The College Catalogue

First-Year Seminars

For a full description of first-year seminars, see the First-Year Seminar section.

17 {1017} c. The Sexual Life of Colonialism: Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial World. Fall 2012. Durba Mitra. (Same as Gender and Women’s Studies 16 {1016} and History 27 {1032}.)

20 {1034} c. Lesbian Personae. Spring 2013. Peter Coviello. (Same as English 10 {1034} and Gender and Women’s Studies 23 {1034}.)

27 {1027} c. From Flowers of Evil to Pretty Woman: Prostitutes in Modern Western Culture. Fall 2012. Jill S. Smith. (Same as Gender and Women’s Studies 27 {1027} and German 27 {1027}.)

28 {1044} c. Queer Gardens. Fall 2012. Terri Nickel. (Same as English 28 {1044}.)

[29 {1029} c. Historians, Comediennes, Storytellers: Women Filmmakers in the German-Speaking Countries. (Same as Film Studies 29 {1029}, Gender and Women’s Studies 29 {1029}, and German 29 {1029}.)]

Introductory, Intermediate, and Advanced Courses

116 {1116} c. Christian Sexual Ethics. Fall 2012. Elizabeth Pritchard.

An examination of the themes, varieties, and conflicts of Christian teachings and practices regarding sex and sexuality. Source materials include the Bible, historical analyses, Church dogmatics, legal cases, and ethnographic studies. Topics include celibacy and marriage, the development and status of sexual orientations, natural law, conversion therapy, reproductive rights and technologies, and comparative religious ethics. (Same as Gender and Women’s Studies 117 {1117} and Religion 116 {1116}.)

200 {2010} c. Sex and the Word: Psychoanalysis and Literature. Fall 2012. Peter Coviello.

Seminar. In its founding, psychoanalysis—Freud’s ambivalently “scientific” framework for explicating desire—was an art of interpretation. Examines the things sex, literature, and interpretation might have to say to one another; particularly close attention paid to how psychoanalytic reading has developed as a vocabulary for describing the enlivening errancies of literary artifacts. Writers likely to include Freud, James, Cather, Larsen, Baldwin, Roth, and others. (Same as English 265 {2001}.)

Prerequisite: One first-year seminar or 100-level course in English.

201 {2001} - ESD. Gay and Lesbian Studies. Every year. Fall 2012. David Collings.

An introduction to the materials, major themes, and defining methodologies of gay and lesbian studies. Considers in detail both the most visible contemporary dilemmas involving homosexuality (queer presence in pop culture, civil rights legislation, gay-bashing, AIDS, identity politics) as well as the great variety of interpretive approaches these dilemmas have, in recent years, summoned into being. Such approaches borrow from the scholarly practices of literary and artistic exegesis, history, political science, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis—to name only a few. An abiding concern over the semester is to discover how a discipline so variously influenced conceives of and maintains its own intellectual borders. Course materials include scholarly essays, journalism, films, novels, and a number of lectures by visiting faculty.

202 {2002} c. Victorian Urban Narratives. Fall 2012. Aviva Briefel.

Seminar. An exploration of London as space and character in Victorian literary narratives. Considers such topics as the intersections between identity and urban setting; the relationship between genre and literary space; and the overlaps in mappings of cities and narratives. Consideration of literary and cultural theory and criticism is central. Authors may include Conrad, Dickens, Dixon, Doyle, Gissing, Marsh, and Wilde. (Same as English 208 {2002} and Gender and Women’s Studies 202 {2202}.)

Prerequisite: One first-year seminar or 100-level course in English.

210 {2110} b - ESD, IP. Global Sexualities, Local Desires. Fall 2012. Krista Van Vleet.

Explores the variety of practices, performances, and ideologies of sexuality through a cross-cultural perspective. Focusing on contemporary anthropological scholarship on sexuality and gender, asks whether Western conceptions of “sexuality,” “sex,” and “gender” help us understand the lives and desires of people in other social and cultural contexts. Topics may include Brazilian transgendered prostitutes (travestí), intersexuality, and the naturalization of sex; “third gendered” individuals and religion in Native North America, India, and Chile; language and the performance of sexuality by drag queens in the United States; transnationalism and the global construction of “gay” identity in Indonesia; lesbian and gay kinship; AIDS in Cuba and Brazil; and Japanese Takarazuka theater. In addition to ethnographic examples of alternative genders and sexualities (so called “third genders” and non-heterosexual sexualities) in both Western and non-Western contexts, also presents the major theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches used by anthropologists to understand sexuality, and considers how shifts in feminist and queer politics have also required anthropologists to focus on other social differences such as class, race, ethnicity, and post-colonial relations. (Same as Anthropology 210 {2110} and Gender and Women’s Studies 210 {2210}.)

Prerequisite: Anthropology 101 or Sociology 101, or permission of the instructor.

212 {2120} c. Gender, Sexuality, and Schooling. Fall 2012. Doris Santoro.

Schools are sites where young people learn to “do” gender and sexuality through direct instruction, the hidden curriculum, and peer-to-peer learning. In schools, gender and sexuality are challenged, constrained, constructed, normalized, and performed. Explores instructional and curricular reforms that have attempted to address students’ and teachers’ sexual identities and behavior. Examines the effects of gender and sexual identity on students’ experience of school, their academic achievement, and the work of teaching. Topics may include Compulsory Heterosexuality in the Curriculum; The Gender of the Good Student and Good Teacher; Sex Ed in an Age of Abstinence. (Same as Education 212 {2212} and Gender and Women’s Studies 282 {2282}.)

Prerequisite: Education 101, Gay and Lesbian Studies 201, or Gender and Women’s Studies 101.

229 {2681} c - ESD. Science, Sex, and Politics. Spring 2014. David Hecht.

Examines the intersection of science, sex, and politics in twentieth-century United States history. Issues of sex and sexuality have been contested terrain over the past hundred years, as varying conceptions of gender, morality, and “proper” sexual behavior have become politically and socially controversial. Explores the way that science has impacted these debates—often as a tool by which activists of varying political and intellectual persuasions have attempted to use notions of scientific objectivity and authority to advance their agendas. Explores debates over issues such as birth control, eugenics, abortion, and the “gay gene.” (Same as Gender and Women’s Studies 230 {2230} and History 229 {2201}.)

240 {2400} c. Loves of the Plants: Botany and Desire in the Eighteenth Century. Spring 2013. Terri Nickel.

Invasive foreigners, licentious women, polygamous tribes, hermaphrodites—these were some of the personae eighteenth-century men and women imagined in their encounters with plants. Explores how the introduction of new flora collected through global exploration and Linnaeus’s invention of sexual taxonomy reshaped eighteenth-century aesthetic practices, including poetry, fiction, art, and garden design. Traces how writers of the era mapped cultural ideas about nationality, sex, and gender onto the natural world. Authors may include Marvell, Addison, Pope, Cowper, Garrick, Erasmus Darwin, Shenstone, Delany, Hannah More, Sarah Scott, Walpole, and Austen. (Same as English 234 {2303} and Environmental Studies 239 {2439}.)

Prerequisite: One first-year seminar or 100-level course in English.

Note: This course fulfills the pre-1800 literature requirement for English majors.

244 {2404} c. Victorian Crime. Every other year. Fall 2012. Aviva Briefel.

Investigates literary representations of criminality in Victorian England. Of central concern is the construction of social deviancy and criminal types; images of disciplinary figures, structures, and institutions; and the relationship between generic categories (the detective story, the Gothic tale, the sensation novel) and the period’s preoccupation with transgressive behavior and crime. Authors may include Braddon, Collins, Dickens, Doyle, Stevenson, and Wells. (Same as English 244 {2404} and Gender and Women’s Studies 244 {2244}.)

Prerequisite: One first-year seminar or 100-level course in English or gender and women’s studies, or Gay and Lesbian Studies 201.

245 {2451} c. Modernism/Modernity. Every other year. Fall 2013. Marilyn Reizbaum.

Examines the cruxes of the “modern,” and the term’s shift into a conceptual category rather than a temporal designation. Although not confined to a particular national or generic rubric, takes British works as a focus. Organized by movements or critical formations of the modern, i.e., modernisms, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, cultural critique. Readings of critical literature in conjunction with primary texts. Authors/directors/works may include T. S. Eliot, Joyce’s Dubliners, Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Sontag’s On Photography, W. G. Sebald’s The Natural History of Destruction, Ian McEwen’s Enduring Love, Stevie Smith, Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic, and Coetzee’s Disgrace. (Same as English 245 {2451} and Gender and Women’s Studies 247 {2247}.)

Prerequisite: One first-year seminar or 100-level course in English, gay and lesbian studies, or gender and women’s studies.

265 {2653} c. Interracial Narratives. Fall 2012. Guy Mark Foster.

Examines the stories that Americans have told about intimate relationships that cross the color line in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century imaginative and theoretical texts. Considers how these stories have differed according to whether the participants are heterosexual or homosexual, men or women, Black, White, Asian, Latino, or indigenous. Explores the impact historically changing notions of race, gender, sexuality, and U.S. citizenship have had on the production of these stories. Texts include literature, film, Internet dating sites, and contemporary debates around mixed-race identity and the United States census. (Same as Africana Studies 205 {2653}, English 209 {2653}, and Gender and Women’s Studies 283 {2283}.)

Prerequisite: One first-year seminar or 100-level course in English.

266 {2266} c - ESD. The City as American History. Fall 2013. Matthew Klingle.

Seminar. America is an urban nation today, yet Americans have had deeply ambivalent feelings toward the city over time. Explores the historical origins of that ambivalence by tracing several overarching themes in American urban history from the seventeenth century to the present. Topics include race and class relations, labor, design and planning, gender and sexual identity, immigration, politics and policy, scientific and technological systems, violence and crime, religion and sectarian disputes, and environmental protection. Discussions revolve around these broad themes, as well as regional distinctions between American cities. Students are required to write several short papers and one longer paper based upon primary and secondary sources. (Same as History 226 {2660}.)

275 {2600} b. Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Eastern Europe. Spring 2013. Kristen Ghodsee.

Seminar. Examines the current scholarship on gender and sexuality in modern Eastern Europe: the countries of the former Soviet Union, the successor states of Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Albania. Focusing on research produced by academics based in the region, examines the dialogue and interchange of ideas between East and West, and how knowledge about the region is dialectically produced by both Western feminists and East European gender studies scholars. Topics include the women question before 1989; nationalism, fertility, and population decline; patterns and expectations for family formation; the politics of EU gender mainstreaming; visual representations in television and film; social movements; work; romance and intimacy; spirituality; and the status of academic gender studies in the region. (Same as Gender and Women’s Studies 275 {2600}.)

Prerequisite: Gender and Women’s Studies 101.

291–294 {2970–2973}. Intermediate Independent Study in Gay and Lesbian Studies. The Program.

299 {2999}. Intermediate Collaborative Study in Gay and Lesbian Studies. The Program.

310 {3310} c. Gay and Lesbian Cinema. Spring 2013. Tricia Welsch.

Considers both mainstream and independent films made by or about gay men and lesbians. Four intensive special topics each semester, which may include classic Hollywood stereotypes and euphemisms; the power of the box office; coming of age and coming out; the social problem film; key figures; writing history through film; queer theory and queer aesthetics; revelation and revaluations of film over time; autobiography and documentary; the AIDS imperative. Writing intensive; attendance at evening film screenings is required. (Same as Film Studies 310 {3310} and Gender and Women’s Studies 310 {3310}.)

Prerequisite: One course in film studies or permission of the instructor.

316 {3000} c. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Spring 2013. William Watterson.

Close reading of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets and the appended narrative poem “A Lover’s Complaint,” which accompanies them in the editio princeps of 1609. Required texts include the New Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997) edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones, and Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1998). Critical issues examined include the dating of the sonnets, the order in which they appear, their rhetorical and architectural strategies, and their historical and autobiographical content. (Same as English 316 {3000}.)

Prerequisite: One 200-level course in English or gay and lesbian studies, or permission of the instructor.

Note: This course fulfills the pre-1800 literature requirement for English majors.

318 {3018} c. Oscar Wilde. Spring 2013. Aviva Briefel.

An in-depth study of Wilde’s fiction, poetry, drama, and critical essays within the context of fin-de-siècle British culture. Topics include decadence, aestheticism, dandyism, queer performance, and the Wilde trials. Also examines Wilde’s position within current literary criticism. (Same as English 318 {3018}.)

Prerequisite: One 200-level course in English or gay and lesbian studies, or permission of the instructor.

346 {3346} c. Philosophy of Gender: Sex and Love. Fall 2012. Sarah Conly.

Issues of sex and love preoccupy us but may not be well understood. Considers what “counts” as having sex, why that matters, and what it is to love someone. These and other relevant topics explored through readings and discussion. (Same as Gender and Women’s Studies 346 {3346} and Philosophy 346 {3346}.)