Course Descriptions

FRE 391 - Black France

Black France is a course that provides an overview of France’s socio-historical relationship to Blackness within its borders and with migrants of African descent. Starting with colonial history and the exploitation of Africa and the post-colonial era, we study France’s complicated and problematic relationship to the concept of race, and to Blackness more specifically. The students in the course will gain knowledge and a critical understanding of how France has dealt with its Black population and what the current racial landscape looks like. While conservative factions argue for the preservation of France’s old social fabric, the course pays particular attention to the contributions of Black artists, politicians, and activists to the country’s well-being and development, and to the work of Black and anti-racist scholars and activists who bring to light the inequalities rooted in the Hexagon’s structural racism.

Because the course is taught in situ, students will have the unique opportunity to visit sites that play a critical role in France’s racial history, and will also have access to resources that are dedicated to issues discussed in the course.

Assignments are designed to impart historical knowledge of France’s racial and colonial history and to develop critical analysis of primary sources produced by artists, writers, and intellectuals of African descent. They include short analytical papers, a presentation, a midterm exam, and a final research project.

FRE 395 - Independent Study for Majors

Independenty Study for Majors

Prerequisites & Notes
Permission of instructor required.

FRE 395, 396, 397 - Independent Study for Majors

FRE 399 - Topics in Francophone Literature

Topics in Francophone Literature

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

FRE 490 - Senior Seminar

Required of all senior majors in the fall semester.

Fall 2021

The focus of this seminar is the body. We will therefore be looking at numerous considerations of the body in French and Francophone works across times and geographic boundaries. When reading or watching our primary works, students will consider a variety of factors, including social, cultural, and historical circumstances at play, but also political and aesthetic ones. The political will become particularly salient in works where power structures such as the State, the Church, or patriarchy are implicated.

FRE 491 - Senior Capstone

Required of all senior majors in the spring semester, except those students enrolling in 499 Senior Honors Thesis.

FRE 495 - Independent Study

FRE 496 - Independent Study

FRE 499 - Senior Thesis/Project

C. Fache

Seniors who satisfy requirements for admission to the departmental honors program enroll in 499. A written request containing a brief description of the thesis project and a working bibliography is submitted to the department for consideration no later than the fifth week of the fall semester of the senior year. Approval of project proposal constitutes permission to enroll in 499. An oral defense of the thesis is required.

GSS 352 - Gender and Sexuality in North Africa

This course will explore texts, films, and issues related to gender and sexuality in the Maghreb. We will therefore be looking at literary, critical, and cinematographic from Francophone Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian writers and directors. Our goal will be to understand how gender and sexuality are conceived of and represented, and how they operate in these societies across different periods. At the same time, we will consider salient socio-cultural, historical, religious, and political factors in order to better understand their dynamic with questions of gender and sexuality. Readings will come from the works of writers such as Tahar Ben Jelloun, Kamel Daoud, Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, Leïla Sebbar, Leïla Slimani, etc.; and films will be selected from Francophone North African movies of the last three decades.

Note: This course was previously taught as FRE 362 and is offered in English.

Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor requirement.
Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.
Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric Ways of Knowing requirement.

GSS 101 - Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies

This class provides an interdisciplinary introduction to the analytical tools, key scholarly debates, history, and research subfields of gender and sexuality studies. It pays particular attention to the construction and deployment of gender as a cultural category across various social institutions. Students will learn to assess and analyze documents pertaining to the history of and contemporary state of feminisms and women’s rights, masculinity, queer theory, disability studies, body image and consumer culture, intersectionality, as well as a host of gendered questions related to health, work, the family, violence, and politics.

Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

GSS 190 - Understanding Leadership through the Female Marvel Universe

The legends, villains, and superpowers of the Marvel universe have captured the world’s attention for decades. However, while female characters are evident throughout Marvel’s history, our attention has only come to women as leaders within the Marvel universe in recent years. This course will give leaders like Black Widow, The Wasp, Shuri, Kamala Khan, She Hulk, and countless other Marvel women the attention they deserve through a critical analysis of their origin stories, leadership characteristics, and contributions to the Marvel universe. We will examine historical, social, and cultural paradigms of leadership, gender constructs within leadership roles, and leadership patterns and behaviors - not only related to cinematic, television and print portrayals of female Marvel characters, but in our own lives and society as well. We will also analyze the representation of women, how female leadership is framed, and marginalization and exclusion of women in leadership roles throughout comic book, film, and television portrayals of the Marvel universe. Selected texts, Marvel-based television shows, and Marvel movies will enhance learning in this course.

Satisfies a major and minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement
Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought requirement

GSS 201 - Feminist and Queer Theories

Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

GSS 220 - Topics in Queer Studies

This course provides an introduction to the field of queer studies by way of a specialized topic. Course content and emphasis will vary with instructor, but sample topics include queer theories, queer of color critiques, queer popular culture, transgender studies, and queer activism.

Satisfies a major requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies - content course for society and politics of trade.
Satisfies a minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies-elective.
 

GSS 292 - Queer Russia (=RUS 292)

Russia is accustomed to playing the role of the “evil empire.” The current ongoing war in Ukraine has resurrected the Cold War-era narratives about Russia as a dark, aggressive, and ruthless military power. The notorious legislation of recent years-whose functions range from barring Americans from adopting Russian orphans to criminalizing the so-called “gay propaganda”-have further solidified Russia’s reputation as a country with little regard for human rights. Yet generations of Russian poets, artists, and writers have transformed the country’s systematic oppression and violence into spectacular forms of protest and self-expression. This course focuses on gender and sexuality in exploring an alternative cultural history of Russia, which highlights its queer legacy from the nineteenth century to the present. We will examine poetry, fiction, art, memoirs, plays, films, performances, and discursive texts that showcase uniquely Russian conceptions of marriage, gender relations, gender expression, and sexual identity. Attention will be paid to the ways in which Russian and Western narratives of queerness align and diverge. In English. No knowledge of Russian is required or expected.

Satisfies major and minor requirements in Russian Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing and Rhetoric requirement.

GSS 321 - Sex Outside the City

Since the early 1990s, many queer theorists have reasserted the centrality of western cities to the formation of queer subjectivities. But more recent scholarship has challenged this assumption, suggesting that not only have LGBTQ identities historically developed in suburban, rural, and non-western locales, but that the dominant urban narrative reinforces white, upper-class maleness as the norm of queer life. This course examines the ways in which space is queered and queerness emerges in response to metropolitan, non-metropolitan, Western, and non-Western space. We will examine the queer convergence of the public and the private, the processes by which space is simultaneously raced and gendered, the relationship between sexuality and built environments, and the role of capitalism and neoliberalism in producing queer individuals and networks.

Satisfies a major requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies -Histories and Geneologies Track.
Satisfies a minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies - elective.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement

GSS 322 - Black Queer South

Whether it’s Black Gay Pride Atlanta or DC, or activists like black trans femme organizer Micky Bradford, the Black Queer South has always had something to say about race, gender, class, and sexual struggle and liberation. However, southern black queer (or LGBT) culture is frequently overlooked, understudied, and/or misrepresented. Thus, this course will employ the geographical place and conceptual space of “the South” as an entry point for exploring black queer possibilities from “the bottom.” [This course will meet the major’s Sexuality Studies Requirement and will be in the Society & Politics track.]

Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor requirement.
Satisfies Africana Studies major requirement.
Satisfies Justice, Equality and Community requirement.

GSS 324 - Sex, Law, Modernity (= HIS 324)

This course, team-taught by a historian of European gender and a legal and literary scholar of the Hispanic world, will introduce students to the ways that early modern and modern Western societies have intervened in and defined categories of illicit sexual desire, identity, and conduct. Modern European states took an abiding interest in regulating what they considered to be disordered and deviant sexual persons- the Homosexual, the Prostitute, the Intersexed. These same states took a marked interest in enforcing public health and hygiene by way of laws targeting private sexual behavior, from birth control to interracial relationships. These interventions expressed sharp anxieties about the character of modern life: urbanization, industrialization, democratization, the rise of the middle classes, empire. The course will combine an interrogation of primary texts from the early modern and modern periods with secondary and theoretical works dealing with history, law, and sexuality.

Satisfies a major requirement in History

Satisfies a major requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies.  Only counted in one track.

Satisfies a minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies  Only counted in one track.

Satisfies a distribution requirement in Historical Thought

GSS 325 - Production Dramaturgy (=THE 325)

This course is an examination of the art, craft, and practice of production dramaturgy. Students will learn how to bring research, script analysis, and interpretation into the theatrical process to support a theatre production’s creative team. Focusing specifically on production dramaturgy, students will gain experience creating materials typically delegated to a production dramaturg.

Satisfies a major requirement in Theatre
Satisfies a minor requirement in Theatre
Satisifes Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor requirement
Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement

GSS 340 - Transnational Sexualities Studies

This course surveys a number of emerging frameworks for rethinking the concept of queerness from a transnational perspective. Our investigations will move between theory and lived experience, within and across national borders, and will challenge key Western assumptions about sexual development, freedom, identity, and citizenship. We will consider questions such as: To what extent do Western paradigms of sex, gender, and sexuality limit our understanding of non-Western sexual cultures? How does the relationship between sexual practice and sexual identity shift across cultures? How do tourists and migrants negotiate, adapt, and remake sexual discourses and economies as they move in and through new spaces? How has the legacy of colonialism shaped and been shaped by sexual practice? How is sexuality used to articulate national, racial, class, and ethnic identities?

Satisfies a requirement in the Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor.
Satisfies Social-Scientific Thought requirement.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

GSS 341 - Race, Gender & Sexuality in Asian American Literature and Film

This course introduces critical race theory and issues of gender and sexuality specific to Asian American context, using literature, film and media, and art and performance. We will explore problems of identity and citizenship, class and labor history, model minority discourse, sexual politics as well as intersection of gender and Asianness, and locate ways in which contemporary Asian America literature and film respond to these issues: how they critique and reinvent traditional ideas about Asian American culture. Furthermore, this course will pay special attention to transnational discourses (e.g. history of immigration, generational conflicts, border-defying transnational experiences and questioning the problematic “national identity”) within Asian American experience, and how gender and sexuality intersect with such discourses. The notions of power, nation, and citizenship in relationship to gender and sexuality are important in this course as we will be asking how gender-conscious and queer Asian American cultural productions may intercept the traditional US thinking on citizenship and racial differences, particularly at this time in our national history. Finally, this course will have a film/media focus, which means we will learn intellectual ways to analyze and discuss Asian American film works, and consider dynamic ways in which minority discourses can be productively deployed in art, film, media, and performance activism. The course content will encompass different Asian American experience, including South Asian, East Asian, and Southeast Asian American narratives.

Satisfies a requirement in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Major and Minor. (Literary and Cultural Representations Track)
Satisfies a Diversity requirement in the English Major and Minor.
Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory Interdisciplinary Major and Minor.
Satisfies a requirement in the East Asian Studies Major and Interdisciplinary Minor.
Satisfies a requirment in the Film and Media Studies interdisciplinary minor.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, & Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

GSS 345 - Queer Immigration and Diaspora

Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

GSS 348 - Femme Theory and Performance

 

Prerequisites & Notes
Fall 2021: The course will mostly meet in person with designated days for online classes.

GSS 350 - Sex Radicals!

When we think about queer and feminist politics, we typically think of the processes by which women and LGBT people have effected change through legislation, court cases, and supporting candidates friendly to their causes. But much U.S. queer and feminist thought and activism has taken root outside the bounds of liberal electoral politics. This course centers on the fringes. It surveys the writings of less-palatable political actors: punks, anarchists, communists, anti-capitalists, sex workers, black radicals, and prison abolitionists. In exploring these political genealogies, we will ask: How does the personal constitute the political? What counts as (legitimate) political action according to whom? (How) can social change be effected outside of electoral politics and state institutions? What should be the role of the state in regulating labor and distributing rights and entitlements? What priorities have animated the various radical traditions within queer and feminist thought, and how have they addressed or failed to address race, class, ethnicity, and disability? How have these traditions intersected and diverged? Why have contemporary queer radicals come to focus on issues less obviously connected to gender and sexuality like global capitalism, drone warfare, and police militarization?

Satisfies a requirement for the Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor.
Satisfies a Social-Scientific Thought requirement.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

GSS 355 - Femme Theory and Performance

As an unconventional expression of gender identity and performance, this course will examine femme formations and cultural productions as a form of patriarchal-masculine resistance.  With its discursive origins in lesbian gender and social relations, the term femme has since evolved as an identity and critical practice of femininity beyond heteropatriarchal and binary logics of recognition.  Therefore, we will explore its conceptual use and implications by various communities and social movements, including but not limited to, gays and lesbians, feminists and queers of color, and transfeminists.  This course will then draw on literature from many of these knowledge paradigms as well as a variety of intellectual modes (art, media, music, dance, novels, etc.) and transnational contexts. 

Furthermore, we will employ femme as an analytical tool for assessing institutional, political, and social gender dominance at the nexus of race, sexuality, class, and nationality.  As such, we will take up the category of femme, to ask not only who is femme, but what does this concept, identity, and/or performance do within these relations?

Satisfies a major and minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies
Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement

GSS 360 - Transgender Studies

A political platform, identity, field of study, and more, “transgender” holds many different meanings for different people today.  This course explores the history and present of an expansive sense of trans- transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, and more- through an array of texts, including memoir, fiction, film, television, and scholarly writings.  By thinking trans in these different contexts and through different concepts, trans studies/politics connects to queer studies, explores and challenges “umbrella”-type understandings, and critically interrogates the inheritances that shape trans activisms today.  Topics that focus our work together include histories of sexology and activisms, disability and trans politics, trans people’s experiences with prisons and carceral violences, trans people’s participation and representation in larger projects for racial justice, environmental justice and trans activisms, and more.

Satisfies a requirement in the Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor (society and politics track).
Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought requirement.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
 

GSS 370 - Global South Feminisms and Social Justice Movements

This course is about contemporary feminist movements in parts of the world that are often overlooked or labeled as “primitive”. With a particular, though not exclusive, focus on parts of South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh), north Africa (Egypt, Tunisia, etc.,) and countries of the Persian Gulf (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, etc.,), we will explore how women are social justice leaders in their daily lives, in individual and collective acts of resistance, in local communities as well as transnationally. We will examine some of the significant issues that poor women, women of color, racialized immigrant women, incarcerated women, confront and resist around the world. Rather than understand feminism as emanating from the “West” or the global north, this course focuses instead on what the “West” or the global north has yet to learn from feminist movements from other parts of the world. We will examine recent social movement histories, as well as considers contemporary social justice issues that impact, and are impacted by, multiple genders (with a particular though not exclusive focus on women and queer peoples), through various means of resistance and grassroots community organizing. These include organizing against reproductive rights abuses, globalization, and for immigrant, labor, and civil rights.

Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor requirement
Satisfies South Asian Studies minor requirement
Satisfies Social-Scientific Thought Ways of Knowing requirement
Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement
 

GSS 390 - Sexuality and Public Discourses in the United States

This course examines the history of sexuality in the United States from 1642 to the present through the lens of primary documents, analyzed using rhetorical methods.

Satisfies a major requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Satisfies a minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Historical Thought requirement.

GSS 394 - Latinx Sexual Dissidence and Guerilla Translation (=LAS 394)

Instructor 
González

Despite local differences and sociocultural contexts, there are also remarkable convergences in subcultural minority activisms focused on liberation from intersecting oppressions related to sexuality, race, gender, ability, citizenship status, and class in North and South America. In this upper-level bilingual seminar, students will translate guerilla-style-functionally and in a non-literary fashion-texts by activists and cultural producers focused on intersectional sexual dissidence. Working in teams, students will have the opportunity to consult with some of their target texts’ authors, and the course’s final product will be an online archive of English and Spanish translations of texts related to intersectional, feminist, and queer Latinx American activisms and cultural productions. First, students will study the rhetorics and aesthetic strategies of feminist and queer activist collectives focused on social issues such as immigration, transgender rights, anti-racism, economic equality, anti-speciesim, body positivity, and prison abolition with a pro-pleasure, leftist perspective. Second, students in the course and I will elaborate a list of the principles and goals informing our functional, guerrilla translations. In the third unit, students will work exclusively on the translation projects they have been developing throughout the semester. They will have the opportunities to interview at least one of the authors whose work they are translating. Collectives, authors, and artists from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and the U.S. that we will study include: Colectivo Lemebel; Colectivo Universitario de la Disidencia Sexual (CUDS); TransLatina Coalition; Biblioteca Fragmentada; Lino Arruda; Constanzx Alvarez Castillo; Jorge Díaz; Valeria Flores; Daisy Hernández; Jennicet Gutiérrez; Claudia Rodríguez; Ignacio Rivera; Julio Salgado; and Susy Shock.

Satisfies a major requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies
Satisfies a minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies
Satisfies a major requirement in Latin American Studies
Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Latin American Studies
Satisfies the Justice, Equality and Community requirement
Satisfies the Literary Thought, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement

Prerequisites & Notes
Requires permission from the instructor.

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

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 representations 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 nonnormative 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 Digital and Screen Media major requirement.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality and Community requirement
 

GSS 402 - Seminar: Black Sexual Politics

Racism has long been permeated through ideologies of gender and sexuality.  However, historically, black political and social movements have often only marginally addressed issues of gender and sexuality.  Furthermore, in the post-Civil Rights era, many feminist and queer scholars of color have noted the evolving and increasing emphasis placed on gender and sexual differences to propagate “new” forms of racism.  Therefore, this course will explore the role and relationship of gender and sexuality in contemporary racism and anti-racist black politics.  This course will pay particular attention to black subjectivity, such as what bodies or embodiments are il/legitimized politically and to what effect? 

Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor requirement.
Satisfies Africana Studies major requirement. 
Satisfies Justice, Equality and Community requirement.
Satisfies Social-Scientific Thought requirement.

GSS 403 - Latinx Sexual Dissidence

Latinx Sexual Dissidence

Satisfies a requirement in the Latin American Studies major and minor.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
Permission of instructor required.

GSS 431 - The Science of Sex

Contemporary understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality are shaped by a long history of scientific work in fields as diverse as sexology, genetics, phrenology, eugenics, biology, and more. This course traces how these understandings shaped and were shaped by sex, gender, and sexuality. The course begins with early work in the field of feminist science studies, then turns to questions of taxonomy and difference before interrogating the role of nationalisms in sex-related sciences. The class also explores American eugenics, early work in sexology and the study of homosexuality, sex and the brain in the contemporary U.S., problems with sex differentiation, the role of sex in current ecological sciences, assisted reproductive technologies, posthuman bodies, and feminist interventions in technosciences.

Satisfies a major requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies

Satisfies a minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies

GSS 432 - Prison Abolition, Transformative Justice, and Queer/Feminist Practice

Satisfies a major requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Satisfies a minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

GSS 435 - Brown, Black, and Blue: Queer of Color Critiques of Policing and Prisons

The United States incarcerates its citizens at a higher rate than any country on earth. Although it comprises only 5% of the world’s population, it is home to 25% of the world’s prisoners-a population that is disproportionately black, Latino, transgender, and queer. This course begins by asking why and how racial, sexual, and gender minorities have historically been criminalized and targeted for state surveillance. We will explore the social framing of crime and criminality through examples like COINTELPRO, police raids on gay bars, the War on Drugs, the school-to-prison pipeline, the birth of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the prohibition of sex work, and the militarization of police forces. Finally, we will examine the burgeoning prison abolition movement led by queer and trans people of color and investigate alternatives to the carceral state such as restorative justice and community anti-violence projects. This course will be conducted entirely online with synchronous and asynchronous components and will feature regular guest visits from scholars, formerly incarcerated people, and community activists.

Satisfies a requirement for the Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement

GSS 440 - Matters of Life and Death: Biopower, Necropolitics, Sex

In this course, we will investigate how definitions of life and death have evolved over the last two centuries and how those definitions have shaped American culture and policy. We will ask who is empowered to make decisions about who lives and who dies and by what authority; what bodies are included and excluded in discussions of bio- and necropolitics; and how gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion frame and become framed by matters of life and death.

Satisfies a requirement in the Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.

GSS 498 - GSS Senior Capstone

Senior Capstone in Gender and Sexuality Studies

GER 101 - Elementary German I

GER 102 - Elementary German II

GER 103 - Intensive Elementary German (2 credits)

GER 201 - Intermediate German

Fulfills the foreign language requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
German 102, 103, or placement. (Fall)

GER 231 - Special Literary Topic: Black German Art & Resistance (in trans.)

Taught in English, this class explores contemporary literature, music, film, poetry, theater, and activism that has been written, created, performed, and enacted by Afro- and Black-Germans. Taking special care to center the voices and works of Afro- and Black-Germans and the work of BIPOC scholars, our topics will include (re)unification and (German) identity, memory culture, the politics of representation, East Germany, racisms, resistance and forms of activism, coalition- and solidarity-building, and more.

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

GER 232 - Burning Books (in trans.)

Would the six million Jews have lived had the estimated 100 million books not been destroyed? What is it about books that suggests such a link to the human condition? Using the 1933 book burnings as its point of departure, this course explores the nature of literature in the context of the Third Reich. As you learn about Nazi Germany and the imaginary, and literary resistance to it, you will also be introduced to some basic methods of literary criticism. The end of the course is devoted to literary representations of the Holocaust.

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

Prerequisites & Notes
Taught in English.

GER 240 - German for Economics and Policy

This advanced intermediate language course provides an introduction to the economic and political structures in Germany and the EU. Covered topics include the history and current state of the most important political structures (parties, governmental structures in Germany and Europe), economic structures (trade agreements, finance, corporate and business structures), the role of the press and political foundations and non-governmental think thanks, and the transatlantic relationship. The course involves case studies: small groups of students will coordinate with a local German (or Swiss or Austrian) company in the Charlotte region and do an in-depth study of the company in the context of the course; this involves on-site visits and interviews and networking with German business leaders. The course culminates with a student-designed Davidson German Business Forum: a symposium and poster session in which students present their case studies with the German business leaders present. The course offers intensive work in German in the course topics. Taught in German. Prerequisite: German 201 or the equivalent.

Satisfies a major requirement in German Studies

Satisfies a minor requirement in German Studies

Fulfills the foreign language requirement

Prerequisites & Notes
Taught in German. German 201 or the equivalent.

GER 241 - Race, Gender, Migration (in trans.)

Instructor
Frazier-Rath

Selected topics in German, Austrian, or Swiss culture. Covers various aspects of culture and society, such as history, politics, economics, literature, film, art and architecture, music, and mass media. Sample topics include The Holocaust and Vienna at the Turn of the Century.

GER 242 - Hollywood Alternatives, From Germany and Beyond (in trans.)

Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement.
May be counted toward the interdisciplinary minor in Film and Media Studies.

GER 243 - Special Topics in Film (in trans.)

Selected topics primarily in German and Austrian film that introduce students to genres, historical periods, and methods of film analysis. Classes focus on close readings and discussions.

Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement.
May be counted toward the interdisciplinary minor in Film and Media Studies.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
Taught in English.
 

GER 243 Gender in Film topic counts towards the Gender and Sexuality Studies major.

GER 250 - Introduction to German Literary Studies

An introduction to authors, genres, and periods in German literature as well as methods of literary criticism. Close reading, discussion, and analytical writing in German about key original texts from various periods and traditions.

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

Prerequisites & Notes
German 201 or placement. 

GER 251 - Special Literary Topics

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

Prerequisites & Notes
German 250 or permission of the instructor. 

GER 260 - Introduction to German Cultural Studies

Close attention to the various answers to the questions: “Was ist Deutsch?” and “What does the study of German culture entail?” Texts drawn from various discourses, including history, literature, film, visual arts, political and social science, as well as journalism and popular culture.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
German 201 or placement. (Fall)

GER 261 - Special Cultural Topics

 

Prerequisites & Notes
German 260 or permission of the instructor.
 

GER 263 - Special Topics in Film

Selected topics primarily in German and Austrian film which introduce students to genres, historical periods, and methods of film analysis. Sample topics include an overview of German cinema, as well as German popular film. Classes are taught in German and focus on close readings and discussions.

Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement.
May be counted toward the interdisciplinary minor in Film and Media Studies.

Prerequisites & Notes
German 201 or placement test.
 

GER 270 - Contemporary Germany

Examination of contemporary life in Germany. Texts include current newspapers and magazines, supplemented by video and film. Emphasis on composition and conversation. Strongly recommended for students planning to study in Germany.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
German 201 or placement.
 

GER 298 - Independent Study

GER 307 - Advanced Grammar and Composition

Study of complex grammatical forms, combined with advanced work in written German. Suitable as preparation for the Goethe-Zertifikat B2.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
German 201 or above. (Fall)

GER 331 - Special Literary Topics (in trans.)

Focus on Uwe Johnson’s 1,700 page novel Anniversaries with attention to its literary and historical contexts. Open to students, alumni, faculty, and staff. Weekly reading and writing, presentations, research paper or creative project.

Satisfies German Studies major and minor requirement.

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

GER 332 - Modernism (in trans.)

An interdisciplinary study in English of modernist movements in Central Europe between 1890 and 1940. Topics covered include literary movements (Naturalism, Expressionism, New Realism); artistic movements (Blue Rider, the Bridge, Jugendstil, Neue Sachlichkeit, Bauhaus); music (Neo-Romanticism, Second Viennese School, Jazz); culture and politics (Freud, fascism, urbanism, film, anti-Semitism). Some key figures include: Kandinsky, Klee, Gropius, Rilke, Kafka, Luxemburg, Modersohn-Becker, Th. Mann, Musil, Döblin, Nietzsche, Lasker-Schüler, Hitler, Riefenstahl, Trakl, R. Strauss, Torberg, Jünger.

GER 336 - Memory on Film (in trans.)

In the wake of 2020’s racial reckonings, memory culture has expanded and gained contemporary relevance. This course will examine memory as a frequent theme in film, film as a form of memory, how filmic structures represent memory, and memory’s role in countering the official stories of history and nation. It will also include attention to visual artists, like Kehinde Wiley and Kara Walker, who represent U.S. racial history, German memory sites that document its turbulent 20^th century history, and ongoing archiving of Covid-related experiences. Besides weekly film viewing, students will write short essays and create a larger memory project which can take written, filmic, or other kinds of creative form. This course may also include a post-semester research trip to Berlin.

Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement.
May be counted toward the interdisciplinary minor in Film and Media Studies.

GER 341 - Art and Culture in the Third Reich (in Translation)

Topic: Art and Culture in the Third Reich

Instructor
Henke

In translation.  Analysis of the state-controlled culture industry in Germany, 1933 to 1945; examination of its dominant art forms, including literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, music, dance, theatre, and industrial art.

Provides credit for the German Studies major.
Provides credit for the History major.
Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
Taught in English

GER 342 - Cultural, Filmic and Digital Studies (taught in English)

Cultural, Filmic and Digital Adaptations examines a variety of medium-specific transformations that occur across German and American culture. We will read adaptation theory, examine intercultural and intermedial manifestations of the adaptation process, and consider connections with translation studies. “Intertextuality” will also serve as a touchstone throughout, or multidirectional movements between source and adaption and art itself as dialogic in nature. Our material will include Weimar cinema as source for Hollywood noir films, web series like “Awkward Black Girl” as template for stories about multicultural creatives in Berlin, Grimm’s fairytales in video game format, and American horror films and westerns as inspiration for German arthouse cinema. Students will write analytic essays and complete one creative assignment that adapts a source in one medium to another.

Satisfies German Studies major and minor requirement.
Satisfies Film and Media Studies Interdisciplinary minor requirement.
Satisfies Visual and Performing Arts requirement.

GER 343 - Special Topics in Film (in trans.)

Selected topics primarily in German and Austrian film that introduce students to genres, historical periods, and methods of film analysis. Classes focus on close readings and discussions.

Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement.
May be counted toward the interdisciplinary minor in Film and Media Studies.

Prerequisites & Notes
Taught in English.
 

GER 350 - Modernes Drama

Overview of modern German drama in the context of major developments in German, Swiss, and Austrian theater. Playwrights discussed include: Büchner, Brecht, Fleißer, Dürrenmatt, Frisch, Weiß, Bernhard, Tabori, Meinhof, and Jelinek. Taught in German.

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

 

Prerequisites & Notes
German 250 or permission of the instructor.
 

GER 351 - Special Literary Topics:

Using the tools of Critical Race Studies, Postcolonial Feminist Thought, and Cultural Studies, this class explores the intersections and interconnectedness of concepts of race, gender, and citizenship/nationhood in Europe as they emerged (in new ways) in the 18th and 19th centuries, as they informed Nazi ideology and experiences of the Holocaust/Porajmos, and as people have responded to and rethought these relationships in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This class is taught in German.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing and Rhetoric requirement
 

Prerequisites & Notes
German 260 or permission of the instructor. 

GER 352 - Special Historical Topic: Erinnerungskultur

“Erinnerungskultur” is the German term for “remembrance culture” or “memory culture.” In this class, we will explore and analyze a variety of ways in which the past - particularly Germany’s tumultuous past - have been remembered. Using the tools of cultural studies, we will ask questions about the possibilities and limitations of representing the Holocaust, the Porajmos, and colonial violence in contemporary Germany. We will explore the ways that Germany’s past, present, and futures are intermingled, and how the ways the past is remembered has profound and often material effects, especially on vulnerable populations (e.g., refugees entering and living in Germany, Afro-German and Black people, Jewish communities, LGBTQIA folx, …) today. This class is taught in German.

Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
German 260 or permission of the instructor. 

GER 354 - Contemporary German Literature

Overview of German literature since 1989, with particular emphasis on prose fiction and popular literature. Authors discussed include: Günter Grass, Judith Hermann, Florian Illies, Daniel Kehlmann, and Juli Zeh, among others. Taught in German.

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

 

Prerequisites & Notes
German 250 or permission of the instructor.
 

GER 358 - Historical Fiction

Coming Soon!

GER 361 - Literary Topics: Imagining Berlin

Although the “Berlin Republic” is more than twenty years old, journalistic assessments of the city emphasize its youthful energy and the start of a new era. Yet literary and filmic representations of Berlin offer a more variegated picture, one both celebratory and critical. This course aims to get beyond the official hype by looking at recent novels and films and how they: represent Berlin topography; call upon historical and ideological perspectives as well as individual and collective memory; depict everyday life and fantasies in a multicultural city; allude to historical and/or continued divisions between East and West. In the process students will encounter both concrete and imaginary conceptions of what one critic has called “the capital of the 20^th century.” All readings, class discussions, and essays will be in German.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
German 250 or 260 or permission of the instructor.

GER 363 - Contemporary German Film & TV

Selected topics primarily in German and Austrian film which introduce students to genres, historical periods, and methods of film analysis. Sample topics include an overview of German cinema, as well as German popular film. Classes are taught in German and focus on close readings and discussions.

Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement.
May be counted toward the interdisciplinary minor in Film and Media Studies.

Prerequisites & Notes
German 260 or permission of the instructor.
 

GER 370 - Advanced Grammar & Comp

Study of complex grammatical forms, combined with advanced work in written German. Suitable as preparation for the Goethe-Zertifikat B2.

Prerequisites & Notes
German 201 or above. (Fall)

GER 380 - Studies in German Language, Literature, Culture

Courses numbered 380-389 are taken abroad.

GER 398 - Independent Study

GER 430 - Seminars (in trans.)

GER 433 - The Holocaust and Representation (=HIS 433)

Instructor 
Denham

History and historiography of the origins and execution of the Nazi genocide during World War II, with a focus on representations of the Holocaust and cultural memory practices in popular and public history, in the visual and performing arts and in literature, and especially in memorial structures and spaces.

Prerequisites & Notes
Permission of instructor required.

GER 438 - Seminar: Goethe, Schiller, Kleist

Introduction to the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), and Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811)

GER 450 - Seminars

GER 458 - Historical Fiction

GER 460 - Film nach 1989

This class, which could also be called Film nach der Wiedervereinigung, introduces students to German cinema since the fall of the wall, analyzing films in their various socio-historical and political contexts. We will explore topics like (re)unification, remembering the Holocaust, representing terrorism, Turkish-German film, transnational and international film reception and collaboration, representing and remembering East Germany, migration and “post-migrant” cinema, and the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship status on screen. This class is taught in German.

Satisifes a major and minor requirement in German Studies.
 

GER 495 - Senior Colloquium

In this course, we will focus on developing good writing habits and a positive relationship with writing in both German and English. We will establish a daily writing practice, set up accountability measures, and work in a collaborative manner. Students will apply what we learn to the writing and completion of a final research project or thesis, while simultaneously honing skills that will serve them in the future. In addition to weekly writing assignments, we will do extensive primary and secondary reading in both German and English on each other’s chosen research topics, ultimately also coming away with a deeper understanding of parts of culture and history pertaining to the German-speaking world.

Satisfies German Studies major and minor requirement.

GER 498 - Independent Study

LIT 245 - The Enlightenment: Centers, Peripheries, & Legacies

In his essay, “What is Enlightenment,” Foucault asks us to resist “the blackmail of the Enlightenment” - the widespread notion that we must take a side. Should we defend the Enlightenment as the birth of modern Western culture that bequeathed a legacy of liberty, human rights, democracy, and human progress, or condemn it as a pernicious era that gave rise to scientific racism and other dehumanizing ideas and structures? Rejecting this binary, Foucault invites us to approach the Enlightenment as its offspring, like it or not. Before embracing or rejecting, we must first study the Enlightenment to understand what it was and how it helped shape who we are and the world we inhabit, with all its promise and its horrors.
This course offers an introduction to the Enlightenment through literary texts that popularized the movement across Europe in the eighteenth century. We will read canonical and peripheral primary and secondary texts that prompt questions related to justice, equality, and community. With Paris as our center and St. Petersburg as our periphery, we will also include non-geographic peripheries - authors marginalized by gender, creed, or race. 

Over the course of the semester, we will discover that many familiar aspects of our lives have a distinct and not-so-distant history in the Enlightenment, including habits of cultural consumption; entire academic disciplines; assumptions about creativity, individuality, and private vs. public; discourses on progress, civilization, race, gender, and inequality; and the very notion of “critical thinking.”

Satisfies the Justice, Equality, & Community requirement (JEC).
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, & Rhetoric requirement (LTRQ)
Counts toward the Global Literary Theory major as one of the six literature courses on a specific period.
Counts toward the Russian Studies major.
Counts toward the Russian Language & Literature major.
Counts toward the French & Francophone Studies major as one of the approved courses outside the department.
Fulfills an elective for the English major and minor.
Counts toward the Russian minor.
Counts toward the interdisciplinary minor in Global Literary Theory.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
No knowledge of French or Russian required or expected. All readings and discussion in English

LIT 251 - Exile Literature

Study of authors and works of exile literature, including defining and challenging what exile literature is now, based on the definition grounded in the exile of writers from Nazi Germany. Major authors may include James Baldwin, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, Aimé Cesire, Eva Hoffman, Else Lasker-Schuler, Anna Seghers, Audre Lorde, Yoko Tawada, Friedrich Torberg, among others. Discussion, readings and weekly response papers to the group, collaborative projects, final research paper.

Satisfies a major requirement in CIS - Global Literary Theory

Satisfies a major requirement in German Studies

Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Global Literary Theory

Satisfies a minor requirement in German Studies

Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement

Prerequisites & Notes
Permission required.

LIT 372 - Nabokov & Global Literature (=RUS 373)

Vladimir Nabokov–brilliant writer, outrageous literary gamesman, and cosmopolitan exile–is a towering figure of twentieth-century literature. His most famous novel, Lolita, propelled him to international stardom and changed the transnational literary landscape. Child of a turbulent century, Nabokov wrote exquisite and at times disturbing prose in Russian and English, balancing between imaginary worlds and harsh realities. This seminar offers a sustained exploration of Nabokov’s major Russian and American writings as well as film adaptations of his Despair (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) and Lolita (Stanley Kubrick). In the second half of the seminar we turn to novels Nabokov haunts: Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, and W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. We will consider memory, exile, trauma, nostalgia, and identity as we read Nabokov, who saw existence as a “series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.” All readings and discussion in English.

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

Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.

LIT 432 - Theory and Practice of Literary Translation (Seminar)

This seminar addresses theoretical and practical aspects of literary translation, underscoring translation as both a distinctive form of creative writing and a demonstration of cross-cultural and linguistic competencies. Coursework includes regular literary translation, theoretical and historical readings, peer review, and a substantial final project and writing portfolio. The course explores translation across languages and cultures, but also issues of genre, adaptation, register, period, colonial and post-colonial literary and cultural relations, canonicity and innovation, for example.

Satisfies a requirement in the English major.
Satisfies a requirement in the Chinese Language & Literature Major.
Satisfies a requirement in the Russian Langauge and Literature Major.
Counts as an elective in the German Studies major and minor.
Satisfies Hispanic Studies manor and minor requirement(Spring 2023 only)

Prerequisites & Notes
Intermediate competence (one course beyond 201) in at least one language besides English and prior satisfaction of the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.

GRE 103 - Intensive Introductory Greek

For beginners. No prior acquaintance with Greek assumed! Together, we’ll cover the whole of ancient Greek grammar, reading excerpts from Greek literature along the way. By the conclusion of the semester, you will be thoroughly prepared for GRE 201, which fulfills he college’s language requirement and serves as gateway to advanced courses in ancient Greek.

Requires participation in AT sessions. Meets five days a week.
[Equivalent to Greek 101 and 102, counting for two courses.]

 

Prerequisites & Notes
(Offered annually, Spring only)

GRE 201 - Intermediate Greek

This course fulfills the college’s language requirement and is your gateway to advanced Greek at Davidson. Together, we’ll review the language’s grammar, read and discuss a variety of excerpts in prose from selected prose authors (e.g., Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon and Plato) and explore concepts such as semantics, pronunciation and translation.

Prof. Toumazou will be on campus, and he welcomes the opportunity to meet outside of class- both in-person and digitally-throughout the semester.

Fulfills the foreign language requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
GRE 103 or placement test. (Offered annually. Fall only.)

GRE 211 - Greek Epic: Apollonius

Apollonius’ Argonautica, the sole extant example of epic from the vibrant Greek Hellenistic Period, charts the tumultuous journey of Jason and the Argonauts to claim the legendary Golden Fleece from the far-off realm of Colchis, on the coast of the Black Sea. We will read Book 3 of the poem in Greek. Students will focus on developing reading skills and reviewing grammar, syntax, and meter. We will also investigate the poem’s socio-cultural contexts and the eclecticism of the Hellenistic Period. Finally, students will read the rest of the epic in English and explore Apollonius’ pivotal place in the larger Greco-Roman epic tradition. As the only complete epic poem written between Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Roman epic the Aeneid, the Argonautica is deeply indebted to its epic predecessors and an enormous influence on its successors. Consequently, a major goal of the course is to gain an understanding of the poem’s themes, style, and intertextuality to appreciate its place in the genre and how it was received in antiquity.

This course is repeatable for credit.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Counts towards the Classical Languages and Literature major and as an elective for the Classical Studies major.
Counts towards the interdisciplinary minor in Global Literary Theory.
Satisfies Language requirement.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
GRE 201 or placement test. Students who have taken a GRE course beyond 201 should enroll in this course as GRE 311.   

GRE 213 - Pindar’s Songs of Victory

Coming soon!

Prerequisites & Notes
GRE 201 or placement test. Students who have alrleady taken a GRE course beyond 201 should enroll in this course as GRE 313. (Not offered in 2019-2020)

GRE 218 - New Testament Greek

Studying the New Testament gives students an opportunity to (1) read in the original Greek the collection of books and letters that is the most frequently read of all ancient texts today; (2) learn about the history of the Greek language as it spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean after Alexander the Great’s conquests; (3) study and practice the principles of textual criticism, principles that apply to editing any ancient text, as we read a text that has a richer manuscript tradition than any Classical text, with more than 5,700 manuscripts.

This year we will begin with the book of Acts, a narrative about the spread of Christianity into the Greco-Roman world, before sampling the gospels, the letters, and the apocalyptic book of Revelation.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Counts towards the Classical Languages and Literature major and as an elective for the Classical Studies major.
Counts towards the interdisciplinary minor in Global Literary Theory.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
GRE 201 or placement test. Students who have already taken a GRE course beyond 201 should enroll in this course as GRE 318. 
 

GRE 231 - TBD

GRE 233 - Euripides’ Bacchae

Coming soon!
 

 

Prerequisites & Notes
GRE 201 or placement test. 
Students who have already taken a GRE course beyond 201 should enroll in this course as GRE 333. (Not offered in 2021-2022)
 

GRE 311 - Adv Greek Epic: Apollonius

Apollonius’ Argonautica, the sole extant example of epic from the vibrant Greek Hellenistic Period, charts the tumultuous journey of Jason and the Argonauts to claim the legendary Golden Fleece from the far-off realm of Colchis, on the coast of the Black Sea. We will read Book 3 of the poem in Greek. Students will focus on developing reading skills and reviewing grammar, syntax, and meter. We will also investigate the poem’s socio-cultural contexts and the eclecticism of the Hellenistic Period. Finally, students will read the rest of the epic in English and explore Apollonius’ pivotal place in the larger Greco-Roman epic tradition. As the only complete epic poem written between Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Roman epic the Aeneid, the Argonautica is deeply indebted to its epic predecessors and an enormous influence on its successors. Consequently, a major goal of the course is to gain an understanding of the poem’s themes, style, and intertextuality to appreciate its place in the genre and how it was received in antiquity.

This course is repeatable for credit.
Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Counts towards the Classical Languages and Literature major and as an elective for the Classical Studies major.
Counts towards the interdisciplinary minor in Global Literary Theory.
Satisfies Language requirement.

Prerequisites & Notes
GRE 201 or placement test. Students who have not yet taken a GRE course beyond 201 may enroll in this course as GRE 211.  

GRE 313 - Pindar’s Songs of Victory

GRE 318 - New Testament Greek

Studying the New Testament gives students an opportunity to (1) read in the original Greek the collection of books and letters that is the most frequently read of all ancient texts today; (2) learn about the history of the Greek language as it spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean after Alexander the Great’s conquests; (3) study and practice the principles of textual criticism, principles that apply to editing any ancient text, as we read a text that has a richer manuscript tradition than any Classical text, with more than 5,700 manuscripts.

This year we will begin with the book of Acts, a narrative about the spread of Christianity into the Greco-Roman world, before sampling the gospels, the letters, and the apocalyptic book of Revelation.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Counts towards the Classical Languages and Literature major and as an elective for the Classical Studies major.
Counts towards the interdisciplinary minor in Global Literary Theory.

Prerequisites & Notes
GRE 201 or placement test.
 

GRE 331 - Adv To Be Determined

GRE 333 - Euripides’ Bacchae

Coming Soon!

Prerequisites & Notes
Cross-listed with GRE 233.
GRE 201 or placement test.
(Not offered in 2021-2022)
 

GRE 366 - Greek Philosophers: Plato’s Gorgias

Detailed reading of Plato’s Gorgias in Greek - mostly! - with interpretation and appreciation of the author’s literary and narrative qualities. Readings from secondary literature will provide a more contextualized understanding of intellectual history in Classical Athens, particularly the rise and development of rhetoric.

Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Counts towards the Classical Languages and Literature major and as an elective for the Classical Studies major.
Counts towards the interdisciplinary minor in Global Literary Theory.

Prerequisites & Notes
GRE 201 or placement test. (Fall)

GRE 399 - Independent Study in Greek

GRE 499 - Senior Thesis

HIS 112 - Medieval Europe

Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement.

HIS 119 - England to 1688