Filtered HSS Courses (2026-27)

Marvels flourish at the boundaries of literary invention, religious belief, and scientific inquiry, challenging assumptions about natural processes and expected outcomes. From Grendel, the monstrous foe of Beowulf, to Satan, Milton's charismatic antihero, this seminar examines the uses of the marvelous in a variety of texts and genres, including Shakespearian drama, medieval romance, and early travel-writing. Readings may include Beowulf, Marie de France, Chaucer, John Mandeville, Shakespeare, Milton. Not offered 2026-27.

This course considers three periods of major scientific development-the Renaissance, the nineteenth century, and the modern period- to explore the influence new ideas, discoveries, and theories had on the imagination of English writers. We will look at the early modern interplay between magic and science, Romantic and Victorian debates about evolution, and the twentieth-century advent of modern physics as we confront consistent tropes like the mad scientist, the scientist-hero, and the problem of uncertainty. Authors covered may include Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon, Shelley, Darwin, Conan Doyle, Stevenson, Auden, McEwan, and Stoppard. Not offered 2026-2027.

European literature has long been a testing ground for radical new ideas which have come to shape our basic understanding of what it means to be a thinking, speaking and perhaps even autonomous human being. The question of what - if anything - makes us different from animals was debated from numerous points of view: including talking dogs, philosophizing women, bestial men, humanlike beasts, and other creatures that defied the conventions of the time. This course explores some of the key literary texts that shaped this debate and pays careful attention to their cultural environments. Selected readings from Cervantes, La Fontaine, Swift, Rousseau, Buffon, Aikin, and Wollstonecraft, among others. Not offered 2026-2027.

Albert Einstein once said that imagination is everything, and even more important than knowledge. This course invites you to think about - and use - your imagination as we explore how the act of imagining has been viewed over time in the service of memory and creativity, in both the arts and the sciences. Readings will focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and will include Hume, Moritz, Kant, Novalis, Hoffmann, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Not offered 2026-2027.

This course will explore modernist literature's relationship to time. We will identify the methods that modernist narratives use to characterize the experience of lived time, or temporality, such as stream of consciousness, non-linear storytelling, and narrative omissions. We will ask: what challenges does temporal experience pose to clock time and, more broadly, historical time? The course will emphasize the influence of new technologies on modernist representations of time and space, including rural and urban space, and modernism's engagement with changing attitudes regarding race, gender and sexuality. Students will learn about key movements within American modernism, including the Harlem Renaissance, and may opt to analyze modernist literature's relationships to other genres, including music and visual culture. Not offered 2026-2027.

Dream narratives reveal as much about cultural beliefs and superstitions as they do about techniques of narration and interpretation. This course investigates key developments in the literature on dreams and dream interpretations with examples drawn from the Renaissance through the beginning of the nineteenth century. Selected readings from Boccaccio, Descartes, Calderón, Shakespeare, and Diderot, among others. Not offered 2026-2027.

This course considers a set of classic, often-adapted nineteenth-century literary works that helped to pave the way for modern "science fiction," and that simultaneously supplied us with many forms and terms we still use for imagining the monstrous and the horrifying. Why does the depiction of scientific work and scientists so often shade into the terrain of nightmare in fiction? What separates the "mad scientist" from the ambitious scientist? How and why do the literary inventions of the past still resonate in the present? Works considered may include: Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Coming Race. Not offered 2026-2027.

Narratives of metamorphosis have traditionally used their dramatic subject matter-a radical change of form-as a vehicle for social criticism. This course explores the ways in which twentieth-century writers experiment with the concept of metamorphosis to take on the most pressing political and social issues of their day, including slavery, women's rights, and critiques of capitalist excess. Readings to include Kafka, Garnett, Orwell, Tawada, and Erpenbeck. Not offered 2026-2027.

In this course, we will be considering lying and other types of deception from the point of view of literature and philosophy, with two main goals in mind: 1) to compare cultural practices of deception at various times in European history and 2) to think in general terms about the ability of a literary text to convey truth and falsehood. Can a fictional text be "true" in any meaningful sense, such as a political one? Or, as many people have thought over time, is it more accurate to think about literature as a beautiful lie? Readings will include the legend of Till Eulenspiegel as well as texts by Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Diderot, and those relating to the Ossian controversy. Not offered 2026-2027.

This course studies Latin America's most influential authors in the 20th and 21st centuries, with a focus on short stories and novellas produced by the region's avant-garde and "boom" generations. Authors may include Allende, Bombal, Borges, Garcia Marquez, Quiroga, Poniatowska, and Vargas Llosa. All readings and discussions are in English. Not offered 2026-2027.

Climate change is a narrative as well as a planetary crisis-it transforms the stories we tell about our world. In this class, we will look at works of fiction that speculate on the shifting relationships between humans, society, and the environment, offering both hopeful and sobering possibilities. Through classic and more recent works of climate fiction, or cli-fi, we will explore the dynamics of resilience and vulnerability, hope and fear, that inform the contemporary environmental imagination. Expect readings from authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Ernest Callenbach, Octavia E. Butler, Amitav Ghosh, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Not offered 2026-2027.

Cultural theorist Raymond Williams once said that nature is "perhaps the most complex word in the language." And yet, when we think of nature, certain images probably come to mind-from oceans and rivers to forests and mountain peaks. Here, we will engage a long arc of environmental writing in the United States to investigate the conventions and contradictions of the "natural world." We will consider Transcendentalist and early environmentalist literature, as well as contemporary critiques of the nature-society divide, particularly as it relates to questions of race, class, and gender. Authors include Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Lauret Savoy, among others. Not offered 2026-2027.

Mass immigration and the abolition of slavery transformed the nature of the American workforce in the 19th century. Since then, American labor has been a key arena in which racial division and solidarity have been experienced and negotiated. How did racial hierarchies structure the everyday encounters and struggles of American workers? How did literary writers make sense of these tensions while imagining political alternatives? This class will provide a historical overview of how the interplay between race and labor was contested in 20th-century American literature. Authors covered may include Claude McKay, H. T. Tsiang, Muriel Rukeyser, Carlos Bulosan, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Not offered 2026-2027.

This course focuses on personal narrative and memoir writing by STEM researchers. STEM research strives for objectivity and replicability, and key genres of STEM research writing require that writers repress their subjectivity and individuality. However, a researcher's experience of inquiry is often deeply personal and emotional, and some researchers choose to write about those experiences in personal essays and memoirs. We will analyze a wide variety of this narrative writing, and we will examine connections between the narratives' formal features and the rhetorical effects they might have on readers. Drawing on what we learn, students will compose an excerpt of their own memoir or a stand-alone personal narrative essay. The course will also explore current approaches to spoken storytelling sometimes utilized by researchers, such as the Moth story and the TED talk. Satisfies the Institute scientific writing requirement and oral communications requirements for students in all options. Not offered 2026-2027.

Well before the advent of the Machine Age, literary texts have been populated by various kinds of ingenious automata, often in animal or human form. This course surveys the role of the automaton in literary texts in order to consider how the notion of "artificial life" changes over time, with a focus on the special case of the human machine. Readings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to include texts by la Mettrie, Hoffmann, Kleist, Shelley, Poe, and de l'Isle-Adam. We will conclude with a classic text from the twentieth century: Isaac Asimov's I, Robot. Not offered 2026-2027.

This course offers a tour of major (as well as some minor) genres and works written in Britain prior to 1500. Far from a literary "dark age," the Middle Ages fostered dramatic experiments in narrative form, bequeathing to modern literature some of its best-loved genres and texts. We will practice reading in Middle English-the language of Chaucer and his contemporaries-while we concentrate on the following questions: how did these texts circulate among readers? How do they establish their authority? What kinds of historical and cultural currents to they engage? Texts may include the lives of saints, the confessions of sinners, drama, lyrics, romances, selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Malory's Morte Darthur. Readings will be in Middle and modern English. Not offered 2026-2027.

This course explores how contemporary poets grapple with the most urgent questions of our moment: identity, equality, environmental crisis, and justice. In this class, students will gain confidence in reading, discussing, and writing about contemporary poems and will encounter recent and more distant traditions of protest poetry. We will ask how poetic language articulates questions of embodiment, community, law, and memory. The syllabus will focus in particular on writers of color, including queer and indigenous poets, and will include opportunities to attend local poetry readings. Not offered 2026-2027.

The medieval term romanz designated both a language, French, and a genre, romance, dedicated to the adventures of knights and ladies and the villains, monsters, magic, and miles that stood in their way. This course explores key examples from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, while also examining evolutions in the form. We will consider how romances figured love and desire as well as negotiated questions of law, territory, and cultural difference. Authors and texts may include Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, Gawain and the Green Knight, Arthurian legends, outlaw tales, and hagiography. Not offered 2026-2027.

Madness threatens to dissolve boundaries of the most various kinds: between the human and the inhumane, reality and fantasy, sickness and health. One of the tasks of a literary text is to subdue and contain madness through the construction of rational frameworks. How does a literary text accomplish this? Which strategies, such as the use of irony and humor, are the most effective? What role do insane characters play in literary texts? And when - if ever - should we consider an excess of reason as a kind of madness in its own right? Selected readings from Shakespeare, Voltaire, Goethe, Hoffmann, Büchner, Gogol, and Schnitzler, among others. Not offered 2026-2027.

This class explores the history of sexuality and gender across the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Exploring both literary texts and visual representation, it considers how previous eras and cultures understood embodiment, sexuality, and gender and asks how we, as modern readers and viewers, approach these questions across the distance of centuries. We will read across a wide range of literature, including theology, philosophy, fiction, romance, and spiritual biography, and examine manuscript illustrations and other early visual media. Questions we will take up include the following: how did writers and artists construct the "naturalness" or "unnaturalness" of particular bodies and bodily acts? How did individuals understand the relationship between their own bodies and those of others? In what ways did writing and art authorize, scrutinize, or otherwise parse the boundaries of the licit and illicit? Finally, how have modern critics framed these questions? How do we approach and make use of earlier theories of sex and gender? Not offered 2026-2027.

Epic remains the most ancient and most modern of literary genres. Women in ancient epic begin as prizes of honor for male warriors and become powerful witches and queens, while some contemporary women writers allow their ancient heroines to speak in their own voices. From Homer to the present, epic narratives also traverse continents as they narrate the founding and foundering of empires historical and imaginary. This course introduces students to key classical epics while exploring historical and contemporary adaptations from Dante's Divine Comedy to Madeline Miller's Circe . By examining the afterlives of epic, we will consider how the genre changes when taken up by the gender typically marginalized in the classical tradition. Possible authors include Homer, Apollonius of Rhodes, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Christa Wolf, Ursula K. Le Guin, Madeline Miller, and María Baranda. Not offered 2026-2027.

Whether you are a physicist, photographer, or bibliophile, grab a warm jacket. The night sky beckons. We will study 19th-century literary, artistic, and scientific responses to new understandings of the universe as dynamic, decentered, and limitless. In Victorian England, picturing the universe in literature and recording celestial light in photographs defied the physiological limitations of human observation and fueled larger debates about objective evidence and subjective documentation. We will examine how these historic contexts continue to shape how we picture the universe in the 21st-century. Not offered 2026-2027.

This class combines the theme of geographic change, including migration and immigration, with two literary questions. Why do novels of migration so often focus on a strongly marked central character? And why is that character so often lonely or isolated? Past readings have included Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart' (1959), Ottessa Moshfegh's 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation' (2018), and Charles Yu's 'Interior Chinatown' (2020). Those familiar with these novels will notice that, in our class, migration may mean international uprooting or some other profound change closer to home. Not offered 2026-2027.

The question of what a woman wants animates a central strain of the modern American novel, as do evolving ideas about what women can and cannot have. This course considers female desire-for personal agency and freedom, self- and sexual fulfillment, economic and social opportunity-across a half dozen novels written from about 1880 - 1940, in light of some of the cultural forces that shape and constrain characters' (and real women's) horizons. Authors covered may include Henry James, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Anzia Yezierska, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Not offered 2026-2027.

A survey of the 19th-century novel from Austen through Conrad, with special emphasis upon the Victorians. Major authors may include Austen, Shelley, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Gaskell, Brontë, Collins, Trollope, Stoker, Hardy. Not offered 2026-2027.

A selective survey of English writing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Major authors may include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Austen. Particular attention will be paid to intellectual and historical contexts and to new understandings of the role of literature in society. Not offered 2026-2027.

The literature of horror, fantasy, and the supernatural, from the late 18th century to the present day. Particular attention will be paid to gothic's shifting cultural imperative, from its origins as a qualified reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, to the contemporary ghost story as an instrument of social and psychological exploration. Issues will include atmosphere and the gothic sense of space; gothic as a popular pathology; and the gendering of gothic narrative. Fiction by Walpole, Shelley, Brontë, Stoker, Poe, Wilde, Angela Carter, and Toni Morrison. Film versions of the gothic may be included. Not offered 2026-2027.

This course will focus on the major novels of Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. Film and television adaptations will also be considered, and students may have the opportunity to read Austen's unfinished works, as well as related eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction and non-fiction. Not offered 2026-2027.

The development of Irish fiction, poetry, and drama from the early 20th-century Irish literary renaissance, through the impact of modernism, to the Field Day movement and other contemporary developments. Topics may include the impact of political violence and national division upon the literary imagination; the use of folk and fairy-tale traditions; patterns of emigration and literary exile; the challenge of the English language and the relation of Irish writing to British literary tradition; and recent treatments of Irish literature in regional, postcolonial, and global terms. Works by Joyce, Yeats, Synge, Friel, O'Brien, Heaney, Boland, and others. Not offered 2026-2027.

The Victorian period introduced a huge array of new possibilities and constraints for women of all classes, as it witnessed rapid urbanization and industrialization, a changing conception of marriage and motherhood, and a new set of professional restrictions but also opportunities. This class focuses on novels by and about women, as it seeks to take the measure of these transformations and of a larger culture's reaction to them. How did women imagine and re-imagine themselves and what they wanted? How did notions of femininity and masculinity change? How do the imaginings of the Victorians resonate now? Authors studied may include Eliot, Gaskell, the Brontes, Oliphant, Braddon, and Scheiner. Not offered 2026-2027.

The course will analyze Melville's career starting with Typee and ending with Billy Budd. Special attention will be given to Moby-Dick and Pierre. The centrality of Melville's position in American literature will be considered from a variety of perspectives, including aesthetics, representations of race, class, and gender, the role of the audience, and connections with other authors. Not offered 2026-2027.

We will start the term by reading Homer's 'Iliad' (8th century B.C.) for three weeks. It's a strange, often disconnected, and violent poem, to the point that you may wonder why it's a widely revered classic at all.  The answer is that being a "classic" is an ongoing process which every generation has to reapply and reaffirm for itself.  We will watch centuries of Homer's readers in action celebrating, defending, and recycling the 'Iliad' as we study ancient Greek philosophical interpretations, a medieval romance by Geoffrey Chaucer, a fake Scottish epic poem, and Chuck Palahniuk's novel 'Fight Club' (1996). Not offered 2026-27.

In the years following World War II, an unprecedented number of African American writers and artists moved to Paris and Rome, many seeking greater personal liberties and a refuge from racial discrimination at home. As we explore literature, nonfiction, and visual culture created by African Americans in postwar Europe, we will consider: how and why does the postwar creative scene in Paris differ from that of Rome? We will analyze postwar African American expatriate writing's unique and often critical perspectives regarding American society and culture and identify the literary strategies that writers used to address the changing times, promote social justice, and advance new narrative forms, often by crossing traditional boundaries of genre and nation. Authors and artists studied may include James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Barbara Chase-Riboud, William Demby, Maya Angelou, and Ralph Ellison. Not offered 2026-2027.

Science is no stranger to performance. There is a long tradition of presenting scientific ideas on various stages, whether for audiences comprised of experts or for a curious public, and there is an equally long tradition of integrating scientific ideas into theatrical works. In this course, we will read several scientifically informed plays, with a focus on the twentieth century. We will explore the ways in which scientific ideas shape the dialogue, plot, and staging of theatrical works and how theater can cause us to consider scientific thought from a new perspective. Readings are likely to include The Physicists (Durenmatt), Kopenhagen (Frayn), Arcadia (Stoppard), and Inherit the Wind (Lawrence and Lee), among other examples, including contemporary works. This course will also invite both scientists and playwrights into the classroom in order to enrich classroom discussions. Not offered 2026-2027.

The course will focus on the literature - what F.O. Matthiessen called "The American Renaissance" -- produced in the period leading up to the Civil War. We will consider representations of gender, race, and class, as well as the aesthetic sensibilities in works by the following: Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Jacobs, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry David Thoreau. Not offered 2026-2027.

Novels, poetry, and memoirs often hinge on experiences of crisis. They can be individual and/or general, historically particular and/or universal: a plane crash; a war; a sudden death; a prolonged one. This course will examine representations of crisis, with a specific focus on their narrative implications. What are the temporal, spatial, and aesthetic effects of crisis? Authors covered may include Joan Didion, Percival Everett, Allen Ginsberg, Tom McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Virginia Woolf, Elie Wiesel, Joy Williams. Not offered 2026-2027.

We tend to think of literary texts as models of a stable poetic order, but modern and postmodern writers conduct increasingly bold experiments to test the contrary. This class explores how writers from the nineteenth century onward draw upon ancient and contemporary concepts of chaos to test out increasingly sophisticated models of disorder though writing. Readings to include Lucretius, Serres, Calvino, Barth, Stoppard, and Kehlmann. Not offered 2026-2027.

The way in which humans perceive and record time has a discernable history, and literary texts offer us one of the best ways to study it, particularly in times of war and natural catastrophe. With a focus on 16th- through 18th-century European literature, we will examine various techniques of literary time-keeping as they relate to topics such as, fame and mortality, as well as the experience of time's slowness and acceleration. Readings will include selections from Baroque emblem books as well as texts by Montaigne, Milton, Pepys, Defoe, and Rousseau. Not offered 2026-2027.

This course examines the post-classical era of Hollywood filmmaking with a focus on the late 1960s through the 1970s, a period of significant formal and thematic experimentation. We will study American culture and politics as well as film in this era, as we consider the relation between broader social transformations and the development of new narrative conventions and cinematic techniques. We will pay particular attention to the changing film industry and its influence on this body of work. Films covered may include Bonnie and Clyde , The Graduate , The Godfather , Taxi Driver , and Jaws . Not offered 2026-2027.

In 19th-century Britain, for the first time in human history, more of a nation's citizens came to live in urban areas than in rural ones. This result of the Industrial Revolution produced many effects, but in the fiction of the period, one of the most striking was an obsession with the problem of crime. Victorian authors filled their novels with murder, prisons, poisonings, prostitution, criminals, and the new figure of the detective; in this class we will look at the social history, publishing developments, and formal dilemmas that underlay such a response. Authors studied may include Dickens, Collins, Braddon, Conan Doyle, Chesterton, and Conrad, among others. Not offered 2026-2027.

This class takes up a set of mostly very funny, mostly 20th century British novels to frame a simple-seeming, yet deceptively complicated set of questions: What does it mean to be educated? Who has access to education? What does an ideal education consist in? And ultimately: What is a university for? As we think through these questions we will read op/eds and investigative journalism in addition to fiction, and we will consider a variety of university-centered topics (determined by student interest) including issues of gender, class, privilege, race, and genius. Authors read may include Sayers, Larkin, Amis, C.P. Snow, Lodge, and Zadie Smith. Not offered 2026-2027.

This course devotes itself to the writings of the diplomat, courtier, bureaucrat, and poet, Geoffrey Chaucer. Best known for the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer also authored dream visions, lyrics, and philosophical meditations. This course will introduce you to some better-known and lesser-known works in the Chaucerian corpus, while also exploring questions central to the production and circulation of literature in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. What did it mean to "invent" a literary work in late medieval England? How did Chaucer imagine himself as a writer and reader? What are the hallmarks of Chaucerian style, and how did Chaucer become the canonical author he is today? We will read Chaucer's works in their original language, Middle English, working slowly enough to give participants time to familiarize themselves with syntax and spelling. No previous experience with the language is necessary. Not offered 2026-2027.

This course will examine how ancient and early modern epic poems variously imagine the processes of identity formation, as well as how narrative construction and figurative language shape the interpretive possibilities of these epics. With memorable protagonists to guide us-from Odysseus and Aeneas to Dante, Britomart, and Adam and Eve-we will analyze how the epic tradition vividly investigates rhetoric and identity, insists on the social and cultural power of storytelling, and asks us to consider how we come to know ourselves and the communities to which we belong. Students will develop skills in reading, analyzing, and writing arguments about these complex and historically significant poems. Texts will include Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid in full, and selections from Dante's Inferno, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Milton's Paradise Lost. Not offered 2026-2027.

For a long time, comics were trivialized as a form of popular entertainment. Graphic novels helped change that, and now it's widely recognized that comics can, indeed, rise to the level of literature. In this class we will look at comics that tell "true stories"-ones that draw on the imaginative interplay between image and text to illuminate the layers of lived experience. We will ask what comics can do that conventional literary forms cannot and explore how authors like Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Joe Sacco have utilized the comics toolkit to write personal stories, rewrite history, and report the news. In addition to class discussion and written assignments, we will do some low-stakes drawing and storytelling exercises. Not offered 2026-2027.