English

This course offers an introduction to translation from English to Spanish. It explores the theoretical and technical framework that underpins the practice of translation. Students develop translation skills through hands-on practice and application of knowledge, procedures, and techniques learned in class.

This course is a history of the personal and institution library, focusing on Renaissance Europe, a pivotal period of enormous cultural, religious, and technological changes. Students examine some masterworks—Petrarch, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Cervantes, Marlowe, and the visual arts. Additional topics include other sites of knowledge such as the cabinet of curiosities, museums, anatomy galleries and gardens and the questions of how knowledge is created and destroyed? How did people cope with information overload in the past? The course requires students to take prerequisites.

The course examines the appeal of science fiction and fantasy as a serious fictional engagement with consensual sense of reality. It addresses fantasy, speculative fiction, and science fiction as forms of narrative engaged in “world-building” and “word-shaping,” studying such fictional constructs as forms of sociological and anthropological knowledge. It also examines the relation between the “strange” and the “real” in terms of the shared and the antithetical elements that relate s/f to realism.

The course begins with an introduction to public speaking for students to develop confidence and overcome fear when speaking before a group. Focusing on informative speech and persuasive speech, the course follows a "learn by doing" approach and all members of the class have many opportunities to test and develop their presentation skills before the entire class.

This course provides instruction and practice in the art of philosophical reflection and the skill of critical argument through the study of some of the core (Western) texts in the humanities and social sciences. While the focus is on analytical reading and critical thinking, there is an equal emphasis on expressing and presenting one’s ideas in writing, as well as engaging in dialogue on how to interpret and explain concepts and the practices they capture. 

This course explores relations in lexical and phrasal semantics. It discusses basic semantic concepts and different types of word and sentence meanings. This course focuses on semantic and pragmatic processes using the most important theoretical models in semantics. It offers a contrastive analysis of English and other languages.

The course explores how drama, theatre, and performance reflect and effect social change. Students think about the relationship of the individual and the community in relation to wider social or institutional structures. The course brings together historical perspectives about drama, theatre, and performance and urgent issues in the present. Key skills students gain include working with theatre texts, historical understanding, and critical analysis about social and cultural change.

This course is a non-academic creative writing course intended to foster student creativity through the practice of creative expression in written English. Topics include creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction. Students analyze readings from a writer's perspective to heighten awareness of features common to successful creative writing. Students adapt these features to their own work as appropriate, using a process approach that encourages thoughtful peer review and revision for personal expression.  

The goals of this class are to articulate eloquently in English about creative texts, write in multiple genres that demonstrate an engagement with course readings and discussions, and enhance creativity and critical thinking by synthesizing feedback into one's own work. 

Students consider a range of Shakespeare's plays (comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies, and romances) from different stages of his career, analyzing the playwright's stagecraft, his use of language and his reworking of traditional forms for the commercial stage. While students explore some recent adaptations for stage and screen, the course also focuses on the plays as produced in their original historical and cultural contexts. The course familiarizes students with Renaissance drama's negotiation of contested social and political issues at the turn of the 17th century. Students investigate the social processes of the theatre – notably the playhouses used by Shakespeare's company (the Theatre, the Globe and Blackfriars) – and focus on the interplay of Shakespearean texts and their performance in the production of meaning.

This lecture series provides an introductory, selective, and exemplary overview of English literary history from the Middle Ages to the present. Selected English literature texts from Chaucer to Kureishi (and others) are presented in their contexts and interpreted in their specific aesthetics and as representatives of the respective epoch.