Graduate / Undergraduate

Trans Embodiments of the Early Modern World — Fall 2021

❦ Syllabus

“The condensation of transness into the category of transgender is a racialized narrative,” C. Riley Snorton writes. This seminar begins with the proposition that exploring the contours of gendered embodiment(s) in early modern texts requires attending to the emergence of modern forms of race and racism. How do we set out on this project in ways that attend both to possibilities and pitfalls of intersectionality and transhistorical research? In exploring gender’s dynamism, plurality, and expansiveness in various cultural and literary contexts, how are we illuminating or obscuring white supremacy, anti-blackness, xenophobia, the biopolitics of settler colonialism, and misogyny? In exploring these and other questions, the seminar draws together conversations inaugurated by the 2019 publication of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies’ special issue, “Early Modern Trans Studies.” Our primary readings will span early modern drama, travel writing, medical treatises, and ephemera. Our critical readings will range broadly as we pay particular attention to how recent collections are shaping the conversation: JEMCS “Early Modern Trans Studies”; The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality and Race; Transgender Studies Quarterly TSQ*, Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies; Early American Studies “Beyond the Binaries in Early America”; & Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern.

The Renaissance of the Earth — Spring 2020

❦ Syllabus

This seminar stages a “collision laboratory” between literatures of the earth produced by Renaissance writers (1450 – 1750) and current popular, artistic, literary and scientific writings about the Anthropocene. It has two aims: first, to explore how seemingly current conversations regarding environmental disaster, sustainability, and resilience traffic in ideas, metaphors, and modes of thinking whose roots extend into the Renaissance; and, second, to consider how early modern habits of thought and practice might not only resemble the present but influence it, aiding in our challenge of imagining alternative forms of habitation and cultivation of the earth.

The seminar draws into conversation cross-disciplinary voices and moves across a broad transhistorical field of focus in the readings. We will regularly set primary material and criticism alongside the visual arts and/or scientific reporting on the Anthropocene. It surveys a decade of Renaissance eco-criticism that positioned Shakespeare’s world-view at its center in order to expand and explore the stakes of recent eco-feminist, eco-philological, and eco-cosmopolitan methodologies, as well as medieval ecocriticisms, premodern and ‘prismatic’ ecologies. We’ll read canonical drama alongside less well-known plays, fairy tales, georgic poetry, agricultural treatises on composting and soil amendment, a dictionary of the terraqueous globe, as well as prose works on: Europe’s ‘little ice age,’ earthquakes, fossils, and the rise of air pollution. Toggling geographically between Europe and the Americas throughout, we’ll arrive here, in the Connecticut River Valley, exploring recent work in trans-Atlantic colonial ecology. The final two seminars provide a diptych study of Paradise and Ruin.

RENAISSANCE KEYWORDS And THE NEW QUEER PHILOLOGY — SPRING 2018

❦ Syllabus

What can we learn from a single word? How is the turn to a new queer philology changing both our answers to and our pursuit of this question? In the Renaissance, what it meant to categorize, historicize, and define words as English was changing. For dictionary makers, words offered singular entry points into the variety of the English language; for antiquarians interested in recovering England’s ancient past, words were half-buried relics or fossils conveying a history of English discoverable by way of etymology as well as geological and geographical inquiry; for poets and playwrights, language invited neologism and grammatical invention—words were sites of experimental play. This course explores both how early moderns shaped ideas of English through debates around particular words and how 20th- and 21st- century critics have likewise taken individual words as their entry into the study of the early modern world.

The Global Renaissance — SUMMER 2013

This seminar examines a variety of critical and literary texts that foreground questions of “globalization” in the Renaissance and evaluate the uses and limits of theories of globalization for understanding representations of England’s real and imagined encounters with “strangers,” both beyond and within its shores. We will toggle between a close study of London as a “world city” struggling to define categories of belonging and estrangement in a period of unprecedented urban expansion, and representations of England’s engagements at the periphery. The figures of encounter that we will explore will be both real/historical (Irishmen, Spaniards, Javans) as well as fictive/indeterminate (Moors, Amazons, Anthropophagi). 

EARLY MODERN DIASPORA — FALL 2011

❦ Syllabus

A Cross-Disciplinary Seminar on the Literature and History of Exile, co-taught with Nicholas Terpstra (History)

The early modern period was fundamentally shaped by waves of human migration unprecedented in western European history. From the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (1492) to the flight of the Huguenots from France (culminating in the late 1680s), European Christian culture sought to protect its changing notions of religious purity by expelling and/or enclosing the Other, thereby triggering an ongoing diasporic discourse. In addition to migrations catalyzed by religion, the movement of people from rural to urban centers transformed many of Europe’s cities into crowded and diversely constituted metropolises. This seminar will explore exile, refugeeism, and diaspora across literary and historical texts and contexts. We will familiarize ourselves with a range of current theories and approaches to the study of diaspora with the aim of developing methodologies for investigating the diasporic discourses engendered by real and imagined experiences of early modern exile.

The Drama of Resistance - Spring 2023

Advanced Shakespeare

What does it mean to read literature as resistance? When should literature itself be resisted or rejected? In this course, we’ll explore these questions by focusing on a single Shakespearean play: Othello: The Moor of Venice. Throughout the term, we will explore various critical/theoretical as well as political investments for how they have changed the ways students, scholars, political activists, theater actors and film directors have interpreted and performed this play.  We'll ask: how do various theoretical frameworks as well as lived experiences change what audiences see about the play and, in turn, how does the play itself change over time? We will: read two versions of the play that were printed in the Renaissance (the quarto and folio editions) alongside modern editions; explore a range of adaptations in the visual arts and in print (including American Moor); and watch a number of film performances. The work of black actors, artists, activists, and scholars will be central to our discussions. We will also speak with actors and directors working on contemporary productions. One class meeting will be held at UMass’s Renaissance Center where you will do hands-on work with rare books from the Renaissance and another will take you through the “Shakespeare Unbound” exhibit at Du Bois library, where we’ll explore Othello’s ongoing American legacies.

British Literature to 1700: The Word, The World & the Wanderer - Spring 2023

English 201

Exploring imaginative works by both male and female authors, this survey of literature from 900 C.E. to 1700 C.E. explores literary art as a world-making enterprise. Significant changes in the English language occurred throughout this period, expanding the horizon of what we mean by 'English' literature. The course will situate the word, the world, and the wander as touchstones along our path as we travel from the epic poetry of Beowulf to Milton's Paradise Lost, from the medieval lyrical romance of Marie de France to literature written in and about the Americas. A host of different wanderers will serve as guides: from pilgrims, exiles, seafarers, and translators, to unruly women, queer shape-shifters, werewolves, fallen angels and devils. By the end of the course, you will: have a historicized appreciation of broad changes to the English language, be familiar with a range of genres produced in the medieval and earlier modern periods, have strategies for close reading to carry with you into future coursework, and experience an increased confidence in your ability to explore literature of the distant past.

HENRY V: UP CLOSE - SPRING 2019

Advanced Shakespeare

This seminar invites you on a journey into a single play by William Shakespeare: The Life of King Henry the Fifth. Over the course of the semester, we will explore a broad range of theoretical approaches to this play and, in so doing, we will evaluate how have read and interpreted literary texts, what evidence they rely upon, how they present and/or articulate their arguments, and what meanings are enabled – or foreclosed – by various literary- critical methodologies. The goal of this course is to explore what transpires when we read slowly and deeply and when we read with the insights and investments of earlier critics in mind. In so doing, we will consider the nuances of this complex play while we also expand how we think about ‘Shakespeare,’ as well as early modern drama, history, performance, and text.

Island Fictions: From Paradise to Ice - FALL 2018

Junior Writing Seminar

Why do islands have such a powerful hold on our imaginations? In the medieval period, earthly paradise was imagined as an island: a walled-garden nestled within our world. Between then and now, islands have served as a master metaphor in western literature. The island conjures ideas of escape and capture, survival and shipwreck, fantasy and reality, the other out there and the inner self. 'Island Fictions' will journey across a wide range of history, literature and non-fiction from the medieval period to now, to explore how and why islands are good to think with, and how these little fragments become a powerful metaphor for imagining the self and other, alternative pasts and futures.

Shakespeare’s global afterlives - FALL 2017

What makes Shakespeare such a global phenomenon? Throughout this course, we will read four Shakespeare plays paired with instances of their afterlives in performance (film, television, theater) and print (novels, plays, poetry, essays, comics). Along the way, we’ll consider how Shakespeare’s plays imagined global cultural exchange in the Renaissance context and, in turn, how they have been revitalized through adaptation and cultural translation to raise new questions about what it means to think globally today.

MAKING EARLY MODERN SEX - SPRING 2011

Theoretical Approaches to Early Modern Literature and Culture

This course explores Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a literary and conceptual backdrop against which early modern English literature invented the sexed body and imagined stories of same-sex and cross-sex desire. Beginning with a close reading of Arthur Golding’s English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1567), we will explore how English literature was making and remaking ideas about the sexed body, same-sex and cross-sex desire. The drama of the early modern transvestite stage will serve as our primary set of texts. Throughout the course we will consider how Ovid’s stories (and their Renaissance retellings) helped to forge new arguments about bodies and sexualities in early modern England.

ENGLISH COMEDY & THE COMEDY OF EARLY MODERN ENGLISH - SPRING 2008

How does laughter help to shape a sense of community? What does laughing at the imperfect English of foreigners or “low” characters teach an audience about its “English” identity? Throughout the course we will explore Renaissance debates regarding the value of the English language together with questions about how the stage use of the English language shaped perceptions about cultural identity in the period. In attending to puns, double entendre, metaphor, simile, malapropisms, and bawdy innuendo, we will explore various ways in which language creates the ambiguity that gives comedy the power to both construct and deconstruct social identities.