English

This seminar course studies how Shakespeare used sources from magical theory, folklore, myth and literature to create the fantasy worlds of two of his most famous plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest.  The class will watch performances of these plays, and students will watch other performances on their own and write critical analyses of them.
 

The course also explores early modern drama, including Elizabethan theatres like Shakespeare’s Globe and the Blackfriars. The class engages with secondary reading on the myths and stories that influenced Shakespeare's writing, including Ovid and popular English fairy stories. The course also discusses magic and spellcasting; folklore and mythology; travel literature; colonialism, and gender and sexuality.

Other secondary reading will include parts of other Shakespeare plays (Love’s Labour’s Lost, Macbeth, All’s Well That Ends Well) and the works of other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights including Robert Greene (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay) and George Chapman (Bussy d’Ambois).

This course explores the theoretical and practical concepts of the varieties of the English language around the world. It discusses traits of these varieties of English such as vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. Topics include: language, dialect, and accent; regulatory varieties and vernacular varieties; English as a native language, a second language, and a foreign language; dominant normative varieties-- American English and British English; other national varieties; vernacular varieties in the English-speaking world; English as a second language-- Africa and Asia; English as a foreign language for international communication; models of English for teaching foreigners.

Through practice-based workshops and seminars, the course explores the methodologies of writing fiction from a writer's perspective, and focuses on form, structure, and narrative technique. The course is delivered through weekly creative writing exercises and immersion in a process of peer critique, as well as the critical analysis of sample texts.

A defining feature of Shakespeare’s creations is their capacity to be enjoyed and understood in strikingly different ways when encountered through different media. In this course students explore this protean quality by considering two great works in three distinct forms: as literature, in theatrical performance, and on film. The plays selected introduce students to the range of instruments in Shakespeare’s stylistic tool kit, and to the specific ways in which he used these. Students also learn what exactly, in the context of Shakespeare studies, we mean by "texts" and how these should be examined. Students also consider the kinds of meaning that are created when the same plays are enacted on the boards of the specific London theatre for which Shakespeare wrote and in which he envisaged them being staged. Students compare their own interpretations with the choices made in specific Globe productions and gain insights into original performance conditions. Finally, students explore how, in the 20th century, directors transformed the meanings of those same narratives through adapting them into the medium of cinema. This involves comparing dramatic language with filmic imagery, considering the transition from playscript to screenplay, and exploring how Britain’s most celebrated cultural export has been creatively reinterpreted in the US, Europe and Asia.

In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer famously makes his Wife of Bath protest at the unfair ways women are represented by men. In this course students look at how women were actively involved in literary production in the medieval period, whether as patrons and audiences whose stated or perceived needs shaped particular compositions, or as themselves the authors of texts. The course begins with the female-voiced poems in the 10th-century Exeter Book and extend through the 15th century, covering texts in Latin, French, and English. 

The Internship Workforce course provides students with an overview of working in the United Kingdom. The course looks at the changing organizational structures of work in Britain. It examines the social and economic changes that affect the workplace in the UK. Topics covered include: sociology of work, trade unions, oppression at work, generational changes at work, and the future of work. An internship while studying in London provides an opportunity to experience a “hands on” working situation and a different perspective on the workplace and working practices, while developing professional skills.