Much of what we now think of as “science” — its practices, its disciplines, and even the term “scientist” itself (coined in 1833 by the British polymath William Whewell) — can be traced back to Victorian England (1837-1901). With the shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy came a growing urban population and an almost unprecedented need for rapid advancements in technology, medicine, and mathematics. As the middle classes gained more time for intellectual pursuits and educational reforms created a new population of readers, science found eager and curious audiences who attended lectures, read periodicals, and visited museums. The explosion and consolidation of new fields of study — from anatomy and biology, to geology and astronomy, to optics and acoustics — resulted largely from the Victorians’ desires to confront their changing world and better understand their place in it.

These new scientific developments incited delight, anxiety, and confusion. At the same time that brain scientists hailed the unique complexities of the human mind, evolutionary theorists discovered humans’ kinship to microscopic bugs and cells. At the same time that the new profession of the “doctor” emerged to heal the body, anatomists dissected corpses and severed limbs. At the same time that technologies of sight and sound were helping humans to see and hear, environmental scientists realized that industrial pollution and urban noise were ruinous to the senses.

In this course, we explore Victorian literary responses to this burgeoning scientific world. While we now often think of science and literature as disparate fields, these two disciplines were closely linked in the nineteenth century. Victorian writers found in science exciting new ideas and images to incorporate into their fiction and poetry. By the same token, scientists seeking to reach a wide, public audience used literary techniques (metaphors, images, analogies) to enhance the appeal and readability of their work. How did Victorian writers absorb, question, critique, or reject the new discoveries that pervaded their world? What did science explain that literature could not — and vice-versa? What might the Victorians tell us about the relationship between the humanities and the sciences — and the possibilities afforded by their intersection — today?

Full syllabus available upon request.

From nineteenth-century Verdian opera, to Helen Reddy’s 1971 feminist anthem “I Am Woman,” to Beyoncé’s 2016 sensation “Formation,” music has long fueled movements for social change. In this course, we explore how humans have mobilized sound and song to foster explorations of gender, sexuality, race, and class. We study a variety of musical genres, including classical, jazz, blues, soul, funk, folk, rock, punk, pop, hip-hop, and rap. Our course “texts” include audio recordings, song lyrics, music videos, stories and films about musicians, and readings about music’s historical connections to social and political projects. No prior expertise or knowledge of music is required.

We investigate some of the following questions: how does music differ or depart from other artistic media — i.e. literature, theatre, dance — in its radical potential? Is there something about music itself that makes it uniquely revolutionary? What gives music the potential for subversion — is it the music itself, the lyrics, the sounds, the performers, or something more intangible? Students also consider musical contexts with more complex or vexed relationships to progressive politics — the paucity of female conductors in the classical music world, the sexist lyrics that pervade a variety of genres, and the forms of cultural appropriation displayed in music videos and performances. We also examine instances in which songs not explicitly intended for protest are mobilized as vehicles for social change (“Over the Rainbow” as a gay anthem, for instance).

Full syllabus available upon request.

This course focuses on works of contemporary fiction by Caribbean, South American, East Asian, South Asian, African, and Middle Eastern writers. We explore narratives that interrogate normative gender codes (of both femininity and masculinity), forces of colonialism and imperialism, environmental racism, and other forms of marginalization and oppression. Topics of discussion include authors’ literary imaginations of various strategies of protest and modes of resistance — even those located in unexpected places. We interrogate the word “subversion” itself and attend to characters who deploy alternative modes of passive resistance or choose not to resist at all.

Full syllabus available upon request.

From the cafés of nineteenth-century Paris to the streets of twenty-first- century Williamsburg, bohemianism has long represented a countercultural movement, an aesthetic fantasy, and an unconventional lifestyle based on “art for art’s sake,” elective poverty, and artistic community. In this course, we trace bohemianism’s origins in fin-de-siècle France to its modern-day iterations in hipster culture. We explore questions such as: when, where, how, and why do bohemian communities emerge? What dominant cultures do bohemian artists and thinkers resist? Are bohemians always quite as countercultural as we (or they) might think? Are they even countercultural at all? Who gets to take part in “la vie bohème,” and who gets left out?

Course texts include George Du Maurier's novel Trilby; Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème; Baz Luhrmann's film Moulin Rouge!; Joyce Johnson's memoir Minor Characters; Amiri Baraka's works "Short Speech to My Friends" and Autobiography of Le Roi Jones; Christopher Columbus's film Rent!; and the pilot of Lena Dunham's show "Girls."

Full syllabus available upon request.

How do writers write the erotic? How do literary works from a variety of genres capture experiences and sensations that are often private, taboo, or even illegal? What techniques and strategies do authors use to describe moments of desire, pleasure, arousal, and stimulation? What language is used to depict sexual experiences that are traumatic, painful, or violent? How do writers negotiate the slippages between sexual identities, acts, preferences, and performances? What can literary works tell us about the history of gender and sexuality across cultures and time periods?

Texts include David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly; Alison Bechdel's Fun Home; Alice Walker's The Color Purple; Carmen Maria Machado's "The Husband Stitch," Octavia Butler’s "Bloodchild;" and poetry by June Jordan, Pat Parker, Chen Chen, and Danez Smith, among others.

Full syllabus available upon request.

In this class, we explore the novel from a range of historical, formal, thematic, and cultural perspectives. From Daniel Defoe’s adventure tale Robinson Crusoe (1719) to Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis (2000), our course texts engage with one of the novel’s central preoccupations throughout time: the "coming-of-age" plot. In addition to exploring various engagements with this theme, we trace scholarly debates about the origins of the novel, read some of the earliest "novels," explore the novel's formal transformations throughout time, and read novels in a variety of formats (as serialized texts, as triple-decker stacks, and as audiobooks). We also consider the novel as a type of media — a technological invention and mode of communication. Some of our motivating questions might include: what makes a novel a novel? What stories make for good novels? Why is the "coming-of-age" plot so common? Why are some novels gripping "page-turners" and others painstaking slogs? How and why have people read novels throughout time, and how and why do we read them today?

In this class, we read novels such as the anonymously-published The Woman of Colour (1808), Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Toni Morrison's Sula (1973), Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005), Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (2007), and Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give (2017).

Full syllabus available upon request.

In this class, we study the formal, thematic, historical, cultural, and theoretical aspects of literary works. We read texts from a variety of genres, cultures, and time periods and encounter a range of diverse perspectives. This course is subtitled "Critical Voices." The word "critical" has several connotations. Most obviously, the writers we read are important figures in literary history due to their formal innovations, historical influence, or societal impact. Many of the writers on our syllabus are also "critical" in the sense that they advanced powerful critiques of their worlds, using literature as a medium to speak out against various forms of injustice. Finally, this course invites you to develop your own critical voices as you share your important ideas and enter scholarly conversations about literature. We will work together to help you build the thinking, reading, writing, revising, and communication skills you will use throughout college and the rest of your lives.

Full syllabus available upon request.

In this course, we explore texts by female, trans, and non-binary writers who "touc[h] our world with their words." We explore works from a variety of genres by authors from a range of time periods, geographic locations, and literary traditions. Our focus is on texts whose authors dissent against various forms of injustice in their worlds, including sexism, classism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, imperialism, colonialism, and transphobia.

We also ponder questions such as: what is "women’s writing?" Is "women’s writing" necessarily feminist writing? How do writers seek to capture "women’s experiences," if at all? How do these texts explore the intersections of gender with other vectors of identity, such as race, class, and sexuality? How might we put pressure on concepts of "womanhood" altogether? 

Full syllabus available upon request.

On June 5, 1981, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which detailed the rare occurrence of Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) in otherwise healthy, young, "homosexual" men in Los Angeles. On July 3, 1981, The New York Times declared a "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals." However, infections caused by HIV and AIDS had been steadily increasing in the states as well as in Central Africa, Haiti, Canada, and Europe for almost a decade before these reports. AIDS activists sharply criticized the mainstream media, the federal government, and the medical community for their belated acknowledgment of and slow response to the disease.

While the lack of engagement with HIV/AIDS by the media, government, and medical world would long be (and still is) a common theme in discourses about the pandemic, HIV/AIDS immediately captured the passions of artists, poet, playwrights, novelists, filmmakers, and musicians. In this course, we explore representations of HIV/AIDS in literature and pop culture from the last 40 years. From Larry Kramer’s 1985 play The Normal Heart, which related some of the earliest activist efforts by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York, to Danez Smith’s 2017 poetry collection Don’t Call Us Dead, which explores what it means to be black, queer, and HIV-positive in America today, the works we read allow us to consider HIV/AIDS from a variety of intersectional perspectives. We explore the linguistic, visual, and sonic tools that artists use to portray an illness that few understand and many stigmatize, consider how creators respond to threats from outside of—and fissures within—activist movements, and discuss the difficulties—and perhaps impossibilities—of fully "representing" an enduring global pandemic.

While we read some "canonical" works of AIDS literature (The Normal Heart, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Susan Sontag’s AIDS and Its Metaphors), we also use an intersectional lens to discuss representations of HIV/AIDS outside the spheres of white, middle- or upper-class gay men in U.S. contexts. We read works by female, trans, and non-binary writers of color from across the globe, including Sapphire’s Push, Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother, Yan Lianke’s Dreams of Ding Village, and Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive. We also consider the "here and now" of HIV/AIDS as they affect people in our own community; a major component of our course includes work with Albany’s Damien Center, supported by Siena’s Center for Academic and Community Engagement (ACE). 

Full syllabus available upon request.

The phrase "Victorian England" often conjures images of agonizingly long novels, dowdy monarchs, and prudish moral codes. While these associations are certainly valid (and we will certainly encounter all of them!), this semester, we will aim to think much more capaciously about the Victorian Period. After all, the years of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901) witnessed some of the most exciting, salacious, terrifying, and troubling events in British and global history — from the invention of photography to the development of the railway system, from the Great Exhibition (1851) to the publication of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848) and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), from a burgeoning periodical press to a thriving underground pornography industry. Reading "Victorian literature" means reading Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Thomas Hardy, yes, but it also means reading works by those on the margins of (and often marginalized by) Victorian society and the Victorian literary canon, including writers who published anonymously due to their class, race, gender, or sexuality (the authors of The Woman of Colour and Teleny, for instance); writers from British colonies who protested Britain’s rule over them (such as Mary Prince and Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati); and writers from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who "write back" to critique long-held assumptions about the period (including contemporary feminist, postcolonial, and critical race theorists).

We explore this tumultuous time period through the lenses of gender, class, empire, race, and sexuality—discourses that were shifting profoundly during the nineteenth century (and of course remain especially urgent today). As Britain expanded its capitalist economy, colonized almost a quarter of the world, and instituted new laws about labor, marriage, disease, and intimacy, writers from a variety of genres, locations, and traditions found vital material for their literary works. One of our major goals, therefore, is to think critically about the relationships between literature and history — to explore not only what the Victorians read, but also how they read and what they experienced. We also discuss urgent debates in the scholarly field of Victorian Studies, including those raised by the "V21 Collective" ("Victorian Studies for the 21st Century"), a group of academics who urge us not to simply "exhaustively describe, preserve, and display the past" but to understand how "our interest in the period is motivated by certain features of our own moment" ("Manifesto of the V21 Collective").

Full syllabus available upon request.

In this class, we study how writers and artists represent the trauma of sexual assault. From Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents of the Life in a Slave Girl, to Thomas Hardy’s 1891 novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles, to memoirs by campus rape survivors, to new collections of #MeToo-era poetry, writers have long sought to convey the horrors of sexual violence. Informed by intersectional feminist and antiracist theoretical frameworks, we consider a range of sensitive, troubling, and complex — but nonetheless crucial — questions, such as: how do writers represent rape? How do writers put into words experiences so deeply rooted in the body? What literary techniques do authors draw on to represent sexual violence? How do we read such narratives — and what are our duties and obligations in doing so? How do survivors tell their stories? 

Full syllabus available upon request.