English

The ability to communicate scientific information well is important if one is to disseminate scientific ideas clearly and accurately. Scientific communication involves more than just writing. It also involves the ability to read, analyze, understand, and critique scientific subject matter in a knowing way, at an appropriate depth and breadth, and with an appropriate style for an intended audience. Within this broad context, this course guides students through writing a scientific research paper, as applied to the physical sciences, for an audience of their peers. Students write about one real physical phenomenon such as one of Hooke’s law, Torricelli’s law, projectile motion, the behavior of a pendulum, or some other suitable phenomenon. Such investigation is supported by simulations and/or practical experiments.

This course explores the thrilling and cataclysmic changes of the 17th century through the prism of poetry. As England came to grips with a fundamental change in the national religion; saw civil war pitting neighbor against neighbor and family against family; witnessed a steep rise in women authors and the emergence of modern science, the country’s values were challenged, overturned and re-formed. The course explore how poets responded to these intense changes. The course explores a wide range of writers, from John Milton and Aphra Behn to Aemilia Lanyer and Robert Hooke. Students analyze the brilliant wit, rich imagery, and evocative forms of the period’s poems and ask what they tell us about the historical conditions of their production, and vice versa. Does political poetry have a particular style? Can poetry propel revolution as well as respond to it? Students investigate the models that poets called upon to write about these unprecedented events. 

This course explores the viability of the Afro-Gothic as a distinctive sub-genre of the postcolonial Gothic. It seeks to answer the question "What is the Afro-Gothic?" through a historicization of the concept Gothic in relation to narratives about, and by, continental and diasporic Africans. In the postcolonial Gothic, the classic tropes of the Gothic—incarceration within labyrinthine structures, tyrannical patriarchs, histories of hidden brutalities, suppressed and deadly secrets, haunting by the past oppressed and abused, and appearances of ghosts and other un-dead figures—are appropriated to exposes legacies of colonial trauma. Our more focused inquiry stems from the peculiar racialization of the Gothic during the 19th century, when Gothic darkness became increasingly associated with African blackness. 

Experimental writing is often counterposed to writing that emphasizes voice, experience, and identity. Exploring the relationships between literary form and subjectivity, between abstract systemic forces and our concrete lived experiences of the world, the course considers how contemporary writers have turned to experimental techniques to channel modes of solidarity, joy and refusal, and to make legible forms of gendered and racial violence. In this way, literary experimentalisms have also provided crucial tools for anti-racist and feminist critique. But what makes a literary text experimental? What does experimental writing have to say about class? And what does it mean to ‘queer’ a text? Asking these and other questions, the course will considers what the literary critic Anthony Reed calls "literature’s means of expanding the domain of the intelligible and thinkable."

Terror expands the soul, said Ann Radcliffe. Does it? Why did Gothic begin in the 18th century? How does it work as a powerful, disturbing, dangerous genre? How did it challenge philosophers and aesthetic thinkers? What can we learn from parodies and satires of Gothic? What questions does it stage and why do they continue to compel and fascinate? Could there be a "Female Gothic"? This course explores a selection of Gothic texts – poems and novels - to investigate the genre's variety of forms and its appeal to readers. 

The focus of this course is on critically evaluating the place and meaning of American popular culture in contemporary life. In order to do so, students look at the complex historical and transnational roots of American popular culture. Students also discuss how American ideals, both constitutional (such as freedom of the press, and also the right to keep and bear arms) and mythic (the American Dream, the frontier, individualism) have influenced the place and content of popular culture in the US.

Through the study of some of the most controversial and celebrated examples of what may be termed as utopian, anti-utopian, and dystopian literature, this course explores some key elements of utopian/dystopian/anti-utopian literature. The course examines themes such as the control and manipulation of language, as well as religion, history, and gender and considers the way in which the contemporary can be explored in an imagined future. Examples of texts studied for this course include Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s HERLAND (1915), set in an isolated society made up entirely of women and engages with issues relating to gender identity in the early part of the 20th century. Zamyatin's WE (1924) presents a totalitarian society, "OneState", and is arguably the archetype of the modern dystopia. BRAVE NEW WORLD (1931) in an imagined future engages with questions of identity, mass production, and homogenization emerging post World War One. 

This writing-intensive course provide preparatory skills in written communication that will support students in their multidisciplinary academic work throughout the degree and beyond, enabling them to develop as a confident and effective writer who can tailor their writing for a range of audiences. Throughout the term, in small-group writing workshops, students write and reflect on formative short pieces and will receive tutor and peer feedback; students then edit and redraft their writing to compile a summative portfolio. Moreover, the course provides opportunity for students to engage in detail with an interdisciplinary topic in the Arts, Humanities, or Social Sciences, led by a tutor from the Liberal Arts core team with specialist expertise in this area. 

This course explores intersections between theatre and politics in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will be introduced to a range of political performance forms and the debates that surround them, from the political theatre of George Bernard Shaw, to the epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht, to the provocative performances of the Black Revolutionary Theatre Movement, to the feminist performances of women’s theatre groups in the 1970s, to the recent rise of documentary and verbatim theatre. In addition, students will consider the theatricality of political protests, from die-ins to zombie walks, as well as recent protest reenactments by artists, including Jeremy Deller’s miners’ strike reenactment, The Battle of Orgreave (2001). Moving chronologically through the semester, the class will focus each week on a particular performance form, engaging with a selection of performance texts and relevant scholarship. By the end of the semester, students will be familiar with a number of influential practitioners and theorists of political theatre and performance; you will be knowledgeable about the contributions of playwrights and theatre-makers to a range of political movements; and students will be able to engage in informed debate about how various theatre and performance forms act politically. 

Through this course, students examine the cultural construction of time and temporality in the early modern period, closely reading one of Shakespeare’s plays in each week of the course. Students take an historicist approach, working toward defining an early modern temporal consciousness. Students consider the temporal conditions and contexts of early modern performance - the temporal experience of the theatre for playwrights, actors, and audience members - engaging with different critical approaches to Shakespeare’s plays that are themselves often reliant on specific constructions of time (e.g. Feminism, New Historicism, Performance Studies, Postcolonialism, Presentism, Queer Studies etc.).