English

The course discusses contemporary U.S. American graphic memoirs, exploring how comics serve as a powerful medium for autobiographical storytelling. It examines how artists narrate personal and intimate experiences through the interplay of image and text. Students analyze how image and text work together to visualize trauma, self-representation, memory, and resilience—and learn what makes the comic medium such an affective space for narrating stories of illness, displacement, queerness, race, and coming of age. The exploration focuses on both the form and content of these works, analyzing how issues of gender, class, and race are portrayed within these narratives and how they engage with broader U.S. American cultural, social, and political contexts. Readings include a diverse range of voices and styles, from graphic memoirs like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, to more recent works by George Takei, Cece Bell, Nora Krug, and Kindra Neely. As part of the course, students have the opportunity to create their own short graphic memoirs, using accessible tools such as Making Comics by Lynda Barry, Canva, or StoryboardThat. This activity is planned to invite students to experiment with visual storytelling and reflect on their own experiences—no artistic background or drawing skills required.

This course familiarizes students with 20th-century English-language literature through analyzing texts belonging to diverse literary genres: poetry, drama, and prose. It covers works by Joseph Conrad; Henry James; W.B. Yeats; James Joyce; T.S. Eliot; Virginia Woolf; Samuel Beckett; W.H. Auden; Seamus Heaney, and Moya Cannon.

This course explores how poetry can address sustainability issues relevant to participants' professional, personal, and academic lives. Participants are encouraged to use poetry to deepen their connection with sustainability-related themes that are meaningful to them. It aims to use poetry's emotional impact to transform readers into active agents of change. The course extends poetry's potential beyond the literature classroom, encouraging participants to decenter human perspectives through the analysis of poems. The course provides a basic introduction to the tools required for analyzing poetry and facilitates the application of these to poems on various sustainability topics. Concepts from poetry analysis that are covered include the use of figurative language, diction, tone, as well as form and structure. Additionally, the course explores poetry and affective responses by exploring how poetry engages emotions. The course delves into both individual and collaborative responses to poetry and how such responses reshape perceptions of sustainability issues through an affective/reader-response lens. A creative-writing component is also integrated into the course. Participants use the writing of poetry to explore sustainability themes.

This seminar investigates how different recent adaptations engage with the classical nostos epic. During the semester, students discuss the following reworkings of Homer’s Odyssey: Ethan Coen and Joel Coen’s film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe (2001), Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), and Amor Towles’s The Lincoln Highway (2021).

This course examines representative narrative works from various periods of Western civilization, analyzing their overarching themes and close textual details to highlight the distinctive features of Western narrative literature and its evolution throughout history.

This course explores some of the most common techniques, forms, and modes of poetry and develops students' practice as poets. The first half of the semester focuses on aspects of prosody such as metre and rhythm, rhyme and form, register, image, and metaphor, allowing students to reimagine these practices from the point of view of the writing, as well as the analysis, of poetry. The second half of the course concentrates on some of the main genres of poetry, with students encouraged to experiment with their own versions or anti-versions of these modes. The first hour each week is spent on an aspect of poetics, while the second hour is spent workshopping student poems. By the end of the course students have developed in their poetic practice and furthered their oral skills through the recitation of their poems, analysis of other students’ work in workshop, and through weekly discussion of set texts. 

The course examines the genre of science fiction from 1945 to the present. Students learn about the development of the genre, major works within it, and productive theoretical and methodological approaches to it.

The course offers a unique opportunity to learn one of the official languages of Scotland. Students develop simple strategies to learn languages and gain confidence in holding a basic everyday conversation. This course is suitable for students with no previous knowledge of the language. Students achieve the equivalent of the A1 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR)and develop their confidence in holding a basic everyday conversation. Students develop these basic linguistic skills through a variety of comprehension and production activities. The course focuses on language that is required for communicating in real everyday situations, such as introducing oneself and others and talking about the daily routine. The course includes autonomous learning activities, which enable students to practice and consolidate their skills.

The world's knowledge is defined by hybridity between oral traditions and written texts. This course is an introduction to Scotland's rich oral/aural traditions of song, storytelling, instrumental music, dance, and folklore. Key concepts and theories relating to the interaction between orality and print, transmission (sharing) of oral material, and intangible cultural heritage as defined by UNESCO are explored in the context of modern (cultural) ethnology. Students learn fieldwork techniques, archival research skills and oral history interviewing. Themes can include children's song, ballads, political song, Robert Burns and Walter Scott, Highland bagpipes, Gaelic folktales, and Scottish legends, and special material is drawn from printed collections and the School of Scottish Studies Archives.

This course explores Berlin through the lens of émigré and exile literature, examining works by writers who either left Berlin or found refuge within it. Through close readings of texts spanning from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to contemporary works, students analyze how experiences of exile, migration, and displacement shape literary imagination and cultural identity. The course moves through Berlin's key historical moments—from the Russian émigré communities of the 1920s, through the forced exile of Jewish writers, to post-war Turkish-German literature and contemporary refugee narratives. By pairing literary texts with theoretical frameworks and conducting original ethnographic research, students investigate how different waves of migration have transformed both Berlin's physical spaces and its literary landscape. Special attention is paid to how writers represent specific Berlin neighborhoods and how various communities have shaped the city's cultural geography. Through engagement with memoir, fiction, poetry, and first-hand accounts, students explore themes of memory, nostalgia, linguistic displacement, cultural adaptation, and the evolving relationship between place and identity in émigré writing.