Course Descriptions

ENG 261 - Modern Drama

This course covers a period in time (roughly 1860-1960) that was critical to shaping Western drama as we know it.  As we will see over the course of the semester, cultural conversations about race, gender, labor, justice, war, art, and society that were initiated by dramatists like Boucicault, Ibsen, and Chekhov were carried forward into the twentieth century by artists like Grimké, Treadwell, and Williams.  We’ll start our survey reveling a bit in that great 19th century theatrical form, melodrama, as it was used to fight slavery in The Octoroon.  We’ll then look at how different playwrights experimented with form and content (why was realism considered so dangerous? How did expressionism try to physically embody the tumult of emotions?)  We’ll talk about the aesthetic and cultural contexts in which these plays emerged (and which plays caused riots!), and what they tell us about their societies, their audiences…and us.  Our goal is to complicate our understanding of dramatic history by understanding how these plays were and are not only “great art,” but significant sites for challenge to conventional social and artistic norms that will ultimately feel more familiar to you than not.  And…you might even get a chance to act yourself! 

Fulfills the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major and minor.
Fulfills a requirement in the Theatre major and minor.
Fulfills a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing and Rhetoric requirement.

ENG 262 - Bodies at Risk in American Drama

In the first two decades of the 21st century, human existence has been made more precarious by racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia; war and conflict; global warming; health inequities; and widening social and economic disparities. Contemporary American playwrights have held up a powerful mirror to such inequities, and deployed the real bodies of actors to bring to light the stories of those whose very existence has been placed at risk. In so doing, they do not simply reify simplistic stories of either victimhood or inspirational overcoming. Rather, they assert these stories as a fundamental part of American identity, taking a more complex, nuanced look at what it means to navigate systemic inequity while asserting identity, integrity, and dignity. In this course, we will look at plays from the last two decades of American drama that take inequity and its aftereffects as their main concern. The plays we read take up issues including gender transition; the school-to-prison pipeline; bullying; the institutionalization of disabled people; the immigrant experience, especially that of women; the erasure of people of color; the effects of the loss of heavy industry in rural America; and the lack of universal health care. How does the stage invite us to debate the ethical questions at the heart of such inequities? How does drama not only invite our empathy, but spur us toward the deeper understanding of experiences different from our own that might result in meaningful systemic change? 
Readings may include:  
Christopher Demos-Brown, American Son
Lindsey Farentino, Amy and the Orphans
David Valdes Greenwood, The Mermaid Hour
Amy Herzog, Mary Jane
Stephen Karam, The Humans
Mike Lew, Teenage Dick
Martyna Majok, Cost of Living
Martyna Majok, Queens
Lynn Nottage, Sweat
Antoinette Nwadu, Pass Over
Anna Deavere Smith, Notes from the Field

Satisfies English major requirement.
Satisfies English minor requirement.
Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing & Rhetoric requirement.

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 requirements.
Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

ENG 280 - American Literature to 2000

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Fulfills the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.

ENG 282 - African American Literature: 18th - 19th Century (=AFR 282)

African American Literature from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major.
Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: North America).
Counts as an elective in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the cultural diversity 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 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 Diversity requirement of the English major.
Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: North America).
Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

ENG 285 - Politics & Performance: 20th Century Theatre (=THE 285)

The course is a study of plays and theatrical theory from a range of geographic regions.  The course explores ways practitioners experimented with form and content in articulating their reactions to the human condition of the 20th century.

Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement.

ENG 286 - African-American Literature: 1900- (=AFR 286)

This course will introduce students to twentieth- and twenty-first century African American literature and literary criticism. It will bring together a wide range of readings from across genres and disciplines, attempting to sketch out the major aesthetic and political features of the black literary project. Authors will include Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Teju Cole, Claudia Rankine, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Fred Moten, and Colson Whitehead to name a few.

Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major.
Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: North America).
Counts as an elective in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies a cultural diversity requirement.

ENG 288 - Contemporary American Multicultural 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.
Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

ENG 289 - Environmental Literature

Overview of environmental literature from Thoreau to the present day.  Generally focuses on the environmental 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 Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

ENG 290 - World Literatures

A survey of selected major works outside of the British and American literary traditions, including literature from Europe, Japan, Latin America, Russia, and South Africa. No prerequisites; designed for majors and non-majors.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major.
Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.

ENG 291 - Literary Mysteries

Literary Mysteries is an exciting Innovation course that offers opportunities for students to explore the lovely literary language that writers such as P.D. James, Umberto Eco, Elizabeth George and Ruth Rendell employ in novels such as An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, The Island of the Day Before, Missing Joseph, and Dark Corners, respectively. Forget the blood, gore, shoot-em-up of many ordinary crime stories. Literary Mysteries are intellectually and dramatically intriguing, layered, intricate, and deftly plotted. Students will build evidence boards in digital sites as they follow the clues embedded in these plots to try to solve the mysteries before the end of the text, and in doing so, they will enhance their deductive skills.

Satisfies the Innovation course requirement in English.
Counts as a literature elective in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

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 a requirement in the Film & Media Studies interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts 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 requirement.
Fulfills the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.
Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies major and interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies a requirement in the Film and Media Studies interdisciplinary minor.

ENG 294 - Harlem Renaissance

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 Diversity requirement of the English major.
Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Area: North America).
Satisfies a requirement in the Gender & Sexuality Studies major and minor
Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.

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 requirement.
Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major.

ENG 297 - Caribbean Literature (=AFR 297)

The Caribbean is key to any understanding of the New World. Caribbean Literature takes students beyond the islands’s popular music, food, and landscapes-ah, those sandy beaches!-to an understanding of the formation of cultures from Europe, Africa, and India that have produced three winners of Nobel prizes-two in Literature and for Economics. In novels, poems and plays we’ll examine the ways in which this particular part of the “Empire” wrote back to Europe before creating its own distinctive body of literature. The course is open to all students, and knowledge of literary theory is not a prerequisite. The most relevant theories will be taught to the class.

Satisfies the diversity requirement of the English major.
Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: Latin America/Caribbean).
Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.

ENG 301 - Writing Nonfiction Prose

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

FALL 2018: Creative Nonfiction
Instructor: 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.

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

ENG 304 - Advanced Fiction Writing

Advanced work in writing fiction.

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

ENG 306 - Digital Design

The digital revolution has opened up scholarship to broader audiences via new platforms. This course applies user-centered design to humanities scholarship in order to reach new audiences. Students will design their own humanities research projects, from initial conception to online publication and audience outreach. They will learn how to frame a topic, identify experts in the field, prepare an annotated bibliography, compile a literature review, and make an original contribution. Students will select digital tools appropriate to their projects, using WordPress as the primary platform for publishing their work and social media for networking with real audiences. The course will focus on UX-design: making humanities scholarship accessible, interactive, and immersive in order to enhance users’ experience. Students will develop digital dexterity and acquire skills in research, design, project management, collaboration, and social media networking that they can apply within and beyond academia.

Satisfies a major requirement in English.
Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Digital Studies.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

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.

Fulfills the Innovation requirement for the English major.
Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Global Literary Theory.
Satisfies the Literary Thought, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement

ENG 308 - Time & Space in Creative Nonfiction

Memoirs and essays can never correspond directly with reality. One real-world element that we can manipulate, like magicians–while remaining firmly in the realm of fact–is time. Compressing, speeding up, slowing down, or otherwise manipulating time can help us convey the meaning and emotional resonance of events. If we accept that linear time itself is a fiction-albeit a useful one-a new universe of possible story structures opens up around us. In this course, we will examine memoirs and personal essays (and a film or two) that flout conventional structures and play with time in innovative, interesting ways, and use these explorations as inspiration for our own writing, with a particular focus on the events of our lived realities.

ENG 310 - The English Language

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

Prerequisites & Notes
 

ENG 333 - Literary Satans

In the first chapter of Job, God asks Satan, “Whence comest thou?”  And Satan responds, “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”  This course follows Satan’s travels through texts such as Job, the Gospels, Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Faust, short fiction by Hawthorne and Poe, Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, films The Exorcist and The Witch, TV shows Supernatural, Fargo, and Lucifer.  Faculty from several departments will visit ENG 333 to help contextualize these varied Satans and the cultures that produced them.

Before there were humans or texts composed by humans, according to Abrahamic traditions, Satan was the first being to plot his own path, the first to want something new and different.  In that sense, Satan is the driving energy of innovative courses.  ENG 333 accordingly satisfies the Innovation requirement of the English major.  The course is innovative in scope and in its assignments.  It requires not only students’ participation but also their leadership in class meetings; five brief projects in response to the course’s texts and topics; and an oral presentation on a representation of Satan omitted from the current syllabus.  The course culminates in a collaborative digital mapping project, through which students will document some important appearances of Satan across millennia and across the globe where he has walked up and down.

Fulfills the Innovation requirement of the English major.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

ENG 340 - Early British Literature and Media

Early British Literature and Media

This course proposes that how we encounter literature matters.  It suggests that the same poem can be understood quite differently if it is recited at Freeword or assigned in an anthology or skimmed on a phone.  This course accordingly surveys how the founding texts of British literature were first encountered and how we encounter them now.

ENG 340 examines the ways that texts of early British literature were initially produced and consumed:  oral performances of epic poetry, amateur and professional theatrical productions, the first printed books, handwritten texts circulated as intimate alternatives to print, chapters of novels published in issues of magazines, words embedded in visual art and set to music.  ENG 340 also examines where we find early British literature now, in modern scholarly editions, film adaptations, digitized versions of medieval and early modern artifacts, even greeting cards and t-shirts.

As the course spans diverse scenes of reading, listening, and looking, both now and long ago, it raises broad questions of how culture is produced and consumed and urgent questions of access and privilege.

Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory major and interdisciplinary minor.

ENG 352 - Shakespeare in Action

This course begins with the premise that Shakespeare’s dramas are not only works of dramatic literature that trace an action across five acts, but also 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 enactment 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 pitched to both readers and actors, situates the plays in the theater for which they were written.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Fulfills the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.
Counts as a dramatic literature requirement in the Theatre major and minor.
Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.

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

ENG 353 - Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Fulfills the Historical Approaches requirement for the English major.

 

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.

Fulfills the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

ENG 361 - Eighteenth Century Pop Culture

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Fulfills the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.

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 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 requirement.
Fulfills the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.

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

ENG 370 - Davidson Summer Program at Cambridge University

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 requirement.
Fulfills the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.

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 requirement.
Satisfies the Diversity requirement in the English major.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

ENG 375 - Fan Fiction

The practice of writing works using the universes and characters of already established authors–Fanfiction–is a recent cultural phenomenon, beginning with Kirk/Spock slash of the 1970s and fueled by 21st century technologies that have enabled fans to appropriate, extend, and transform beloved characters and plots. The output is staggering: as of March 2017, Fanfiction.net alone holds 761,000 Harry Potter stories, and fanfiction writers have  become best-selling authors (Cassandra Clare, E.L. James). Yet centuries of adaptation and appropriate permeate the Western canon, from Homer’s stock phrases to Shakespeare’s work with sources such as the Decameron and Holinshed’s Chronicles. 

ENG 375 will explore the world of fanfiction, from past iterations to the present extensive array of fanfiction. We will consider common tropes in fanfiction, such as fanon/canon, gender swapping, shipping, and transgressive pairings of many kinds, and investigate how social media enables empowered, creative fandom. The author may be “dead,” in Barthes’ estimation, yet h/she/zer are also very much alive and writing.

Fulfills the Innovation requirement of the English major.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing & Rhetoric requirement.

ENG 380 - Studies in American Literature

Special topics in American literature with attention to critical approaches. 

Satisfies the Literary, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Fulfills the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.

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

ENG 381 - 19th Century American Fiction Revisited

This course pairs classic 19th-century American novels with their 21st-century rewritings: Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Mat Johnson’s Pym (2011), Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Hillary Jordan’s When She Woke (2012), Melville’s Moby-Dick and Jeffrey Ford’s Ahab’s Return (2018), Alcott’s Little Women and Geraldine Brooks’s March (2006), and Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Jon Clinch’s Finn (2007).  For each pairing, we will investigate the literary, cultural, and political contexts that inspired the texts, exploring enduring issues that vex and captivate American writers: race, class, gender, religion, violence - and the power of stories.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Fulfills the Innovation requirement of the English major.

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

ENG 382 - W.E.B. Du Bois at Large (=AFR 303)

(ENG 382 cross-listed with AFR 303 during spring 2018 semester only.)

This course will introduce students to the major works of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois.  Readings will include (in chronological order): The Philadelphia Negro (1899); The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Dark Princess (1928); Black Reconstruction in America (1935); Color and Democracy (1945); and The World and Africa (1947) to name a few.  They will be supplemented with secondary readings by: Booker T. Washington, Michael Rudolph West, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Adolph Reed, Lewis Gordon, Marina Bilbija, C.L.R. James and others.

Fulfills a 300-level major thinkers requirement of the Africana Studies major (Geographic Area: North America).
Counts as a 300-level elective and fulfills the Diversity requirement in the English major.
Counts as an elective in the Global Literary Theory interdisplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Justice, Community, and Equality requirement.

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 requirement.
Fulfills the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.

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

ENG 387 - Contemporary Poetry

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A course concerned with schools, movements, and problems in the literary arts, "Contemporary Poetry" will include exploration of poetic geneaologies, and investigate the relationship between poetry and cultural theory, poetry and current affairs, and poetry and technology.

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Satisfies the history requirement for the English major.
\nCounts as a literature course for the Global Literary Studies interdisciplinary minor.
\nSatisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

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. Yest there is simply no substitute for the vitality and importance of live theater. To paraphrase Edward Albee, theater puts the mirror up infront 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 theater in the Western tradition, post-1960, with an emphasis on American and British drama. We will particularly place 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 Algería Hudes, Lynn Nottage, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, Robert O’Hara, Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, Jez Butterworth, Tony Kushner, and Ayad Akhtar.

Satisfies the Literacy, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Fulfills the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

ENG 390 - Word Art

Instructor
Churchill

We live in a highly visual culture.  To be literate, we need to read and interpret words, images and the interplay between them, both in print and online.  This course examines print and digital texts that combine words and images.  We will study some of the most complex and subtle word/image texts, focusing on Japanese masters and genres such as haiku, political woodblock prints, manga, and anime.  Word-Art is a hybrid course: a study of words and images, a combination of critical and creative writing, and an investigation into print and digital forms.

The Spring 2018 course will be interlinked with Professor Tyler Starr’s ART 331 - Printmaking - Japan . Students must sign up for both courses and will receive 2 course credits. Students will create their own books using paper from Japan and create interactive digital facsimiles.  While ostensibly, ENG 390 will emphasize writing and digital publication, and ART 331 will focus on images and printmaking, the pairing of the two courses will deconstruct word/image, print/digital, and East/West binaries through multimedia investigations that require interdisciplinary approaches and encourage cross-fertilization.

Fulfills the Innovation requirement in the English major.
Counts towards the East Asian Studies major and interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.

ENG 391 - Literary Criticism

Analytic and comparative reading of major critical texts.

Satisfies the Philosophical and Religious Perspectives requirement.
Satisfies the Diversity requirement in the English major.

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

 

ENG 393 - Film Genres

Genre is both a theoretical concept useful in film analysis and a function of  film  industry’s market forces. For Spring 2019, the genres will include Romantic Comedy, The War Film, Psychological Thriller, and (based on student choice) either Film Noir or Sci-Fi.  In each case we will examine the genre’s roots and legacies, common themes, narrative structures, and visual styles.

Students will be invited to satisfy requirements by making short movies, writing papers, participating in a writers’ bullpen and/or creating longer individual screenplays.

Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement.
Fulfills a requirement in the Film & Media Studies interdisciplinary minor.

ENG 394 - Studies in Modern Literature: The Avant-Garde (Fall 2017)

A course concerned with avant-garde schools, movements and strategies, “The Avant-Garde” will include exploration of different genres, media, and cultures, and investigate relationships between avant-garde practice and theory, artistic innovation and social change, and forms, platforms, and politics. Because of its focus on challenging the white, male domination of the avant-garde with attention to women, queer, and minority poets from modernism to the present day, this course meets the diversity requirement for the English major and qualifies for GSS credit.

Fulfills the Diversity requirement of the English major.
Counts towards the Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor (Literary and Cultural Representations track).
Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.
 

 

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

ENG 395 - Independent Study in Literature

ENG 396 - Independent Study in Writing

ENG 397 - Independent Study

ENG 404 - Seminar: Writing the “Sexy”* Novella

This course offers students in any major at Davidson College an opportunity to realize their dream of writing the first strong draft of a novella that has the potential to be developed into a novel.  Before the writing begins, students will read and dissect two novellas, each selected from a list of prize-winning books.  These selections are intended to inspire the student-writer’s creativity.  By the fourth week, writing begins in earnest with short exercises produced in and out of class.  By the end of the term, each writer would have produced at least 60 pages of a compelling story.  Writers should be prepared to write often, discuss their work in the seminar, and be open to critiques that are intended to help them create “sexy” fiction.

*”Sexy” means provocative, intriguing, inspiring, and/or compelling. It does not refer to pornographic butit can encompass the erotic.

ENG 409 - Television: Queer Representations (=GSS 401)

With its roots in the gendered domestic suburban household, television has a longstanding investment in questions of gender and sexuality.  Pushing back against the assumption that LGBTQ characters did not appear on our screens in a sustained way until the 1980s, this course will investigate how TV representation of queer life have changed with the evolution of the medium since the 1950s.  Recent work in the field of queer TV studies has unearthed queer characters from previously invisible archives, charted changing conceptions of masculinity and femininity in broadcast programming, and documented the organizational strategies  employed by television narrative that disclose and contain expressions of non-normative sexualities. Indeed, in one of the foundational texts on queer TV, Lynne Joyrich argues that “U.S. television does not simply reflect an already closeted sexuality but actually helps organize sexuality as closeted.” Extending Joyrich’s line of reasoning, we will seek to understand the dynamics of visibility and invisibility that structure representations of televised queerness. How might we understand the contemporary series Transparent alongside or against the representation of a trans character on All in the Family (1975)? Why might The New Normal, a seemingly positive portrayal of new kinship structures, have failed as a series in 2013? Even as we watch the problematic take on villainous lesbian characters in the Angie Dickinson vehicle, Police Woman (“Flowers of Evil,” 1974), we will move beyond diagnoses and critiques of “bad” versus “good” queer representations to acknowledge the pleasures that may attend the viewing of even ideologically corrupt programming. Which shows and episodes became lightening rods for desire despite their failure to produce fully realized queer characters? And what genealogy (or genealogies) of queer TV might take us from the groundbreaking episodes of Ellen (“The Puppy Episode”) and Roseanne (“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”) in the 1990s to the moment at which a Vanity Fair cover declared that with “Gay-per-view TV” shows like Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, prime time had “come out” (2003)? As we historicize such developments, we will consider the contributions of writer-producers and series creators such as Alan Ball and Ryan Murphy, and analyze a variety of programs from “quality television” to animation, from the sit-com to reality TV, and from sci-fi to the game show.

Satisfies a major requirement in English.
Satisfies a minor requirement in English.
Fulfills the Diversity requirement in the English major.
Satisfies a major requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Satisfies a minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Film and Media Studies.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality and Community requirement.

ENG 415 - Fall 2017 Seminar Topic- Poetics of Relation: August Wilson

Poetics of Relation: August Wilson
Instructor
Flanagan 

Poetics of Relation is the rubric for a seminar in which students analyze the ways in which the discursive forms - novels, plays, essays, and poetry - of one or two major writers relate to specific cultures, landscapes, political and historical moments.  In its three previous iterations students have examined such intersections in the work of two Nobel Laureates Derek Walcott and Wole Soyinka; Vidia Naipaul and Derek Walcott, and in novels and essays by Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.  In fall 2017, the focus will be on August Wilson, one of America’s foremost playwrights.  In addition to close readings, substantive discussions, oral presentations, and two major essays, seminar participants will contribute to the Poetics of Relation website on the Davidson college website.

Satisfies the Diversity requirement for the English major.
Satisfies a requirement in Africana Studies and Global Literary Theory.
Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.

ENG 415B (SPRING 2017)

415 B Style
Instructor
Fackler

From Samuel Richardson’s titular heroine Pamela obsessing about her wardrobe (1740), to the conspicuous consumption of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), and from the discussion of Hero’s sartorial choices in Much Ado About Nothing (1598) to the iconic Holly Golightly of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), there is a clear literary history of fashion. This course will consider both fictional and theoretical engagements with fashion alongside the works of authors such as Vladimir Nabokov and Henry James, whose prose reveals the fingerprint specificity of their writing styles. Working from Roland Barthes’s theory in The Fashion System to Cecil Beaton’s diaries and Joseph Roach’s study of the “It” factor (“the easily perceived but hard-to-define quality possessed by abnormally interesting people”), this transcultural and transhistorical course will investigate style as both form and content. Whether we are looking at the fashion and literary styles of the roaring twenties in Fitzgerald’s works or the punk subcultures of the UK in the 1980s, we will question how literary innovation and fashion interpenetrate.

Counts as an Innovation course for the English major.
Satisfies the Innovation requirement.

ENG 421 - Writing the Self

This seminar looks at the ways that writers, often from marginalized communities, used “non-literary” forms such as letters, diaries or notebooks as a form of expression when traditional avenues of publication or literary recognition were not available to them. In addition to looking at texts from various literary traditions we will also examine the ways that contemporary writers have returned to these forms, including a consideration of blogs and social media as part of the contemporary expression of these forms.

SPRING 2018
Instructor: S. Campbell

Looking into the past to make sense of the present pervades non-fiction writing.  This type of reflection emerges in a variety of forms and lengths, including the brief personal memoir, the podcast, and the multi-volume autobiography.  Whereas autobiography explores large pieces of a life in an effort to explain a whole person, the memoir uses a narrow focus, what William Zinsser terms a “window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition” (136).  We will read memoirs that provide windows into the childhoods and adulthoods of people of varied classes, ethnicities, and experiences.  Students will approach the genre both critically and creatively, exploring what it means and can mean to write the self.

ENG 430 - Italo Calvino and Invention

A hybrid course focusing upon the works of Italo Calvino and Postmodernism, this seminar will offer scholars and writers the opportunity to study “invention” as both an idea and a practice.

Satisfies a major requirement in English.
Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory major.
Satisifes a minor requirement in English.
Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Global Literary Theory.

ENG 452 - Seminar: Performing Shakespeare/Radio Shakespeare

In Shakespeare’s London, audience members referred not to “watching” or “seeing” a play, but to “hearing” it.

“Radio Shakespeare” is a new incarnation of English 452, “Performing Shakespeare.”  The course will culminate in three full-length radio performances of The Merchant of Venice before live audiences.  A fourth performance, a Sunday matinee on the order of a staged reading, may occur at the Zimmermanns’ Renaissance villa, Pian del Pino.  One of the audio performances will be broadcast live on WDAV.  Post-production, engineers will assemble an immortal podcast combining the strongest elements of the three recorded performances into one whole.

ENG 453 - Literary Alchemy

What happens when a literary genius takes hold of a mere suggestion and transforms it into literary gold?  By what process of imagination does a snippet of news in The New York Times become Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or spawn Susan Orleans’s orchid thief, John Laroche, who reemerges as played by Chris Cooper in Spike Jonze’s conversion of The Orchid Thief into a film about the very matter of Adaptation?  How does Miss Kay grow from what Muriel Spark calls “the seeds of the future Miss Jean Brodie” into that fully formed character in her prime?  What happens when Shakespeare takes hold of a lackluster little narrative by Giraldi Cinthio, turns it on its ear, and produces Othello out of base metal?  Or when George Saunders spins Lincoln in the Bardo out of a line of history that concerns Abraham Lincoln’s visit to his son’s tomb?  This seminar will explore the literary imagination by focusing on such transformations into nonfiction, fiction, drama, and film-some from humble origins, others from already established masterpieces.

ENG 455 - Seminar- A: Renaissance Revenge or B:Reading Endings

TOPIC A: Renaissance Revenge

The words “Renaissance” and “revenge” are usually followed by a third:  “tragedy.”  This seminar will indeed survey selected Renaissance revenge tragedies, those bloody, perverse, ironic plays written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.  But this seminar will also consider other Renaissance works driven by revenge, including comedies and poems.  It will trace the roots of Renaissance revenge in works such as Seneca’s Thyestes and Machiavelli’s The Prince and the legacy of Renaissance revenge in works such as Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Tarantino’s Kill Bill.  We will study revenge as a means of balancing a plot (one injury initiates the action; another ends it), as economic exchange (the inexact calculations of payback), as an aesthetic form (heads baked in pies, corpses arranged in tableaux), as political resistance (the state’s revenge is called “justice”), and as grounds for theological questioning (when is an avenger an instrument of divine will?).  We will ask, finally, about revenge as a component of modernity, inherited from the Renaissance and canonized in the most conspicuously modern of early modern plays, that masterpiece of Renaissance revenge called Hamlet.

TOPIC B: Reading Endings

This course is structured as a tutorial.  For most class meetings, three or fewer students will meet with the professor to discuss assigned texts.  Students will direct those conversations, both formally, through essays that they will present, and informally, through their preparation.  The course’s broad topic is designed to allow seniors to continue their work as English majors and reflect on that work, at the end of their undergraduate careers.

“Reading Endings” balances the need for shared texts and the recognition of diverse interests.  As much as possible, the course aims to allow space for students to pursue the distinctive passions of their literary studies, within a community of English majors. 

The topic of endings has been essential to literary study since Aristotle began defining comedy and tragedy, and it remains open to the interests that students bring to the course.  Seniors in their final semesters at Davidson might be especially alert to endings.

The shared texts of “Reading Endings” raise questions of aesthetics (what assumptions differentiate satisfying from unsatisfying endings?), questions of creative process (who or what determines when a text is finished?  what endings are supplied when a text-or indeed, a life-seems to need resolving?), and enormous questions of culture (how does the awareness of death color our reading of endings?  what cultural stories seem most authoritative in 2019, and with what endings?).  This vast field of questions extends beyond any single course.  Our thinking, talking, and writing about the topic will accordingly extend beyond the ending of ENG 455.

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

ENG 462 - Seminar: A: Romantic Radicalism or B: The Long Eighteenth Century Gothic

Instructor
Vaz

For William Godwin, truth, if it exists, comes about in the “collision of mind with mind.”  In this seminar, we will investigate and interrogate how Romantic literature manifests this “collision” by creating and participating in the aesthetic, economic, and socio-political tectonic shifts of the period.  By doing so, we will examine how Romantic literature intersects with the richness and complexity of the period’s radical and revolutionary thought.

Fulfills the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.

462B The Long Eighteeth Century Gothic

lnstructor
Vaz

There’s nothing like reading books we’ve been told we ought not read.  That’s essentially the story of the Gothic during its inception.  Lambasted by contemporary critics as literature’s illegitimate and sinful child, gothic novels nonetheless sold like hotcakes, and the infection easily spread to poetry and drama.  In our seminar, we will trace this phenomenon in England from the 1760’s through the Romantic period to study its evolution from bastard child in the eighteenth century to literature worth of scholarship only in the last 30 years of the twentieth century.

Fulfills the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.

ENG 472 - Seminar A: Gossip or B: Twenty-First-Century British Literature or C: Joyce/Nabokov

472A Gossip

Instructor
Fackler

Drawing on cultural studies and performance studies, this trans-historical and transnational course investigates the role gossip plays in literature, psychoanalysis, journalism, politics, television, film, and new media. The seminar foregrounds the imbrication of gossip and scandal with constructions of gender and sexuality.

This topic counts for the Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor.
 

472B 21st Century British Literature

Instructor
Fackler

This course considers the transformation of the book as artifact and idea since the turn of the century. We will investigate the new, often experimental, narrative forms authors have developed as a response to such twenty-first-century pressures as globalization, terrorism, and genetic engineering. Questions for the seminar include: What are the overarching concerns for fiction in the wake of the postmodern and postcolonial moment? What kind of relationship can we expect between science and literature in the 21^st-century novel? Does contemporary science contribute to newly emergent structures of feeling that the novel might register? And if such structures call up concepts of the posthuman, how might they sit with the traditionally humanistic orientation of the novel as a broadly popular genre?  How does post-9/11 fiction respond to current fears of technological and/or natural annihilation? What are the factors determining pre-canonical status for the texts on this syllabus, and how can we understand the new circulation of global capital and cultural value? Students will consider the following concepts: virtual fiction; cloning, the post-human, and dystopian responses to the possibility of a genetically engineered future; alternative modes of narration; the figure of the artist manqué; ghostwriting as a narrative technique (and as a 21^st-century replacement for the omniscient narrator); detective fiction; fictions of terrorism and the politics of post-9/11 vulnerability; the new Bildungsroman; the author business, and the influence of book clubs and literary prizes such as the Man Booker. 
 

472C Joyce/Nabokov

Instructor
Kuzmanovich

Why a seminar on Joyce/Nabokov?   Like most seminars, this one requires intensive attention to the themes and techniques of  major writers.  These two long dead writers consists of their still having in print almost all the books they’ve written,  with those books provoking over 10,000 critical pieces just since 1963.  Joyce’s influence is acknowledged by Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Anthony Burgess, Philip K. Dick, Umberto Eco, William Faulkner, Arthur Miller, Raymond Queneau, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Tom Stoppard, and Derek Walcott while Martin Amis,  John Barth, Paul Bowles, Italo Calvino, Bobby Ann Mason, James Merrill, Thomas Pynchon, W.G. Sebald, Zadie Smith, Mark Strand,  Amy Tan, and Richard Wilbur mention Nabokov’s, and probably Joyce’s by way of Nabokov.

Method:  We will concentrate on (1) their styles (Joyce’s “High Modernist” and Nabokov’s supposed “post-modernist”/”metafictional”/”intertextual” one) since the grit in these men’s words has gotten under the skin of many a reader with an innovative critical approach; (2) their tendencies to generate their respective narrative authority from events in their own lives, especially their respective experiences of exile; (3) their depictions of Love in its various forms (including the loss of it); (4) the absenting presence of the big bogey, Death; and (5) the last member of that robust triumvirate, Art. 

Goals:   A foretaste of mature and thoughtful reading; confidence that you can do independent, original,  and careful scholarship on even the most challenging writing.

But is this class really for you?  If you believe that certain words or subjects should be off-limits to writers or readers, this is not the class for you.  Ulysses and Lolita each continue to sell well over 100,000 copies per year, yet they not only contain but also provoke language and situations which some students may find objectionable.  This is a class for those students who not only possess the already uncommon share of discipline, imagination, memory, and attention to details vouchsafed to most who choose Davidson, but who are also blessed with an ability to heft another’s words and deliver and withstand therapeutic non-rancorous badgering especially on the topics of  suspending disbelief in the transfigurative power of art and the (ir)relevance of contemporary critical theory. 

Texts: 0-14-024774-2 Joyce,  Dubliners; 670-0 180301; Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as Young Man; 0-19-511029-3 Fargnoli: James Joyce A-Z 0-394-74312-1; Joyce: Ulysses, Gabler Edition;  0-679-72725-6 Nabokov, Gift; 1-883011-18-3 Novels and Memoirs; 1-883011-19-1 Novels 1955-1962 0-679-72997-6; Nabokov,  Stories  of Vladimir Nabokov; 052153643X; Connolly, The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov (Recommended Only); 0-679-72609-8 Nabokov: Strong Opinions (Recommended Only); 978-0-3-0-7-27189-1Nabokov, The Original of Laura (Recommended Only)

Prerequisites & Notes
Juniors and Seniors only. 

ENG 483 - Black Literary Theory (=AFR 383)

(Cross-listed with AFR 383)

This course will bring together readings both literary and critical/theoretical, beginning with Frantz Fanon’s seminal Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Taking Fanon as its point of departure, then, this course will necessarily turn to a discussion of the recent discourse on Afro-pessimism and black optimism, attempting to introduce students to issues and questions of race, race relations, anti-black racism, black sociality, the universality of whiteness, the fungibility of the black body, and of the vulnerability and precarity of black life; and together we will think more closely about how the complex and “unthinkable” histories of slavery, colonialism, and the Middle Passage, for examples, continue to challenge the representational limits and potentialities of traditional literary genres and modes of emplotment. In addition to Fanon, authors will include Orlando Patterson, Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, and Fred Moten.

Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major.
Counts as a senior seminar and fulfills the Diversity requirement for the English major.
Counts as a literature elective for the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.

ENG 486 - Navigating the Avant-Garde: Mina Loy & Her Nework

The emergence of the avant-garde in the early 20th century coincided with an explosion in magazines. Between 1885 and 1905 alone, 7500 new periodicals were established in the U. S., and thousands more in Great Britain. This seminar will explore the avant-garde as it circulated through magazines, ranging from experimental “little magazines” to “quality” monthlies and the mass-market glossies and pulps. Mina Loy’s “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” appeared in The Dial in 1922, the same year that T. S. Eliot published “The Waste Land” in the same journal and James Joyce’s Ulysses was serialized in The Little Review. By the 1920s, avant-garde writers had become celebrities, featured in Vogue and Vanity Fair.

The central node the seminar’s inquiry will be Mina Loy-an artist, writer, feminist, inventor, and entrepreneur who moved in the circles of Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism, and migrated among metropolitan centers of avant-garde activity, including Paris, Florence, Rome, New York, London, and Berlin, from the 1910s to the 1950s. Since Loy played a role in almost every major avant-garde movement, we will explore and map the avant-garde networks she navigated, using magazines to chart lines of connection and influence.

Just as the avant-garde began with an explosion of new print media, you will enter the field of new digital media, operating your own Davidson Domain and using WordPress, Google Docs and Google Drive, as well as mapping and timeline tools-skills you can market in job, fellowship, and employment applications, along with your experience working on a team. The seminar is a collaborative research & methods course with readings drawn from the field of periodical studies. You will find and select many of primary source readings, collaborate on a major research project, and contribute to the expansion of the web site Index of Modernist Magazines: a select bibliography. In addition, your digital scholarship may be published on the scholarly website, Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde (mina-loy.com).

Prerequisites & Notes
Desire to study the past, eagerness to equip yourself for the future, willingness to take risks, and team spirit.

ENG 487 - Seminar: Legal Fiction

The principal claim of English 487 is that a trial is a text that can be read in much the same way that any other text can be read. Indeed, modern trials are in effect storytelling contests, with two competing “narrators” telling two versions of the same story to a captive audience. Understanding how, when, and to whom this story can be told takes some effort, however, because the language of trials is not the same as literary language and the conventions of legal storytelling are not literary conventions. Nevertheless, a great deal of contemporary literary theory offers genuine insight into the kinds of fictions that get constructed in a courtroom. This seminar tests a number of hypotheses about legal fictions, offers direct observation of some real trials in progress, and asks students to undertake research in the interdisciplinary areas where legal studies and literary studies overlap.
 

ENG 493 - Film Art

Film Art is a hands-on study of style and narration in the fiction film. That does not mean that you cannot make a documentary film for your final project.  Study and production are two very different processes.  We’ll proceed in this way:  After a reminder of the pre- and post- production processes, we’ll focus on individual directorial styles. We’ll also make a communal film to  learn that (most of the time) film is a collaborative art and to explore the capabilities and shortcomings of the available equipment (and talent). Then, each student  will be given a chance to write/adapt, direct, film, and edit a short film using digital video cameras and non-linear editing equipment.  The individual film need not be a fiction film.  It should, however, be your best work.   In the past, these were the films students submitted as their portfolio films for graduate school.  We’ll look at those films in light of the latest theories of narrative and the knowledge about cinema acquired from the film-maker’s end.  The final versions of all films will be burnt to DVDs and posted to VIMEO. If there are musicians among us, they will be given a chance to score a film and/or do sound design.

Satisfies a requirement in the English major and minor.
Satisifes a requirement in the Film & Media Studies interdisciplinary minor.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
Limited to juniors and seniors.

ENG 494 - Seminar: A - Disability in Literature and Art; B - Multicultural Literature

Instructor
Fox

The literary tradition in English is rife with representation of disability.  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.  Disability Studies asks us to reframe our understanding of disability history, question socially defined categories of normalcy and ability, and understand and learn about the presence of “disability culture” and its widely diverse members are also using literature to tell their own stories in a vibrant new artistic tradition.  Literature is and has been obsessed with the disabled body, both as metaphor and actual subject – an extension of the degree to which disability has loomed in the larger societal imagination in one way or another across centuries.

Rather than trying to catalogue all the examples of disability in literature, this seminar 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 literary, artistic, and cultural texts.  We’ll ask how these are used as “narrative prosthesis.”  How are such depictions used as literary devices?  What beliefs do these images promote about disability?
• Examine how “disability” and “normalcy” are culturally constructed categories like race, gender, class, and sexuality.  How does disability intersect with these other identity categories?
• Study contemporary writing, performance, and art from disability culture. This writing establishes history, explores identity, refutes/reclaims stereotypes, and promotes discourse within the disability community.  We will look at genres ranging from memoir to fiction to performance to film.
• Consider how a “disability aesthetic” of literature might be conceived.  How can disability contribute to the reconsideration of the processes and products of literary creation?

Therefore, while our course has a loose chronological frame, it’s more appropriate to think of it as organized conceptually.  The survey here will be of the questions to which the intersection of disability and literature gives rise.  While this is a senior English seminar, disability studies is a very interdisciplinary field.  Junior and senior students in other majors with an interest in the course topic are very welcome to join; the course does not presuppose a familiarity with disability studies.

Fulfills the diversity requirement for the English major. 
Satisfies a cultural diversity requirement.
Satisfies the Justice, Community, and Equality Requirement.

494B Multicultural Literature

Instructor
Campbell

Beyond just teaching children letters, counting, and shames, children’s literature teaches individuals how to interact with one another based on their similarities and differences.  This seminar will explore how what is accepted and promoted as “appropriate” multicultural representation in literature for children and adolescent changes over time.  At a moment of intense American debates about immigration, demographic shifts, and marriage equality, we will explore issues of power and representation-who has the right to write, whose stories are worth telling, what version of those stories should one tell through focusing on literature for children, including picture books, stories, comics, and short novels.

Fulfills the Cultural Diversity requirement.
Fulfills the diversity requirement for the English major. 

Prerequisites & Notes
Juniors and seniors only.

ENG 495 - Seminar: Cleopatra

Cleopatra is one of the most iconic women of all time.  Her personal history rivals in interest the history of her appropriation by various Western cultures in various time periods.  This course begins with her biography, which entails her very first public images, both those she herself projected and those that Augustan Romans fashioned.  When Shakespeare created his own image of her in Antony and Cleopatra by adapting and subverting the Roman Plutarch’s rendition of her as the toxic seductress of Marc Antony, a second icon entered the historical panorama.  Now the English playwright was subject to adaptation and appropriation by such competitive literary figures as Restoration playwright John Dryden and, later, George Bernard Shaw.  Centuries after Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra herself endures as an icon who attracts icons, none more notable than the glamorous Elizabeth Taylor, whose recently re-released film portrayal of the Egyptian queen is now over fifty years old.  Throughout this course, students will explore how various iconic figures have appropriated Cleopatra- as a woman, an exotic, and a royal- for their audiences: what does a particular version of Cleopatra reveal or suggest about the historical period or social milieu in which she emerges?  What is her relationship to her appropriator?  The course ends with a contemplation of Cleopatra and Taylor as iconic complements.  Are they femmes fatales or feminists? 

Satisfies a major and minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Fulfills the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.

Prerequisites & Notes
Not open to first-year students and sophomores without instructor’s permission.  

ENG 498 - Seminar: Senior Honors Research

ENG 499 - Seminar: Senior Honors Thesis

ENV 100 - Special Topic: TBD

The Environmental Studies Department will welcome a new faculty member in the environmental social sciences in the 2018-19 academic year.  As of this time, the instructor and topic of the course are still to be determined, but the course will count toward the social sciences track of the Environmental Studies major and minor.

ENV 120 - Introduction to Environmental Geology

A study of basic geologic principles and critical issues in environmental geology on a global scale. Topics to be covered can include: minerals, rock types and cycles, earthquakes and tectonics, volcanoes, mass wasting, stream systems, coastlines, soils, water resources, mineral and rock resources, fossil fuels, and climate change. Generally, the class will divide time between learning introductory geologic principles and applying those principles to understand environmental issues associated with geology.

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Natural Science requirement.
Students entering before 2012: satisfies Laboratory Science requirement.
Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Natural Science Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

ENV 150 - Environmental Analysis with Econ Lens

The course will introduce students to thinking about interdisciplinary environmental issues as an economist does.  We will concentrate on a few economics themes and use topical issues to motivate and to illustrate interdisciplinary economic analyses.Note: The course does not earn economics credit and does not replace the Economics 101 prerequisite for any of the three Economics environmental courses (ECO 226, 235, or 236).  

Satisfies a major requirement in Environmental Studies

Satisfies a minor requirement in Environmental Studies

Satisfies the Liberal Studies Requirement

ENV 155 - Climate, Energy, and Society

Climate change is the most profound environmental problem facing human society and challenges the foundations of the global economy and energy system that relies on burning fossil fuels and emitting greenhouse gases. This course examines how economic, political, and cultural systems have produced global warming and how those same systems can and are being transformed to reduce carbon emissions and create resilient communities. Questions of justice across intersections of race, gender, class, and nationality are emphasized in understanding dynamics of power and privilege in how climate change was created and who will bear the costs and burdens of mitigation and adaption.

Fulfills social science track depth component credit in the environmental studies major and interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies a requirement in the Sociology major.
Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought requirement.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

ENV 160 - Environmental Justice

This course introduces students to the concepts, contexts, and conflicts of environmental justice, both in the U.S. and globally.  After covering some general history and theoretical frameworks, the course is organized according to six cases studies (Love Canal, Hurricane Katrina, Hydro-Quebec, US migrant farmworkers, Bhopal, and Ogoniland).  Throughout this interdisciplinary course based in the environmental humanities, students will make connections among various kinds of information sources (literary, documentary, ecocritical, theoretical, ethical, historical, etc.).  For the final course project, students will create their own environmental justice case study, based on a case not covered in class, and with their choice of relevant literary text, documentary film, and background readings.

Satisfies a requirement for the Environmental Studies major

Satisfies a requirement for the Environmental Studies minor

Satisfies the Liberal Studies requirement

Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement

ENV 170 - Social Science Perspectives on Environmental Justice

Poor and minority populations have historically borne the brunt of environmental inequalities in the United States, suffering disproportionately from the effects of pollution, dispossession of land, resource depletion, dangerous jobs, limited access to common resources, and exposure to environmental hazards. Paying particular attention to the ways that race, ethnicity, class, and gender have shaped the political and economic dimensions of environmental injustices, this course draws on the work of scholars and activists to examine the long history of environmental inequities in the United States, along with more recent political movements that seek to rectify environmental injustices.

Satisfies a requirement of the Sociology major.
Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought Ways of Knowing requirement.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

ENV 181 - Food and Sustainability: Introduction to the Farm at Davidson

Did you know your college has a student farm? In this course, we will combine hands-on experience learning to grow food at the Farm at Davidson with readings, lectures and discussions that address local food systems. Our goal will be to critically analyze some of the issues facing our local food system through positive engagement with sustainable solutions. This course serves as a prerequisite for the spring research seminar where students will have an opportunity to conduct research at the Farm.

Satisfies depth and breadth course requirement in the Social Science track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

ENV 200 - Special Topic: TBD

The Environmental Studies Department will welcome a new faculty member in the environmental social sciences in the 2018-19 academic year.  As of this time, the instructor and topic of the course are still to be determined, but the course will count toward the social sciences track of the Environmental Studies major and minor.

ENV 201 - Environmental Science

Overview of the scientific concepts, principles, processes, and methodologies required to understand how ecosystems work. This knowledge will be applied to selected environmental problems to help students understand the scientific basis, estimate the risks associated, and evaluate alternative solutions for resolving and/or preventing them.  One laboratory meeting per week.

Satisfies a requirement for the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Natural Science requirement.
Students entering before 2012: satisfies Laboratory Science requirement.

ENV 202 - Environmental Social Sciences

Overview of social science approaches to environmental issues, with problem-based and topical approaches to the study of interactions between society and the environment. This course teaches students to integrate concepts and the qualitative and quantitative methods of the social sciences (primarily anthropology, economics, geography, psychology, political science, and sociology) in interdisciplinary analyses of environmental issues.

Satisfies a requirement for the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought requirement.

ENV 203 - Environmental Humanities

Overview of humanistic approaches to environmental issues, including perspectives from art, cultural studies, history, literature, philosophy, and religion.  This course emphasizes humanistic methodologies such as close reading and analysis of primary and secondary materials in both written and visual forms.

Satisfies a requirement for the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Liberal Studies requirement.

ENV 210 - Introduction to Environmental Literature: Food Literature

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

ENV 220 - Climate Systems: Present and Past

The climate of the Earth is changing. It has always changed. It will continue to change. How do we assess the impact of humanity on climate? We need to understand how our Earth system works, now and in the past, if we expect to predict our climatic future. This course looks at the current climate system and explores the Earth archives that illuminate our climatic past.  Topics covered include: The Earth energy budget; the role of carbon dioxide and methane in short-term and long-term climate cycles; orbital cycles and the ice ages; Earth as a snowball; the Greenhouse Earth; ice cores and tree rings; oceanic and atmospheric circulation systems; and the impact of human activity on climate. Class discussions, demonstrations, and exercises provide opportunities for students to apply their knowledge and practice analytical techniques.

Satisfies depth and breadth course requirement in the Natural Science track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

Satisfies a requirement in Liberal Studies

ENV 232 - Introduction to Environmental Health with Community-Based Learning (=HHV 232)

Students will apply biological, chemical and epidemiological content to environmental health case studies and community-based learning projects. This is an introductory course designed to expose students to different scientific disciplines within the context of environmental health.

Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Health and Human Values.
Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Natural Science Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Liberal Studies requirement.
 

Prerequisites & Notes
ENV 232 may not be taken for credit after ENV 233.

ENV 233 - Introduction to Environmental Health with Laboratory-Based Learning (=HHV 233)

Students will apply biological, chemical and epidemiological content to environmental health case studies and laboratory projects. This is an introductory course designed to expose students to different scientific disciplines within the context of environmental health. ENV 233 may not be taken for credit after ENV 232.

Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Health and Human Values.
Satisfies the Natural Science requirement.
Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Natural Science Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

ENV 235 - The Ocean Environment

Covering 71% of the surface, yet mostly unexplored, the Earth’s oceans are a source of food, hurricanes, used as a wastebasket by human kind, and a great unknown in our climate future. This introductory course covers the formation of ocean basins; the composition and origin of seawater; currents, tides, and waves; the ocean-atmosphere connection; coastal processes; the deep-sea environment; productivity and resources; marine pollution; and the influence of oceans on climate. The class will focus on how oceanic systems work with class discussions, demonstrations, and exercises providing opportunities for students to apply their knowledge and practice analytical techniques.

Satisfies depth and breadth course requirement in the Natural Science track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies Liberal Studies requirement.

ENV 237 - The Interdisciplinary Use of Geographic Information

Geographic information is not bound to any particular way of knowing and can be used to visualize and  analyze spatial information of any type. This course will teach methods for using geographic information that will be applicable across the liberal arts. This course serves as an introduction to the ArcGIS software and will explore its abilities in a combination of inclass exploration, explanation, and exercises that teach the functionality of the software using interdisciplinary examples with a primary, but not exclusive focus, on environmental issues. For instance, we can visualize issues of environmental justice by mapping demographic data. Conservation issues can be better understood through mapping environmental data. Land use history can be explored through a blending of narrative, historical maps, and modern satellite imagery. In the later part of the course, we will spend time exploring and learning about some of the more interesting geostatistical tools available with the ArcGIS software. All skill levels with computers are welcome. Some comfort with PC-based software will be helpful at the start.

Counts as an Applied Environmental Science course in the Natural Science track of the Environmental Studies interdisciplinary major.
Counts as a methodology or elective course in the Environmental Studies major.
Satisfies the Mathematical and Quantitative Thought requirement.

ENV 240 - Environment and Ecology of India

This course introduces students to major environmental issues with both local and global impacts.  Through lectures, research, and field visits, students will analyze key questions of ecological integrity posed by the Earth Charter Commission, specifically the importance of biological diversity, best practices for environmental protection, methods to safeguard Earth’s regenerative capacities, and the study of ecological sustainability.  The course will give particular attention to sustainability, food security, and food sovereignty.

Satisfies depth and breadth course requirement in the Social Science track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies Liberal Studies requirement.
 

ENV 241 - Globalization, Sustainability, and the Environment

The global economy consumes large amounts of fossil fuels and natural resources creating a myriad of environmental problems, but many NGOs, international institutions, governments, and businesses think that a more ecologically sustainable form of economic development could resolve these environmental issues while enhancing community wellbeing. What is the potential for sustainable development? Who would benefit and who would bear the burdens? Using social science theories, this course investigates the socio-ecological impacts of contemporary capitalism across global supply networks and life cycles, and critically examines proposals for sustainable development through questions of power, democracy, and justice. 

Provides social science track depth component credit in the Environmental Studies major and interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies a requirement in the Sociology major.
Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought requirement.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

ENV 250 - Human Geography Theory and Research

The core of geographic thought is a spatial understanding of nature-society interactions, and knowledge and theoretically informed practice that synthesizes across nature/society divides. The first part of this course explores major thinkers and key theoretical developments in the field of human geography, tracing the evolution of the discipline from its origins in classical thought to contemporary cutting edge theoretical discourses. This course explores geographic thought, various ways to ask geographic research questions, and appropriate methodologies to collect, analyze, and represent geographic data, through both quantitative and qualitative traditions. By exploring both theoretical underpinnings and current methodologies, this course provides insights into a profound discipline concerned with the myriad relationships between people and nature.

Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Social-Scientific requirement.
Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Social Sciences Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

Not offered in 2016-2017.

ENV 256 - Environmental History

This course covers environmental interactions large and small, tracing the changing ways that Americans have shaped and thought about the places where they live and work. Course focuses on US environmental history from the colonial period to the present, including national parks, preservation, conservation, and wilderness; the relationship between the US and the rest of the world; and debates over what nature is, who it is for, and how it should be used.

Satisfies depth and breadth course requirement in the Humanities track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies a major requirement in History.
Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement

ENV 273 - Art, Activism, and Environment

In this course students will explore environmental themes in American visual culture. Taking the art related to the environmental justice movement as a point of departure, students will be exposed to a broad range of visual material that offers insight into how humans have advocated for a wide range of political opinions through their painting, sculpture, memorials, historical markers, roadside and yard installations, printmaking, murals, and the natural environment. Students will gain a strong sense of how this visual material not only has been used as important tools in inspiring political action but also how these materials also serve as important “texts” in documenting and preserving less well-known environmental perspectives.  

Satisfies the Humanities track of the Environmental Studies major and interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

ENV 278 - Natural History

Natural history is the close observation and detailed recording of the natural world.  This course explores the history, culture, and artistic productions of natural history, with an emphasis on the United States.  In addition to studying natural history, students will also become natural historians by developing their own skills of close observation and detailed recording of a local natural environment, in writing, sketching, and specimen collecting.

Satisfies a requirement in the Humanities track of the Environmental Studies major and interdisciplinary minor.

ENV 283 - Global Food Systems

Creating a sustainable world food system requires that we address both food security and sustainable food production in tandem, a clear case of intersecting challenges or “wicked” problems. Wicked problems are those issues that have so many relationships of causality and correlation that researchers and policy-makers sometimes do not know where to begin to address them. In this course, we will begin to investigate some of the ways we can understand and address the challenges of producing and provisioning food using the lens of sustainability.

Satisfies depth and breadth course requirement in the Social Science track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.

ENV 284 - Latinxs and Environment (=LAS 284)

In this course, students will examine a broad range of Latinx environmental experiences across time and place in the United States.  Taking the environment as a key category of analysis, students will explore the ways that the natural and built environments shape, and are shaped by, Latinx culture.  Looking to important rural, urban, suburban, and wilderness sites across the United States, students will construct a nuanced “picture” of how Latinx environments have changes over time.  With our methodology placed squarely in historical and visual analysis, we will frequently engage interdisciplinary approaches to enhance our understanding of key issues including: labor, migration, public health, community and neighborhood building, transportation networks, natural resource development, education, and tourism.  Students will be exposed to a wide range of human expressions of place, such as art, literature, and activism, to gain a better understanding of how Latinxs have represented their environmental experiences.

Satisfies the Humanities track of the Environmental Studies major and minor.
Satisfies a requirement in the Latin American Studies major.
Fulfills the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
 

ENV 285 - Indigenous Perspectives on the Environment

It is often posited that indigenous peoples possess a different relationship to and cosmology of the environment, of nature, of the natural world. In this course, we will interrogate this assumption through a series of case studies that examine indigenous experiences of natural and built environments.  Our guiding questions as we examine these case studies are: Does this collectivity express a unique perspective on the environment? How does that shape their relationship to their environments and the world at large? Are those relationships necessarily more sustainable? How can the natural world be managed according to these principles, or have we reached an impasse between resource extraction and resource renewal? We will use indigenous perspectives and experiences to examine issues that affect all of us: nonrenewable resource extraction, climate change, human-animal-plant relationships, the practice of science, and the limits to economic development.

You will leave the course with the ability to explain:
1) The adaptations of indigenous peoples as they confront threats to their well-being that have arisen through environmental misuse of the earth
2) Conflicts between indigenous dwellers, colonizing states and extractive industries happening on each continent
3) The conflicts and compromises between indigenous groups themselves as they struggle to make their ways in late capitalism
4) Various perspectives in the social sciences that conceptualize how we understand our natural worlds, including the ontologies and epistemologies of western science and indigenous traditional knowledges

Satisfies the depth component of the social science track and the breadth component of the natural science and humanities tracks of the Environmental Studies major.
Satisfies the social science requirement of the Environmental Studies interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.

ENV 290 - Deserts

Deserts are among the most hostile environments on earth for the survival of humans, yet their allure has resulted in profound impacts on civilizations. Religions view deserts paradoxically as places of isolation and of deep spiritual connection. Artists and writers exploit these sparse landscapes of seemingly infinite vistas to highlight the singular aesthetics of this (allegedly) empty wilderness.  Geologists have long asserted that deserts are so unique that they require their own set of processes to explain the landforms. Climatologists realize that deserts are not local phenomena, but rather are globally forced features based on worldwide circulation and heating patterns.  In this transdisciplinary and team-taught course, students will learn about deserts from multiple perspectives and through approaches both humanistic and scientific. 

Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Natural Science or Humanities track of the Environmental Studies major and interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Liberal Studies requirement.

ENV 295 - Independent Study

Under the direction of an ENV Core faculty member, the student learns environmental studies material through a structure that primarily resembles a typical course or through independent research at an introductory level.

ENV 300 - Special Topic: TBD

The Environmental Studies Department will welcome a new faculty member in the environmental social sciences in the 2018-19 academic year.  As of this time, the instructor and topic of the course are still to be determined, but the course will count toward the social sciences track of the Environmental Studies major and minor.

ENV 303 - Research Seminar in Food and Agriculture Studies

In this course, you will gain hands-on experience conducting social science research in the discipline of food and agriculture studies. Our research site is The Farm at Davidson College. Our goal is to design and implement a group study that measures the Farm holistically along the three dimensions of sustainability: environmental, economic and social sustainability. As a student in this class, you will be held to high expectations. Not only will you be responsible for reading assigned materials, you will be expected to conduct yourself as a professional scholar responsible for developing research questions, collecting, analyzing, storing and presenting data in an ethical, confidential and transparent manner. Our course will culminate in a presentation of our findings to the Davidson College community. Students in this course are expected to already have a working knowledge of the Farm at Davidson College. Please contact the instructor if you would like to enroll in the course and need extra material to familiarize yourself with the Farm.

Satisfies a requirement in the social science track in the Environmental Studies major.
Satisfies the social science breath course in the Environmental Studies Interdisciplinary minor.

ENV 315 - Analytical Chemistry I (= CHE 220)

Topics in chemical equilibrium, electrochemistry, spectroscopy, chromatography, and nuclear chemistry, with applications in biological, environmental, forensic, archaeological, and consumer chemistry. Laboratory experiments include qualitative and quantitative analyses using volumetric, electrochemical, chromatographic, and spectroscopic methods.

Satisfies the Natural Science requirement.
Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in Natural Science Track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
Counts as an Applied Environmental Science course in the Natural Science track of the Environmental Studies interdisciplinary major.