cross-listed as Environmental 210).

This course is for Foodies, Ag Activists, Farm Fans, and anyone who is interested in literature about food from a variety of perspectives.  We’ll read fiction, poetry, and nonfiction about the pleasures of eating, the cultural and aesthetic significance of food, rural and urban agriculture, and food justice.  Field trips will include farm visits, and students will participate in hands-on, community-based assignments connected to the college’s Food and Sustainability project. 

Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Humanities Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

ENG 110 - Introduction to Shakespeare
Instructor
Ingram

This course is designed for students who have encountered at least a little Shakespeare-in a book or on a stage or on a screen-and who have enjoyed those encounters. It surveys a selection of Shakespeare’s plays, including comedies (Much Ado about Nothing), histories (Henry V), tragedies (Othello), and hybrids of several genres (The Tempest). We will approach the plays primarily through close-reading and spirited conversation, but also through in-class performances, film adaptations, and occasional critical texts. At the end of the semester, students enrolled in the course will choose our final play, as a step out of the classroom and toward a lifetime relationship with the writer who most shaped our words and still shapes our world.

ENG 110 - Literature of Celebrity
Instructor
StaffAn introduction to literary thought, including attention to the tasks of close reading and of building sustained arguments in written form about texts. Focuses on writing about the idea of fame, both in the contemporary world and throughout the past. Includes attention to a variety of literary forms, including novels, short stories, poetry, drama, film, and creative nonfiction. Major credit.
Grading: 25% papers, 25% tests and quizzes, 25% final exam, 25% consistency and thoughtfulness of class participation and discussion.

ENG 110 - Literature & Social Change
Instructor
Parker

An exploration of the ethics of art-making amid current social issues, in conversation with the authors studied-all of whom will either visit class or video-conference with the class.

ENG 110 - Media & Community
Instructor
Churchill
 
From Walt Whitman’s broad embrace of American readers in the 1860s to the digital social networks of today, this course examines how various media form communities of readers and writers. We will investigate how lyric poetry creates one kind of intimacy between author and reader, how blogs establish another, and how the NBC television comedy Community builds its own cult following. Davidson College meets Greendale Community College in a course that teaches you how to read, analyze, and respond critically and creatively to various forms of media. 

ENG 115 - The Art, Science, and Fascination of Fragrance

Description: This is a new kind of course, built bottom-up from the kinds of curiosity about the sense of smell expressed by students and professors in a liberal arts college. Not all of these questions have answers, but this course strives to give you  the feeling that you are looking in the right direction as you consider the  fascination of fragrance, the science of scent, and the passion and profit of perfume.  You and professors from Art History, Biology, Chemistry, Classics, Economics, English, Environmental Studies, and Psychology will think together and think out loud about what would be the best  next step  in formalizing your own curiosity about olfaction.  So the course is really a series of investigations into the art, biology, chemistry economics, history, and psychology of fragrances.

Organizing Questions: How exactly does the sense of smell work?  Why do we have considerable numbers of olfactory receptors yet a rather small vocabulary for describing smells?  Did the sense of smell shape the human face? Are perfumes aphrodisiacs? Why are aphrodisiacs named after Aphrodite? What are nectar and ambrosia in Homer’s epics? Do fragrances alter moods?   What makes  tangerine fragrance as effective as Valium in lowering stress? Can fragrances really bring back memories?  What role do fragrances play in religious rituals? Why do skins react differently to the same perfume? How did the ancients make/use/store perfumes? Why myrrh and frankincense?  Are there always smells in the air?  Beyond inviting pollinators, of what use are fragrances to fragrant plants? How come mirror image molecules smell so different? How come some fragrances last long on me and some don’t? What is the link between fragrance and flavor? What is the Spice Road and how did it come about?  If I like perfume  X, what other perfumes might I like? Why?   How do people lose their sense of smell? Is losing one’s sense of smell predictive of certain diseases? How do dogs smell cancer? Why do men seem to pay less attention to smells than women do? Are women really 1000 times more sensitive to musk than men are?  Is there a relation between odor and morality? Can human behavior be subliminally manipulated by odors? Does aromatherapy work? Why do I love some fragrances and hate others?  How come old people’s perfumes smell so strong? Is it true that animal urine is used in perfumery? Is there really a smell of fear? Are organic perfumes better than synthetic ones? Why is there the persistent belief in human pheromones? What exactly are notes in a fragrance? How many different smells can a human nose distinguish? How big is the fragrance industry?  What does it take to succeed in it?  What’s up with celebrity perfumes? What perfumes did Cleopatra use? In what organs do human have odor receptors?  

Texts:  Rachel Herz,  The Scent of Desire;   Mandy Aftel, Essence and Alchemy:  A Natural History of Perfume;   Patrick Susskind, Perfume;  Scent of a Woman; Essays on the art, history, chemistry, biology, psychology, and economics of fragrance; Poems and stories on fragrance  themes.

Satisfies a Liberal Studies requirement.

ENG 116 - Gesture

From our non-verbal cues in daily conversation to our postures, gaits, facial expressions, and movements, gesture plays a significant role in our daily communications with one another. Whether we are using sign language or watching the unfolding of a graceful développé in ballet, we are tuned in to the ways in which our gestures communicate meaning. The study of gesture is a multidisciplinary effort, as scholars draw on fields as diverse as psychoanalysis, performance studies, dance, neuroscience, anthropology, linguistics, behavioral science, and literary analysis. This course will examine the interpenetrations of gesture with both speech and thought in a series of cultural artifacts, ranging from the silent film comedy of Buster Keaton in The General (1926) and the fiction of Nathanael West and Zadie Smith, to the YouTube videos of Chris Crocker (“Leave Britney Alone!”) and the documentaries Paris is Burning (1990) and Rize (2005). What does it mean to study gesture in an interdisciplinary way? What questions do theorists of gesture ask of the literary and cultural artifacts they study?  How do gestures amplify our understanding of each other and of literary characters and documentary subjects? Rooted in close reading and analysis, this class will ask students to consider how our movements create meaning and what those meanings suggest about our culture(s) and the other cultures under consideration in the course.


Satisfies a Liberal Studies requirement.

ENG 201 - Professional Writing

ENG 202 - Introduction to Creative Writing

English 202 introduces students to the art and craft of writing short fiction and poetry of all varieites including “slam”.  Creativity is essential, as is dedication to writing, reading, and engaging in productive discussions of each other’s work.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

ENG 203 - Introduction to Writing Poetry

ENG 204 - Introduction to Writing Fiction

Practice in the writing of short fiction with some reading of contemporary fiction writers in English.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

ENG 205 - Introduction to Screenwriting

This course is a workshop, where virtually everything will be based upon, work from, and be inspired by, the writing that you and others in your class accomplish.  The course is based on learning the discipline and rigors of writing daily, creating and listening to dialogue, and making individual scenes work. 

Satisfies Visual and Performing Arts distribution requirement.
 

ENG 211 - Filmmaking

This course is a workshop, where virtually everything will be based upon, work from, and be inspired by, the films you and others in your class accomplish.  The course is based on learning the discipline and rigors of thinking visually, daily.

Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Film and Media Studies and Digital Studies.
Satisfies Visual and Performing Arts distribution requirement.
 

ENG 220 - Literary Analysis

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

ENG 231 - Young Adult Fiction

ENG 240 - British Literature to 1800

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
 

ENG 241 - Magic, Monsters and Medievalism

This course will explore fantasy literature that draws on medieval images, motifs, narrative traditions, and social configurations–texts that operate in the fictional mode known as “medievalism.” We will be especially interested in the possibilities opened up by the use of magic and monstrosity in these fictional worlds and will examine the ways that writers in various non-medieval contexts use monstrosity, magic, and medievalism for their own purposes. The readings will range from early modern fantasy narratives that draw on a medieval past to contemporary literary fantasy novels. These readings will be supported with selected texts from the literature of Middle Ages. By the end of the course, we will have not only read some wonderful fantasies but also outlined a literary history of medievalism. Students will be encouraged to develop projects that use the course framework to interpret the medievalisms of contemporary popular culture, including comics, genre fiction, film, television, and video games.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

ENG 244 - Arthurian Masculinities: Queerness in the Age of Chivalry

Exploration of the Arthurian tradition with special emphasis on the construction and function of masculinity and gender in the world of King Arthur’s court. Readings will be drawn from medieval English and continental Arthurian narratives as well as medieval intellectual culture and contemporary gender theory and queer theory. The course will present medieval writers as dynamically engaged in the interrogation and reshaping of concepts gender in their own times and places. It will likewise investigate our present-day inheritance from the Arthurian tradition, with particular reference to the notions of “courtesy” and “chivalry.”

Satisfies a major and minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

ENG 260 - British Literature since 1800

ENG 261 - Modern Drama (= THE 261)

ENG 271 - Disability in Literature and Art

In this course, we will explore disability as it is depicted in literary and cultural texts, from the canon to disability culture.  These representations are sometimes used metaphorically, as representations of extreme innocence or evil.  Likewise, they might reduce the experience of the disability to a conquerable challenge, or to a fate worse than death.  We will reconsider disability history, question socially defined categories of normalcy and ability, and learn about the presence of disability culture.  Rather than trying to catalogue all the examples of disability in literature, this course seeks to use disability studies as a genesis point and theoretical framework through which to examine several core questions about disability, literature, and the problems and opportunities arising from the intersection of the two.  We will reconsider representations of disability in literature; examine how disability is a culturally constructed category like race, gender, class, and sexuality (and how it intersects with those); study contemporary writing, performance, and art from disability culture; and consider how disability aesthetics can meaningfully contribute to the processes and products of artistic creation.  This course presumes no prior coursework in English and welcomes those from across the disciplines interested in studying the social and cultural experience of disability as a way to inform their own work in the arts and sciences.

Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirements

ENG 280 - American Literature to 2000

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

ENG 281 - Contemporary Southern Literature - (= ENV 281)

ENG 282 - African American Literature: From Colonialism to Renaissance

This introductory course takes students on a literary journey that begins with Sundiata’s An Epic of Old Mali– which allows for discussions of what might be African in African American Literature– through Harlem, and ends at the start of the Black Aesthetic Movement. Through close readings, lectures and discussions, students will learn how to analyze and comprehend literature. Students will write short responses to selected works, offer oral presentations, and end the course with a production of a major essay.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

ENG 283 - Short Prose Fiction

Examines the history and development of the modern short story and its various subgenres through a close reading of texts from many authors and cultures.  The course also gives some attention to writing for publication and allows the option of submitting creative work.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
 

ENG 284 - African American Drama

We will read work by playwrights including (but not limited to): August Wilson, Katori Hall, Lynn Nottage, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, Robert O’Hara, Suzan-Lori Parks, Anna Deavere Smith, Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, and Lynn Manning.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

ENG 285 - Representations of HIV/AIDS (= BIO 263)

(Cross-listed as Biology 263). What happens when literary critics and scientists converse? In this team-taught course, we will examine texts related to HIV/AIDS through the lens of the artist and the lens of the biologist.

Satisfies the Liberal Studies distribution requirement.
 

ENG 287 - Indian Literature in English

An overview of literature written in English by authors from India. Genres include fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, from the 19th century to the present. Includes writers from the Indian diaspora as well as those not widely-known outside India. 

Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Counts toward the South Asian Studies interdisciplinary minor.
Counts toward the Africana Studies major.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

ENG 288 - Contemporary Amer Multicultural American Drama

• What does it mean to use the stage to give voice to being part of a multicultural community?
• How does theater help fight stereotypes and oppression?
• In what ways do plays rewrite history and create pride?
• What does it mean to stage the multicultural experience in a globalized world?
• How does theater show us the intersections of different kinds of identity?

This course will answer these questions and more through our study of twentieth- and twenty-first century drama from several rich traditions of multicultural playwriting in America. Communities represented will include African-Americans, Asian Americans, disabled Americans, Latino/a Americans and LGBTQ Americans. We will explore issues raised in their plays including identity, the American Dream, stereotypes, history, and hope. No prior experience reading drama is necessary.

Satisfies the Cultural diversity requirement.

ENG 289 - Environmental Literature

Overview of environmental literature from Thoreau to the present day.  Generally focuses on the enviornmental literature of the United States, but may include other English-language literature.  Designed for both majors and non-majors.

Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Humanities Track of the Enviornmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

ENG 290 - World Literatures - South Africa & C. Europe

Designed for majors and prospective majors.  A historical survey of selected texts outside the British and American literary traditions.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Satisfies the Literature diversity distribution requirement.
Satisfies a major requirement in Africana Studies when taught by Prof. Flanagan.

ENG 292 - Documentary Film - History, Theory, and Production of Documentary

The course will first examine the modes of the documentary genre, often described as expository, observational, interactive, and reflexive. For each mode we will read relevant history and theory, and watch representative documentaries. Students will then make a series of short documentaries as a means of understanding how these modes affect both the production and reception of a documentary. We also consider more specific sub-genres of documentary such as science/nature, politics/protest, biography, and mockumentary.

Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts distribution requirement.

ENG 293 - Film as Narrative Art

This course explores the relationship of film video to other narrative media, with emphasis on authorship, genre, and the relationship of verbal and visual languages. Students will make a short video, but the course does not assume any production experience.

Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts distribution requirement.
 

ENG 294 - Harlem Renaissance

Topics vary.  

Read major texts of the Harlem Renaissance and explore issues of race, gender, sexuality, migration, & diaspora that shaped this formative moment in twentieth century literature. We will read poetry, fiction, essays, and plays by W. E. B. DuBois, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, and others, situating their work in the context of developments in modern art, music, sociology, psychology, and print culture.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement. Counts toward the Africana Studies Major.
 

ENG 295 - Women Writers

This course prowls the house of fiction’s dangerous and often forbidden spaces employing the visions and voices of transgressive agents, who go places they should not, wrestle monsters literal and figurative, and rescue bodies (of information and imagination) essential to us all. Readings: selected 19th, 20th, and 21st century fiction by women, from A Room of One’s Own, to In the Cut, to Swamplandia, and lots of great works in between.   

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

ENG 297 - Caribbean Literature

The Caribbean is key to any understanding of the New World. Caribbean Literature takes students beyond the islands’ popular music, food, and landscapes to an understanding of the formation of cultures from Europe, Africa, and India that have produced two Nobel Laureates. In novels such as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, we see how love leads to the death of a young woman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. We’ll understand, too, why and how Aime Cesaire rewrites Shakespeare’s The Tempest to allow for the resurrection of the spirit of Caliban’s mother, Sycorax. Students do not need to know theory to take this course.  

Students may retake this course for credit when the topic/readings change with instructor’s permission.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Satisfies the Literature and the Cultural diversity distribution requirement.
Counts toward the English Major and the Africana Studies Major

ENG 301 - Writing Nonfiction Prose A: Advanced Nonfiction or B: Creative Nonfiction

Instructor

Varies

Check schedule to determine which section is being offered.
Both A and B satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

301A Advanced Nonfiction

Instructor 
Miller

This workshop-driven course pursues the advanced study of nonfiction in a variety of genres in the arts and sciences (e.g. science/nature writing, the review, food writing, travel writing). In each genre studied, students read professional model essays, write an essay in the genre, and respond to one another’s work. For the final independent project, students submit an article for publication.
 

301B Creative Nonfiction
Lewis

The core of this class is the writing workshop, in which students review of one another’s work develops objectivity on their own writing and essential editorial skills. In preparation for drafting each writing assignment, students read and discuss model essays representing such approaches as description, scene-setting, interviewing, analysis, argumentation, story-telling, personal narrative, and art reviewing. At the end of the semester, students craft longer essays on topics of their choice. The course also features attention to style, voice, and key choices that constantly face a working writer.

Offered Fall 2016


301B Creative Nonfiction
Campbell

In “Why I Write,” Joan Didion argues that “In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind” (n.p.).  Writing creative nonfiction, to expand on Didion’s description, means discovering, creating, and “saying I” through writing and revising.  Thus, English 301is substantially individualized:  you will set and work toward specific goals.  To complement these individual efforts, the class will explore connections between critical reading, careful observation, and effective writing.  Overall, English 302 emphasizes the entire composing process and relies heavily on your contributions and collaborations. My course goal is to demonstrate that understanding and addressing expectations and responses–both as writers and as readers–to writing helps us create nonfiction that entertains, informs, moves, and provokes.
 

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

Course may be repeated for credit if taught by two different professors.

ENG 303 - Advanced Poetry Writing

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
Course may be repeated for credit if taught by two different professors.

ENG 304 - Advanced Fiction Writing

Advanced work in writing fiction.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.  

Prerequisites & Notes
Course may be repeated for credit if taught by two different professors. 

ENG 306 - Filmmaking

ENG 307 - Forms of Fiction

“Forms of Fiction” investigates a literary genre via both theory and practice, operating like a laboratory, emphasizing experimentation, and embracing making as a way of learning. No creative writing background is required; there are no prerequisites.

Satisfies a major requirement in English

Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Global Literary Theory

Satisfies the Literary Thought, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement

ENG 310 - The English Language

ENG 340 - Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature

Special topics in a selection of Medieval and Renaissance texts (to 1660) with attention to critical approaches.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 342 - Medieval Literature A: Medieval Women or B: Crusade, Violence, and Literature

Instructor

Varies

Both A and B Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

ENG 342A Medieval Women
Instructor
Ford

An interdisciplinary study of medieval English literature, visual art, and spirituality from the 8th through the 15th century.  Most texts in translation.  

ENG 342B - Crusade, Violence, and Literature
Instructor
Ford

This course examines the medieval literary representations of religious violence. We will focus primarily on narrative texts depicting the complex, multi-stage military encounters in the Levant and Asia Minor from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, known collectively as the Crusades. The famous, infamous, and fictionalized figures at the center of these conflicts-Godfrey of Bouillon, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Saladin, and Bevis of Hampton-will occupy much of our attention. We will also encounter several texts that read Crusades patterns of religious violence into other contexts: the “Matter of Britain” material (Arthurian narratives) and the “Matter of France” material (Carolingian narratives) primarily but also a provocative medieval retelling of the life of Buddha in which Buddha becomes a Christian Crusader king. We will also read Jewish and Islamic accounts of Crusades violence and attempt to make sense of the vast range of perspectives on this international conflict. Throughout the course, we will pursue such questions as: How do medieval Christians (or medieval Muslims or Jews) depict their ideological and military opponents? What justifications-assumed or articulated-are offered in support of violent actions? What condemnations are leveled against violent enemies? Where are the boundaries between the Christian and the (Jewish or Muslim) other? Between heretic and infidel? Between fellow citizen and enemy? Are these boundaries permeable? If so, to what extent? The Crusades raise questions like these in medieval readers and writers. Consequently, the Crusades narratives become fascinating windows into the culture and worldview of the Middle Ages as well as useful tools with which to think about the rhetoric, ideology, and iconography of geopolitical tensions in our own time.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

 

ENG 343 - Chaucer

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor. (Not offered Fall 2015.)

ENG 345 - Creating Book Culture

ENG 352 - Shakespeare’s Playscripts

This course begins with the premise that Shakespeare’s dramas, while composing an impressive body of literature, are first and foremost play scripts for actors who performed 400 years ago. As such, they require their own set of reading skills. Through regular writing assignments, class discussions, and acting workshops, students acquire the skills required to understand the words on the page as clues to their embodiment on the early modern stage. The course surveys plays across Shakespeare’s theatrical career–comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. Critical reading includes both literary criticism and theatrical history.  This course doesn’t require a background in acting and isn’t aimed at actors per se.  Rather, the course, which is aimed at both readers and actors, situates the plays in the theater for which they were written.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 353 - Studies in English Renaissance Literature A: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries C: Donne

Topics in Renaissance literature such as Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Renaissance schools of poetry, and Northern humanist culture.

Both A and B satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Check schedule to determine which section is being offered.

353A  Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Instructor
Lewis

Although Shakespeare tends to overshadow all other writers of his age, he was actually but one of many working, accomplished dramatists of the period who influenced and competed with one another.  By exploring a series of pairings between a Shakespeare play and a play by one of his contemporaries (for example, The Merchant of Venice and Marlowe’s Jew of Malta), this course surveys not just Shakespearean drama, but, more broadly, early modern drama.  A discussion-based class that explores Shakespeare in his network, the course also attends to original staging conditions of the plays and to some of the most pressing questions about performance.  A guiding principle of the class is that all of the plays, now neatly presented by editors and publishers for study in the classroom, were originally conceived of as living, malleable scripts for actors.
 

 

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 355 - Milton

This course follows John Milton’s carefully shaped career, starting with early poems, such as Lycidas, before considering prose, such as Areopagitica, and the late masterpieces, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.  Milton’s texts ask some of the most important questions of the Western tradition:  what is the relation between an artist and predecessors?  how much should governments constrain individuals’ choices?  are there “natural” elements of gender and sexuality?  if God is both all-good and all-powerful (a huge “if”), why is there so much suffering?  As befits these big questions, ENG 355 emphasizes class discussion and individual discovery through formal and informal writing.  In the Miltonic tradition, this course also emphasizes choice:  students may choose to take a comprehensive final examination or participate in an all-day reading of Paradise Lost, a rare opportunity for students to learn about themselves and about one of the most influential poems in literary history, all in one unforgettable day.

ENG 360 - Studies in Brit Lit: 1660-1900 A: Desire or B: British Literature Since 1945 or C: Trad/Originality

Instructor

Varies

Courses A,  B and C satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Check schedule to determine which section is being offered.

Course list for British Literature

360A - Desire

Instructor
Fackler

Examines representations of sexuality, desires, and passion in British literature. This trans-historical course proceeds both from the observation that we may see sexuality as a set of scripted performances and from the theory that sexual desire has a history, even a literary one.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.


360B -  British Literature Since 1945

Instructor
Fackler

An analysis of the novels, short fiction, drama, and poetry of the postwar years in Britain, up to the present moment, with special attention to both historical context and the stylistic innovations of the period.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.
 

360C - Tradition and Originality
Instructor
Ingram

This course charts the shifting definitions of both “tradition” and “originality” in British literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.  The course will consider these shifting definitions in three overlapping contexts:  literary (how can a text so obviously and deeply indebted to other texts as Milton’s Paradise Lost claim to accomplish “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”?  how do literary artists respond as the list of “things unattempted yet” shrinks?); historical (how did changing concepts of authorship and of intellectual property both shape and reflect British literature of the period?); theoretical (who or what defines “tradition”?  to what extent is “originality” possible-or desirable?).  In a series of case studies, the course examines some origin stories, such as where the novel came from and how some writers became celebrities.  It follows those stories to the present day, with the awareness that issues of tradition and originality extend beyond any course.

ENG 361 - Eighteenth Century Pop Culture

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 362 - A: British Romanticism or B: Reimagining Blake

362A British Romanticism

Instructor 
Vaz

Topical study of the poetry and prose of the period ranging from the examination of Romantic gender ideology to studies of individual authors

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

362B Reimagining Blake

Instructor
Vaz

William Blake was a risk-taker and a rule-breaker.  In his creative output, he sought to unshackle the ideological “mind-forg’d manacles” that stunted human thought.  We will study Blake’s seminal works and apply some risk-taking and rule-breaking of our own by digitally recreating a few of his illustrated plates.  Just as Blake used text and image in his original plates, so will we, as we creatively and critically reimagine Blake’s work and his message.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 363 - History of the Novel

The origins of the novel in Britain and the circumstances, both historical and sociological, surrounding its emergence. 

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Satisfies the Literature distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 370 - Davidson Summer Program at Cambridge University

ENG 371 - Victorian Obsessions

ENG 372 - British Fiction: 19th and 20th Centuries

Selected British and Commonwealth fiction from 1800 to 2000. 

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 373 - “Terrible Beauty”: Yeats and Modern Poetry

ENG 374 - Picturing Disability

What does it mean to consider the visual representation of disability as a kind of text? Why does it matter? This course will consider the ways in which picturing disability helps us do several things: expose and challenge stereotype, understand how disabled or ill bodies have been used to create cultural meanings, better understand the social experience of disability, reconsider disability in the medical context, and appreciate the amazing human variation of all bodies that disability underscores.  Representation also presents us with some of the thorny issues with which we will grapple: what are the ethics of picturing disability, and how can we avoid spectacle or voyeurism even as we take advantage of the “visual activism” staring allows? How do we make typically invisible impairments like anxiety or depression visible? How do we show the reality of pain without reinforcing the sense that disability is only a tragic or isolating existence? How do we create visual representations that retort against tropes so familiar that we may not even realize we are using them to shape our personal definitions of disability? How can we create representations that suggest “disability gain”-that disability begets creativity and innovation in the arts and sciences? In this course, we’ll look at a wide-ranging assortment of ways disability has been pictured in society. We’ll explore everything from public health posters to medical textbook photographs; painting and sculpture to zines and graphic novels; charity campaigns to material objects (including medical or adaptive devices). You will create your own representation of disability, do some disability hacking of material objects, and work together to curate an online exhibition of disability representations.

This course presumes no prior coursework in English and welcomes those from all majors interested in studying the representation of disability as a way to inform their own work in the arts and sciences.

Satisfies the Literary, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
 

ENG 380 - Studies in American Literature

Special topics in American literature with attention to critical approaches. 

Satisfies the Literary, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 381 - American Fiction: 19th Century

Historical and theoretical understanding of romanticism, realism, and naturalism, with attention to Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, Crane, and others. 

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 382 - African American Literature 1955 & Beyond

Designed by Davidson College students, this course is an exploration of the vibrant literature that African Americans produced during the years in which they struggled for Civil Rights, and in years leading up to Barack Obama’s Presidency. Students will study works by writers such as Sonia Sanchez, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Haki Madhubuti, Ishmael Reed, Al Young, and Randal Kenan as they, and others, relate to a new aesthetic in American Literature.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

Counts toward the Africana Studies major.

Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.

ENG 383 - Ethnic American Literature A: Black Poetics and “the Queer” or B: Black Literature Since 1953– The Poetics of Black Beauty

Instructor

Varies

Both A and B satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Counts toward the Africana Studies major.

383A Ethnic American Literature-Black Poetics and “the Queer”
Instructor
Staff

Predating the nation’s founding, African American literature has been marked since its inception by its writers 1) affirming their equal humanity under the auspices of divine forces while being treated as subhuman property; 2) staking claim upon and expanding the ideals of what constitutes American identity and culture; and 3) reflecting on their state of being as those living with what preeminent scholar W.E.B. Du Bois terms a “double consciousness,” a keen, spiritual awareness of a dual citizenship and ancestry in these United States and in a continent that has always been at once reviled for its link to dark skin and religious and cultural difference and revered for its wealth of natural resources. This course will explore that journey of discovery, mourning and protest-subtle in its nuanced critique in the eighteenth century and at times scathing in its nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century manifestations-in the poetics of African American writers. Primarily, we will be studying lineated poetry, but we will also ponder the ways these writers blur and expand genre boundaries in poetic fiction, nonfiction prose, spoken word, and song and in the ways that gender and sexuality further complicate what it means to be non-white and American. This course will close by mining the poetics of writers of color of other ethnicities who have arrived on these shores experiencing similar ostracism and oppression and have adapted African Americans’ creative, rhetorical modes to serve their own poetic (re)visions and expansions of American, non-white identities. In this course, we’ll explore the possibilities of the word “queer,”  as it is used by the writers themselves, both in the classical sense of odd and striking deviation from a norm and for its contemporary theoretical utility in exploring representations of non-heteronormative sexuality and gender performance.​


383B Ethnic American Literatures:  Black Literature Since 1953 – The Poetics of Black Beauty
Instructor
Staff

Starting with Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha and “The Mother” from her 1963 Collected Poems and culminating with the “rachet/bootylicious” poetics of Beyoncé, this course will trace the ways that black female artists have continued to cast off expectations of respectability, invoking the sinful, the risqué, the forbidden, as they complicate the mantra “Black Is Beautiful” that was central to the “black aesthetic” Amiri Baraka, Addison Gayle, Larry Neal, and others posited as essential to liberate the race from the tyranny of the white imagination. Along the way, the poems of Nikki Giovanni, Lucille Clifton, Ai, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Rita Dove, and others will be used to reflect on their invocation of and tribute to the performance of singer-activists Josephine Baker, Nina Simone, Tina Turner, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, and others who have informed the hypersexual diva ethos Beyoncé has used to dominate contemporary pop culture.

ENG 386 - American Fiction: 20th Century

A study of realist, modernist, and postmodernist American fiction that is not only set in the past, but actively questions the ability of fiction writers to adequately capture and depict the spirit of another time. Major authors: Wharton, Faulkner, Vonnegut, Doctorow, Ishmael Reed, Morrison, Roth. Readings include fiction, criticism on major texts, and theory that deals with the relationship between historiography and fiction. An upper-division elective intended for majors but open to non-majors.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 387 - Modern American Poetry

ENG 388 - Contemporary Theatre

Instructor
Fox

Despite our highly visual and multimedia age, we don’t often think of the stage as being a site of significant cultural conversation.   Yet there is simply no substitute for the vitality and importance of live theater.  To paraphrase Edward Albee, theater puts the mirror up in front of an audience and asks them: “This is who you are. Now what are you going to do about it?”

This course will examine the origins and development of contemporary theatre in the Western tradition, post-1960, with an emphasis on American and British drama. We will particularly place a heavy emphasis on text-based drama of the last two decades, examining the ways in which recent theater has asked its audiences to contemplate issues of concern to contemporary life including (though not limited to) race in America; global violence against women; class division; and the commodification of human relations, both personal and international.  We will also discuss how theater challenges us to find creative solutions through connection, community, and claiming identity. No prior experience reading drama is necessary.

In the past, this course has included works by (but is not limited to): August Wilson, David Henry Hwang, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Lynn Nottage, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, Robert O’Hara, Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka​, Jez Butterworth, Tony Kushner, and Ayad Akhtar. 

Satisfies the Literary, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 389 - Posthumanism

This course will reexamine the idea of “the human.” Readings will be drawn from graphic novels, post-apocalyptic narratives, classical and contemporary theory, science fiction, and recent work in cultural and environmental criticism. Through our reading, we will reconsider the distinctions between humans, nonhumans, and the idea of the natural. The often-porous borders between species, technologies, and environments will also allow us to ask questions about the future of the humanities. If we unsettle prevailing assumptions about the meaning of “the human,” what will the humanities look like in the coming decades? What is the future of humanistic study in an age when digital technologies have become a common feature of everyday life and environmental crises pose existential threats to the planet and our species?

In order to reconsider what we mean when we talk about “the human,” we will need to trek across diverse intellectual terrain. We’ll consider narratives that imagine a future continuum of human-cyborgs, reflect on vast spatial-temporal scales that call into question the significance of our species, probe the assumptions about race and gender underlying popular American ideas about nature, and evaluate scenarios in which the natural becomes “uncanny” even as the technological becomes “organic.”

The course will require three seminar-style projects, regular engagement in discussion, and a final class assignment in which students imagine the future shape, practices, and concerns of the humanities. 

Satisfies the Literary, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Humanities Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

ENG 391 - Literary Criticism

Analytic and comparative reading of major critical texts.

Satisfies the Philosophical and Religious Perspectives distribution requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

 

ENG 392 - Literature of the American South

In this course students explore works by eleven southern women writers including Dorothy Allison, Harriet Arnow, Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, Sheri Reynolds, Alice Walker, Jesmyn Ward, and Eudora Welty. Together we will encounter narratives that challenge our understanding of public and private histories and impel us to consider both theoretically and personally the effects of gender, race, class, and region on creative expression and the stories that unfold.  We will question the texts, their contexts, and ourselves, always acknowledging Welty’s assertion that “there is absolutely everything in fiction but a clear answer.”  The course will include both lecture and discussion. 

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” Muriel Rukeyser
 

Counts toward the Gender & Sexuality Studies major, and the Africana Studies major.
Satisfies the Literary, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 393 - Studies in Literature and the Visual Arts: A: Film Genres or B: Love and Art or C: Film Theory or D: Word Art

Instructor

Varies

393A-C Satisfy the Visual and Performing Arts distribution.
Check schedule to determine which section is being offered.
 

393A Film Genres

Instructor
Kuzmanovich

Originally a means of market differentiation, film genres now are sets of conventions with emotional payoffs, that is, formal devices that promise “repetitive reaffirmation of certain ritualistic experiences” (Gehring).  In other words, film genres are about business, art, and technology.  But they seem to me also about ways of creating or recreating emotions.  In this course we’ll look at the formal and psychological markers as well as cultural consequences of a number of film genres that create, recreate, and thus keep certain emotions in circulation. 


393B Love and Art

Instructor
Kuzmanovich

This is not a course in which we parade our pain or give advice to the lovelorn. But it is an immodest and wholly foolish undertaking.  And an ambitious one, too:  though it’s mostly literary analysis it is also part philosophy, part psychology, part history, part film theory, part creative writing and filmmaking.  For to begin to speak of love is to speak of desire, beauty, goodness, creation, immortality (Plato), psychic anatomy and anatomical memory, prophetic dreams, conscious irrationality, obsession, transgression, suffering, repression, sublimation (Freud), selfhood, otherness, will to power, slavery, mastery, surrender (Hegel, Sartre, De Beauvoir), prostitution (Marx and Engels), male conspiracy (Firestone),   Lines between  eros, philia, nomos, agape, and theoria grow faint and not only because they happen to be Greek words and thus equally strange. Appetites sometimes merge and sometimes squabble with reason and spirit.  Loving oneself, loving others, loving God, loving God in others, passion, intimacy, commitment, these states bring up only the first questions: Who/what should be loved? How does a lover choose a/the beloved? What causes love? What does love cause? Egotism? Idealism? Self-knowledge? Marriage? Companionate marriage? Partnership? The sense that the lovers are heroes/heroines of their own stories which they can finally tell? If one’s love is a story, or becomes a story, what is the genre of that story? Does love become a story only in love’s absence? Is love good? Is love a good? Is there a hierarchy of loves and lovers? What connects love to sexual desire? Do causes and connections differ among cultures and historical periods? What differentiates falling in love from being or staying in love? All of these are good philosophical questions and psychological categories, but talking about love philosophically or treating it as something amenable to psychologizing invariably causes us, as the philosopher Arthur Danto said in the Chambers Gallery, “to lose touch with the reality everyone cherishes.”


393C Film Theory

Instructor
Miller

This course explores theoretical approaches to fiction and nonfiction film, television, video and other media. Though no production experience is required, we will make short storyboards  and videos, and students have the option to make a video as a final project. We then consider “ists” and “isms,” including realism and reality TV; modernism; postmodernism; materialism; evolutionary criticism, and Freudianism and gender theory. Movies we may consider: Modern Times, Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Bicycle Thieves, Star Wars, Shane, Out of the Past, Waking Life, No Country for Old Men, Man with the Movie Camera, Un Chien Andalou, and a variety of shorter videos.


393D Word Art

Instructor
Churchill

You live in a highly visual culture.  To be literate, you need to read and interpret words, images & the interplay between them, both in print and online. This course examines print & digital texts that combine words & images, but it is not a course in mass communications. Instead, we’ll study some of the most complex and subtle word/image interactions, including ekphrasis (poems about pictures), illuminated books, graphic memoir, and digital poetry. ENG 393: Word-Art is a double hybrid: a study of words & images via critical & creative writing. The course inhabits both print and digital realms: meet in a classroom & blog on this website; draw in notebooks & write for web publication; hack print books & design a Davidson Domain.

Prerequisites & Notes
Permission of the instructor required.

ENG 394 - Studies in Modern Literature

Instructor 
Varies

Special topics in modern literature such as The City Novel, Modern International Fiction, Contemporary Poetry, Literature and Medicine, Contemporary Drama and Disability Literature.

Satisfies the Literary, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.


Topic: Fictions of Empire
Instructor
Vaz

British imperialism permeated the literary tradition much as it did the globe.  In this course, we will examine the fictions and critiques of empire constructed in and through literary texts from the eighteenth century through the present.  We will read these texts through the lens of postcolonial theory, so we can better grasp the ideology of British colonialism and its after-effects.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
First-year students require permission of the instructor.

ENG 394 Contemporary Drama and Disability Literature topic counts for the Gender and Sexuality Studies major.

ENG 395 - Independent Study in Literature

ENG 396 - Independent Study in Writing