English

From an ecocritical approach, this course explores the ways in which literature and culture represent, and interact with, the natural world, ecological consciousness, and social transformation. It examines how these issues and concerns are reflected in literary texts. This course also discusses a variety of critical approaches and literary responses to the period commonly referred to as the Anthropocence/Capitalocene, considering how literature can become a tool to promote environmental sustainability, multispecies dialogues, and social justice.

This course studies the history of English literature, exploring key texts from each literary period, and examines English literary texts from cultural and social perspectives. In particular, the course analyzes literary classics such as Beowulf and works by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and Kazuo Ishiguro, situating them in their cultural and social contexts.

This course examines the celebrated Chinese novel Journey to the West - the story about the dispossessed, marginalized, and demonized, Journey to the West exemplifies a sort of plurilingual, multicultural cosmopolitanism that is deeply resonate with the world today. Drawing on recent movements in literary studies—ecocriticism, gender and sexuality, food studies, animal-human interspecies interaction, the bureaucratic turn—students explore in the text English translation and study its global reception and why the novel continues to be popular.

This course introduces students to the world of poetry, which includes both composition: inspiration, methods, forms and reception: reviewing poetry, statements of poetics, writing for poetry outlets, and public readings. Students examine shifting conventions, evaluation, and how poets write about poetry. Coursework involves a combination of written assignments, peer workshops, and public readings.

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.