These data were not obtained from SIS in real time and may be slightly out of date. MouseOver the enrollment to see Last Update Time
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| African-American and African Studies |
 AAS 2500 | Topics Course in Africana Studies |
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| | Shopping While Black |
| | Race and Consumption in the 20th Cent United States |
| Fall 2024 14157 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open  | 11 / 18 | Micah Jones | Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm | New Cabell Hall 411 |
| | In 2019, Sephora employees in Calabasas, California accused SZA, the Grammy award winning musician, of theft in a racially motivated incident. When SZA’s tweet about the encounter went viral, Sephora implemented a mandatory day of diversity training for its workforce. Though wealth and fame secured SZA an apology, her status ultimately did protect her from the all too familiar indignities of “shopping while Black.” In a 2018 Gallup poll, two-thirds of Black respondents reported encountering racial discrimination while shopping. This course historicizes the experience of "shopping while Black." Together, we will explore the racial norms of Jim Crow era stores, the possibilities and limits of Black capitalism, the Civil Rights Movement as a consumer struggle, and the racial politics of looting. Ultimately, we will consider how “shopping while Black” came to be, and indeed remains, an essential measure of the power of racism to shape day to day life in the United States context.
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| | Introduction to Afro-Latin America |
| Fall 2024 13166 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 13 / 18 | FATIMA SIWAJU | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | New Cabell Hall 064 |
| | This course examines the cultural, intellectual and political pursuits of people of African descent in Latin America. We foreground Latin America as a critical site to explore the complexities of the Afro-American experience. |
| | Black Genders |
| Fall 2024 14158 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 6 / 20 | Alexandria Smith | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | New Cabell Hall 395 |
| | Black Genders provides an introduction to Black Studies with a specific emphasis on how gender and sexuality inform the ways Blackness is lived and experienced throughout the African diaspora. We will start from the premise that Blackness is a diverse and flexible social construct, and that the African/Black diaspora is a way of naming the dispersal of Black people across the globe, particularly in the wake of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. We will also start from the position that gender is a social structure used for categorizing human sexual and racial difference, simultaneously. The written, visual, and auditory material we engage this semester, in conjunction with our class discussions, will provide explanations for the terms of these starting premises and allow us to dive more deeply into their connections.
We will learn primarily through seminar-style discussions about course materials. Most evaluations will be writing assignments and in-class presentations. This class is appropriate for students with any level of experience in African American, Black, and gender or feminist studies. |
| | Black Love: Media Representations vs Realities |
| Fall 2024 13165 | 004 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 30 / 30 | Ashleigh Wade | We 5:00pm - 7:30pm | New Cabell Hall 132 |
| | How do media representations shape our perceptions and lived experiences of Black love?
In this course students will examine media portrayals of Black love alongside theoretical readings about the historical, social, and cultural elements that impact the development of Black relationships. In addition to exploring examples of Black romantic relationships, we will also explore Black love in the context of family, friendships, and community.
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| | Black Bodies in Literature |
| Fall 2024 14159 | 005 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 12 / 20 | Alexandria Smith | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | New Cabell Hall 395 |
| | Black people’s bodies and body parts—-skin color, head shape, reproductive organs, and more—-have long been treated as if they were definitive of the person as a whole. Sometimes, as in the case of the Black is Beautiful movement and worldwide veneration of particular Black athletes and entertainers, Black embodiment has been treated as a positive and empowering affirmation of Black humanity. In many other ways, from the musings of UVA founder Thomas Jefferson, to the unwritten and written rules governing behavior in the Jim Crow South, to the discriminatory sex testing of Black athletes like Caster Semenya, the bodies of Black people have been and continue to be treated like they are somehow missing the mark of recognizable and appropriate humanity.
Our class will use this dilemma as an entry point to discuss some of the major themes of Black Studies. How have Black creatives and intellectuals used their bodies to create art, literature, and scholarship? How have academics across genres and time periods framed their explorations of Black people’s bodies? In what ways might it be affirming, rebellious, resistant, or counterproductive to continue to center Black bodies in discussions of Blackness? These are only some of the questions we will pursue through a range of disciplines and media styles.
This class is ideal for those with an interest in sports, dance, photography, the arts, literature, or Black Studies. |
| | Environmental Justice in the Mid-Atlantic |
| Fall 2024 19551 | 006 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 13 / 20 | Kimberly Fields | Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm | New Cabell Hall 027 |
| | What this Course is About
A wave of state instituted environmental justice initiatives followed the nationwide grassroots protests that prompted President Bill Clinton’s 1994, Executive Order (EO 12898), Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice for Low Income & Minority Populations. This course is dedicated to examining government responses to environmental injustice. Our readings and discussions will use an interdisciplinary social-science perspective to track the trajectory of environmental justice activism and official responses to it in the five states (DE, MD, PA, VA, WVA) the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has designated as comprising the important but understudied mid-Atlantic region. We will analyze these states’ EJ efforts in relation to each other and compare them to the EJ efforts of other states in different regions. We will consider cases that exemplify common forms of environmental inequality. We will see how differences in state capacity, resources, procedures, activism, demographics, economies and power distributions shape and influence states’ official EJ efforts. As this is an upper division course, we will spend most of our time together in a discussion format rather than a lecture format, and we will devote significant time engaging in active learning activities that apply insights from our texts to real-world scenarios.
Through selected case studies, we will examine a number of topics and questions. Some key topics to be considered include: how and when political rhetoric shapes public policy, government responses, institutional design and resource allocation, the historical development of definitions of environmental justice and the environmental justice movement, programmatic outputs and political trajectories associated with race-neutral EJ approaches versus race-conscious ones, the significance of variations in how states’ EJ efforts address the racial dimensions of environmental inequality, why some states embrace some measures and others did not, how EJ efforts’ racial framing subsequently influences political behavior, why the racial dimensions of environmental inequities persist, deepen and are reproduced in some places despite interventions, under what conditions ― and with what consequences ― environmental justice came to be defined and pursued through government action throughout the mid-Atlantic region, the nature of the relationship[s] between dominant theories of justice and impacted citizens’ and EJ activists’ conceptions of environmental justice and the policy implications of that relationship[s].
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| AAS 3500 | Intermediate Seminar in African-American & African Studies |
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| | Education and Conflict |
| Fall 2024 13935 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 25 | Naseemah Mohamed | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | New Cabell Hall 315 |
| | This course explores the complex historical, ideological, and political relationships between education and conflict in various African contexts. Beginning with indigenous conceptions of knowledge and education, it traces the impact of colonialism, independence movements, and contemporary challenges such as structural adjustment programs and generative AI on African education systems. Through case studies from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal/Mali, Kenya, and South Africa, students will learn to critically interrogate the evolving role of education (including their own) in different forms of conflict across the continent and around the world.
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| | Gender Wars: US Empire in the Caribbean |
| Fall 2024 13936 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 3 / 18 | Shelby Sinclair | Mo 4:00pm - 6:30pm | New Cabell Hall 485 |
| | How did ideas about race and gender inform the culture of US empire in the Caribbean? This course exposes students to the history of U.S. capitalist expansion and imperial domination in the Caribbean archipelago and continental rimland territories after 1898. Using music, literature, film, state documents, newspapers, poetry, visual art, and more, we investigate a series of “gender wars” to uncover how the Caribbean became a laboratory for U.S. imperial strategy. Furthermore, we examine how people of African descent undermined the United States’ protracted attempts to shape the world for its interests. |
| | Race, Ethnicity, and Health in the US |
| Fall 2024 19587 | 005 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 13 / 16 | Liana Richardson | We 2:00pm - 4:30pm | New Cabell Hall 287 |
| | In this course, we will examine the relationships between “race”/ethnicity and health. Drawing from research in a variety of disciplines, including epidemiology, demography, and sociology, we will examine how health is distributed by “race”/ethnicity, as well as the social, economic, and political factors that give rise to the differential distribution of health between and within racial/ethnic groups. We also will discuss whether contemporary health promotion and disease prevention policies are sufficient to address racial/ethnic inequities in health. Finally, we will consider the kinds of policies that could have a bigger impact, and the potential explanations for why they have not been pursued. |
| AAS 3559 | New Course in African and African American Studies |
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| | Horror Noire: History of Black Americans in Horror |
| Fall 2024 19808 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 14 / 15 (29 / 30) | Robin Means Coleman | Mo 4:00pm - 6:30pm | Wilson Hall 238 |
| | Black horror is a primer on the quest for social justice. What can such a boundary-pushing genre teach us about paths to solidarity and democracy? What can we learn about disrupting racism, misogyny, and anti-Blackness? If horror is radical transgression, then we have much to learn from movies such as Candyman, The First Purge, Get Out, Eve’s Bayou, Blacula, Attack the Block, Demon Knight, Tales from the Hood, and Sugar Hill. |
| | Black Womanhood & The Meaning of Freedom |
| Fall 2024 20175 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 9 / 22 | Shelby Sinclair | Tu 6:00pm - 8:30pm | Bryan Hall 328 |
| | This course uses gender to understand the social traditions and political strategies that defined Black women’s lives in the West from the 17th to 19th centuries. By examining the conditions of Black women’s unfreedom, we discover how these women theorized, pursued, and experienced liberation. We also investigate women’s life-sustaining community formations and defense against state-sanctioned domination, including their construction of rival geographies, their use of eroticism, and their exercise of discursive resistance. Harnessing critical feminist scholarship across disciplines, this course offers a broad perspective on Black women’s subjectivity, theories of freedom, and their importance to modern world history. |
| AAS 4501 | Advanced Research Seminar in History & AAS |
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| | Race, Power & Political Economy |
| Fall 2024 19550 | 001 | SEM (4 Units) | Open | 5 / 15 (5 / 15) | Andrew Kahrl | We 2:00pm - 4:30pm | Wilson Hall 244 |
| | This research seminar will examine the relationship between struggles for political and economic power and social constructions of race in the past and present. We will read classic texts and recent scholarship on the political economy of race (with an emphasis on the US context) before students embark on individual research projects on a topic of their choosing broadly related to the course’s main theme. |
| AAS 4570 | Advanced Research Seminar in African-American & African Studies |
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| | Caribbean Sci-Fi |
| Fall 2024 19553 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 7 / 18 (7 / 18) | Njelle Hamilton | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 044 |
| | In this advanced undergraduate seminar, you will encounter Caribbean writers working at the cutting edge of Science Fiction/Fantasy (SFF), and discover novels, stories, artwork and film that center Caribbean settings, peoples, and culture, even as they expand the definition of genre. Authors and auteurs from the English-, Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean might include: Nalo Hopkinson, Tobias Buckell, Karen Lord, Junot Díaz, Rita Indiana, Marcia Douglas, Ernest Pepin, René Depestre, and Agustín de Rojas. Assignments will include short critical essays and a long research paper where you think through how Caribbean texts redefine, expand, or critique mainstream SFF. |
| American Studies |
| AMST 3250 | Black Protest Narrative |
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| Fall 2024 19947 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed  | 30 / 30 (30 / 30) | Marlon Ross | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | Bryan Hall 235 |
| | This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements, and black postmodernism. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion, crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Either directly or indirectly, all of these narratives ask pressing questions about the meaning of American citizenship and racial community under the conditions of racial segregation and the fight for integration or black nationalist autonomy. What does it mean to be “Negro” and American? How should African Americans conduct themselves on the world stage, and which international identifications are most productive? What roles do the press and popular media play in the sustenance and/or erosion of a sense of community both within a racial group and in relation to the country? What are the obligations of oppressed communities to the nation that oppresses them? What role should violence play in working toward liberation? How do intersectional subjectivities like gender, sexuality, religion, class, immigrant status, and color factor into ideologies and strategies of protest? We begin our study with the most famous protest novel, Richard Wright’s Native Son. Then we examine other narratives in this tradition, including works by Angelo Herndon, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gwendolyn Brooks, Malcolm X, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Joseph Beam, Marlon Riggs, and William Melvin Kelley. Films include Joseph Mankiewitz’s No Way Out, Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and The Watermelon Man, and Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied. Written assignments include an in-class midterm, a take-home midterm, a final exam.
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| AMST 3323 | Hemispheric Latinx Literature and Culture |
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| Fall 2024 19426 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 22 / 24 (22 / 24) | Carmen Lamas | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Bryan Hall 235 |
| | No waitlist, but spaces often open up. Please come to the first day of class. |
| | This course offers a survey of Latinx literature from a hemispheric perspective. We will examine how the histories of the US, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia come together to produce novels, poems, memoirs and films that are distinctly Latinx. In addition to exploring the integrated global histories that produce latinidades, we will analyze how race, class, gender and sexuality are presented in Latinx literature and other artistic forms. The course will introduce students to the different Latinx national-origin groups and the reasons individuals immigrate to the United States. Students will also read a variety of Latinx texts that demonstrate the hemispheric and trans-American nature of the Latinx experience. All readings, writing, and discussions are in English. |
| AMST 3422 | Point of View Journalism |
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| Fall 2024 20294 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 25 / 0 (25 / 0) | Lisa Goff | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | New Cabell Hall 132 |
| | No waitlist, but spaces often open up. Email Prof. Lisa Goff lg6t@virginia.edu if you want to join the class. |
| | This course examines the history and practice of “point-of-view” journalism, a
controversial but credible alternative to the dominant model of “objectivity”
on the part of the news media. Not to be confused with “fake news,”
point-of-view journalism has a history as long as the nation’s, from Tom Paine
and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century to "muckrakers" like
Ida B. Wells Barnett and Ida Tarbell at the end of the nineteenth, and “New
Journalism” practitioners like Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and Barbara
Ehrenreich in the twentieth. Twenty-first century point-of-view practitioners
include news organizations on the right (Fox News, One America News Network)
and left (Vice, Jacobin, MSNBC, Democracy Now), as well as prominent
voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Rebecca Solnit, Jia
Tolentino, and Roxane Gay. We will also consider the work of comedians such as
Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and John Oliver, who pillory the news (and newsmakers) in
order to interpret them.
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| AMST 3559 | New Course in American Studies |
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| | Hollywood Exile: German Filmmakers Flee Fascism |
| | Hollywood Exile: German Filmmakers Flee Fascism |
| Fall 2024 20165 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 16 / 30 (16 / 30) | Paul Dobryden | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 332 |
| | In the 1930s, many people employed in the German film industry whose lives were threatened by fascism took refuge in Hollywood. This course examines the contributions exiled directors, writers, actors, and others made in genres ranging from comedy and melodrama to film noir. In addition to indicting fascist violence, reflecting on the trauma of forced migration, and rousing anti-fascist affect, these films often turned a critical eye on the U.S. Selected films include: FURY (Lang, 1936), CASABLANCA (Curtiz, 1942), A FOREIGN AFFAIR (Wilder, 1948), and ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (Sirk, 1955). |
| AMST 3790 | Moving On: Migration in/to the US |
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| Fall 2024 13178 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 19 / 0 (19 / 0) | Lisa Goff | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 323 |
| | No waitlist, but spaces often open up. Email Prof. Lisa Goff lg6t@virginia.edu if you want to join the class. |
| | “Moving On: Migration In/To the U.S.” examines the history of voluntary, coerced, and forced migration in the U.S. Students will trace changing attitudes about migration over time using a variety of cultural products, including videos, books, documentaries, poems, paintings, graphic novels, photographs, fashion, digital humanities, and academic scholarship. Class participation/contribution is the core of this class. Other assessments include reading responses, presentations, papers, and reflective essays. There will be one scheduled test. Students will be required to volunteer 5-10 hours with a migration-related project during the course of the semester. |
| AMST 4500 | Fourth-Year Seminar in American Studies |
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| | Race, Space, and Culture |
| Fall 2024 19428 | 100 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 7 / 18 (7 / 18) | K. Ian Grandison+1 | Tu 5:00pm - 7:30pm | New Cabell Hall 044 |
| | Co-taught by K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross, this interdisciplinary seminar examines the spatial implications at work in the theories, practices, and experiences of race, as well as the cultural implications at stake in our apprehensions and conceptions of space. Themes include: 1) the human/nature threshold; 2) public domains/private lives; 3) urban renewal, historic preservation, and the new urbanism; 4) defensible design and the spatial politics of fear; and 5) the cultural ideologies of sustainability. The seminar foregrounds the multidimensionality of space as a physical, perceptual, social, ideological, and discursive phenomenon. This means melding concepts and practices used in the design professions with theories affiliated with race, postcolonial, literary, and cultural studies. We’ll investigate a variety of spaces, actual and discursive, through selected theoretical readings from diverse disciplines (e.g., William Cronon, Patricia Williams, Philip Deloria, Leslie Kanes Weisman, Gloria Anzaldúa, Oscar Newman, Mindy Fullilove); through case studies (e.g., Indian reservations, burial grounds, suburban homes, gay bars, national monuments); and through two mandatory local site visits: to Monticello on Sunday, Sept. 22, from 1 to 5 p.m.; and to downtown Charlottesville on Tuesday, Nov. 12, from 5 to 8:30 p.m. Requirements include a take-home midterm, a final critical reflection paper, and a major team research project and symposium presentation.
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| AMST 5559 | New Course in American Studies |
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| | Theories, Methods of Latinx Studies |
| Fall 2024 19432 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 8 / 12 | Lisa Cacho | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | Wilson Hall 214 |
| | This is a reading and writing intensive course for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. We will examine scholarship from a range of disciplines that have shaped how people study Latina/o/xs in academia and juxtapose this work against critical scholarship by Latinx Studies scholars within and outside these disciplines. Consistent attendance is expected. |
| Anthropology |
| ANTH 3679 | Curating Culture: Collection, Preservation, and Display as Cultural Forms |
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| Fall 2024 19252 | 100 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 17 / 18 | Lise Dobrin | Th 2:00pm - 4:30pm | Fayerweather Hall 215 |
| | Click on class details page (5-digit number to the left) for description specific to fall 2024. |
| | ANTH 3679 – Curating Culture: Collection, Preservation, and Display as Cultural Forms
This course explores the importance of understanding cultural meanings for curating items, whether material or intangible, drawn from social worlds other than one’s own. Rights and the power to control items of patrimony and their representation are extremely important when thinking about curation of cultural materials, but it is also important to understand how the meaning of these items can create challenges for curation.
The course addresses two main themes, which will be somewhat interwoven in the schedule. The first is a general introduction to collection, preservation, and display that emphasizes how these activities are cultural forms in their own right. We will historicize museums and archives and bring focus to situations that raise cultural challenges for curation, such as cases in which items are understood by those who created them to have power apart from the uses anyone makes of them, or where community ideas about the value of replication run up against preservation workers’ insistence on differentiating between “original” and “copy”, or where cultural protocols limit who can appropriately handle or view particular items. I will share with students my own work digitally curating texts, images, maps, and other materials from the Arapesh culture of Papua New Guinea, where I do research, so as to make them accessible to outsiders while also expressing their meaning and value from an Arapesh cultural perspective.
A second major theme this semester will be a focus on Jewish ritual practice. Students will gain direct experience with the problem of curating culture by studying items from a newly acquired collection of Torah pointers, or in Hebrew yads, at UVa’s Fralin Museum of Art. We will enter the Fralin’s storage facility to study how the objects are organized and preserved; we will read literature on Jewish ritual practice; we will visit Torah reading events in the Charlottesville community to see firsthand how Jewish people use these objects; and we will analyze the implications of the knowledge we gain for appropriate curation. As a final group project, we will contribute to the preparation of a culturally informed exhibit of the Fralin’s Torah pointer collection that is scheduled to be mounted in spring 2025. |
| ANTH 5559 | New Course in Anthropology |
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| | Crisis and Anti-Crisis |
| Fall 2024 20090 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 12 / 15 | Kath Weston | We 4:30pm - 7:00pm | New Cabell Hall 287 |
| | Many have characterized the 21st century as an era of urgent, overlapping, socially compelling crises. This course approaches the concept of crisis critically, through ethnographic case studies and a series of questions: What claims do researchers tacitly make when they describe things they have observed as symptoms of, or contributions to, an already denominated crisis? What are the historical and etymological roots of crisis as a category? Does the analytic value of "crisis" for 21st-century ethnography depend upon the specifics of the case: climate crisis, extinction crisis, financial crisis, refugee crisis, systemic racism as a public health crisis, democracy in crisis, the practice of "crisis management," anthropology in crisis? How does "crisis" operate within a relational field that includes semantically linked yet distinctive counterparts such as "disaster," "emergency," "catastrophe," "collapse," and "event"? To what extent is the concept of crisis declarative and performative, altering the political landscape and scope for action through its very proclamation? What is the relationship of "crisis" to perceived reversals of the order of things? What temporalities have shaped the concept? What might the abstraction of "crisis" conceal, especially as regards power relations? What textures of social relations does "crisis" flatten as commentators apply the term across different cultural domains? Then, if not "crisis," what? |
| Applied Mathematics |
| APMA 2501 | Special Topics in Applied Mathematics |
| |
| | Programming in R and Matlab |
| Fall 2024 21253 | 001 | Lecture (2 Units) | Open | 11 / 20 | Meiqin Li+1 | Mo 4:20pm - 6:00pm | Mechanical Engr Bldg 214 |
| | This course introduces basic programming skills in R and MATLAB, aiding students in related courses such as APMA 3080/3110/3120/3150/6430. MATLAB covers data types, control structures, functions, visualization, and data structures. R focuses on data manipulation, exploration, analysis, and visualization, with practical examples and exercises from engineering, mathematics, and various disciplines. No prerequisite |
| History of Art and Architecture |
| ARAH 8060 | Prospectus and Grant Writing |
| |
| | For third-year ARAH students only |
| Fall 2024 18951 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 4 / 12 | Amanda Phillips | Mo 2:00pm - 4:30pm | Fayerweather Hall 215 |
| | For third-year ARAH students only |
| Architecture |
| ARCH 5420 | Digital Animation & Storytelling |
| |
| Website 14494 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 21 / 21 | Earl Mark | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Campbell Hall 105 |
| | DESCRIPTION: Arch 5420 is a 3-credit workshop/seminar that explores moviemaking through 3D computer animation. Five independent short animations constitute the work of the term culminating in a one to five minute final project. An interdisciplinary group of students admitted to the seminar bring perspectives from across the university and design. The seminar is informed by screenings of student exercises and of other movies. Discussion of perceptual phenomenon provides a cognitive framework for the development and critique of this work. In addition to a physical computer classroom, the course will have fulltime access to high performance virtual computers and rendering. Movie projects may range in subject, including abstract or realistic studies such as short narrative character animation, scientific simulation, a physical simulation of architecture or landscape architecture, or related to computer music or synchronized captured sound.
APPROACH: Storytelling, whether by means of character animation or more complex scene description, may be related to simulated real or imagined environments. For any subject or scale, built structures and landscapes may be experienced according to our own changing eye point of view, the physics simulation of natural and mechanical phenomenon, the transformation of light and objects, as well as the exploration of fluids and particles under force fields. In addition, objects found in architecture and nature reveal patterns of forms, textures, structures and spaces when animated over over varied rates of time. Movement can also be explored in three dimensional living or human forms that transform or present a point of view.
TECHNOLOGY: The principal software Maya is widely used in 3D computer animation, movie production, visualization and design. Other products will be introduced for special effects, simulation, composite video, sound, motion capture, and image or video processing. An in-depth exploration of NURBS and Polygon 3D modeling and will be the basis for representing built and natural environments, sculpting characters and creating complex geometrical forms. Simulation of gravity and light energy add to the modeling of wind, water, fluids, particles, rainfall, snow, fabric, springs, particles, hinges and other physical phenomena. Motion capture data and a body suit (if Covid is no longer of concern) will be used to study human movement. All the required technology, including Maya, is free to download under educational licensing for academic use as will be described in the class. We also take advantage of new Virtual Workstations for high performance computing and that are accessible remotely from any current personal Windows or Mac OS computer.
ENROLLMENT: The class is open 2nd year and above undergraduate and all graduate students from any field. It may count as an Architecture Elective or an Architecture Visualization Elective. It also counts as an Integrative Elective in Computer Science and as a Practice of Media Approved Course in Media Studies. Please contact Earl Mark, ejmark@virginia.edu, with any questions. |
| Architectural History |
| ARH 4591 | Undergraduate Seminar in the History of Architecture |
| |
| | Everyday Medieval Life |
| | Lay Piety: Religion in Everyday Medieval Life |
| Fall 2024 14470 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 5 / 6 (10 / 12) | Lisa Reilly | Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm | Fayerweather Hall 206 |
| | This seminar fulfills the Second Writing Requirement.
Because this course is cross-listed, SIS will not create a waiting list - so if it is full and you are interested, just email me at lar2f@virginia.edu. |
| | This seminar will examine the changing dynamic of everyday religious practice with a focus on later medieval England through the material culture and architecture of the parish church. We will explore ordinary people’s experience of religion in the pre-Reformation period. Classes will be discussion based and each student will undertake a major research project on a topic developed in consultation with the instructor. |
| History of Art |
| ARTH 1503 | Art and the Premodern World |
| |
| | Art and Astronomy |
| | Art & Astronomy |
| Fall 2024 13456 | 100 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 48 / 60 | Eric Ramirez-Weaver | MoWe 9:00am - 9:50am | Campbell Hall 160 |
| | Looking outward and upward at the starry sky, artists, philosophers, and scientists have throughout history consistently sought to situate themselves within the cosmos and to comprehend its heavenly machinery. Creative efforts at understanding or harnessing the significance of the planets and the stars have resulted in architectural wonders such as Stonehenge, zodiacal floor mosaics in late antique synagogues, star pictures in medieval manuscripts, Islamic celestial globes and astrolabes, illustrations for medical treatment, alchemical interventions, observation or imagination of the heavens, and more modern treatments ranging from Joseph Cornell to Star Wars. This course traces the development of scientific, political, spiritual, magical, and intellectual technologies of power that have tied individuals to their views and uses for astronomy. Topics include: stars and rule, astronomy, astrology, Ptolemy’s universe, Christian reinterpretation, Arabic or Islamic contributions, alchemy, magic, medicine, Galileo, science fiction, Chesley Bonestell, Remedios Varo, Kambui Olujimi, androids, Star Trek, and Star Wars. |
| ARTH 3595 | Art History Practicum |
| |
| | Intro to Museum Practice I: Fralin Egypt & Nubia |
| | Be part of an exhibition team: Egypt and Nubia in Africa (2025-2026) |
| Fall 2024 21178 | 001 | PRA (3 Units) | Permission | 5 / 4 | Anastasia Dakouri-Hild | Fr 10:00am - 12:30pm | Contact Department |
| | Must be declared art history or archaeology major; have minimum GPA 3.5; must have taken at least one upper level seminar involving written research; 3rd or 4th year; for Spring 2026: completion of the Fall iteration |
| ARTH 4051 | Art History: Theory and Practice |
| |
| Fall 2024 13454 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 8 / 12 | Eric Ramirez-Weaver | Tu 12:30pm - 3:00pm | Fayerweather Hall 208 |
| | Alongside the creative pursuits of artists broadly considered, the creative process of writing about art has played a vital role in forming the conceptual frameworks, which art historians draw upon in order to make sense out of present and past cultures. In this selective survey of significant contributions to an ever expanding literature about how people over time have thought about and interpreted artworks, we will critically examine with great rigor Renaissance through recent approaches to the understanding of art historical inquiry. Through detailed discussions of primary sources, complemented by their evaluation or application in the secondary literature, we will assess together how certain ideological interpretations of art and its history help or hinder the meaningful activity of writing about art and its material production. Each week, we will explore one or more particular paradigms or specific strategies for understanding the nature of art and those who work as participants in the creative processes. This is neither a course in philosophical aesthetics, nor is this a concatenated series of one-day sessions reviewing various approaches to the interpretation of art, fostering an inappropriate belief in evolutionary or teleological refinement, culminating with the present or a nostalgic wishful return to one or more modernisms. Instead, this course weekly grapples head on with a selected sample of critical texts, which we will read carefully with an open mind, assessing the key arguments presented by the chosen authors while we consider together the implications of their arguments.
This course is intended to be an introduction to the various ways people undertake art historical research. That is because this course will enable you to master current art historical research methods, recognize the relative merits of different research methodologies that conceptualize them, and situate them within a theory of art that in your mind successfully and meaningfully permits the articulation of what matters about aesthetic experiences at the moment of a work of art’s creation and whenever it is being shared with others. |
| ARTH 4591 | Undergraduate Seminar in the History of Art |
| |
| | Performance Art and NYC in the 1970s and 80s |
| | Street Actions |
| Fall 2024 11817 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 6 / 12 | David Getsy | Tu 3:30pm - 6:00pm | Fayerweather Hall 208 |
| | This discussion-based and reading-intensive seminar will examine how New York City's urban spaces enabled the proliferation of performance art in the 1970s and 1980s. The tumultuous shifts in the economic landscape of New York City facilitated new modes of non-commercial artistic practices that turned away from the commodified object and toward performance, event, and action. We will study the ways in which artists created disruptive public tactics, urban interventions, infiltrations of institutions, and public protests. Emphasis will be placed on performance art at public sites, often unauthorized and unsanctioned. A central question will be how artists actively sought unexpecting audiences and new locations for performance in order to contest mainstream narratives of race, sexuality, and gender. From eroticism to activism, performance art interacted with the city’s urban geography, contested zones, and infrastructure. |
| | Lay Piety: Religion in Everyday Medieval Life |
| Fall 2024 13145 | 004 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 5 / 6 (10 / 12) | Lisa Reilly | Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm | Fayerweather Hall 206 |
| | This course fulfills the second writing requirement.
Because this course is cross listed, SIS will not create a waiting list - so if it fills and you would like to enroll - just email me at lar2f@virginia.edu! |
| | This seminar will examine the changing dynamic of everyday religious practice with a focus on later medieval England through the material culture and architecture of the parish church. We will explore ordinary people’s experience of religion in the pre-Reformation period. Classes will be discussion based and each student will undertake a major research project on a topic developed in consultation with the instructor.
This course fulfills the Second Writing Requirement.
|
| American Sign Language |
| ASL 3081 | History of the American Deaf Community |
| |
| Fall 2024 19747 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 22 / 25 (22 / 25) | Christopher Krentz | MoWeFr 12:00pm - 12:50pm | New Cabell Hall 338 |
| | Examines the history of deaf people in the United States over the last three centuries, with particular attention to the emergence and evolution of a community of Deaf people who share a distinct sign language and culture. We will read both primary texts from specific periods (by writers like Laurent Clerc and Alexander Graham Bell) and secondary sources (such as Douglas Baynton's Forbidden Signs and Carol Padden and Tom Humphries’ Inside Deaf Culture). We will also view a few historical films. Among other topics, we will consider how hearing society has treated deaf people and the reasons for this treatment; how deaf people have explained and advocated for themselves; how the deaf community complicates our understanding of linguistic and ethnic minorities and of disabled people in the United States; the impact of technology; and what changing constructions of deafness reveal about the history of American culture in general. Requirements will include two papers, one midterm exam, one final exam, and active participation
No prior knowledge of Deaf culture or ASL is required for this course. |
| Astronomy |
| ASTR 1210 | Introduction to the Sky and Solar System |
| |
| Syllabus 10030 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 322 / 350 | Edward Murphy | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | Chemistry Bldg 402 |
| | A study of the night sky primarily for non-science majors. Provides a brief history of astronomy through Newton. Topics include the properties of the Sun, Earth, Moon, planets, asteroids, meteors and comets; origin and evolution of the solar system; life in the universe; and recent results from space missions and ground-based telescopes. |
| Biology |
| BIOL 4585 | Selected Topics in Biology |
| |
| | Advances in Drug Discovery & Emerging Therapies |
| Website 19535 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 44 / 42 | Mike Wormington | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | Chemistry Bldg 206 |
| | This course examines the fundamental science behind today's important medicines and explores the question, "What defines a drug as transformative?" The disease it targets? Patient demographics? Profitability? Examples to be considered include anti-cancer drugs (e.g., Gleevec, Herceptin, ADCs); Metabolic regulators (e.g., Statins, Metformin, Ozempic, ACE inhibitors, Caffeine); Neurobehavioral and pain modulators (e.g., Adderall, Prozac, Clozapine, Ketamine, Sumatriptan, Valium); "Recreational drugs" (e.g., Psilocybin, LSD).
This course is based on a Drug Discovery perspective Fundamental science behind today's important medicines written by Jonathan Spector, Rosemary Harrison & Mark Fishman that was published in the April 25 2018 issue of Science Translational Medicine. Spector et al presented the fundamental discoveries that underlie 27 of today's most transformative medicines spanning diverse diseases. The overall goal is to explore and appreciate how the generation of new drugs rests upon one or more fundamental discoveries that were made without regard to practical practical outcome and with their relevance to therapeutics typically only appearing decades later. This exemplifies the transition from “basic” to “translational” research and illustrates that many years of fundamental work often elapses before the realization of such work holds the key to a medical breakthrough. We will use a case study approach to examine several of the transformative medicines summarized in Spector et al. as well as additional drugs of interest. Assigned reading will come from the primary scientific literature. Students will work in groups to critically read, interpret, and evaluate primary research papers in a historical context and to present their findings in both informal "whiteboard talks" and formal presentations. Although no textbook will be used, relevant background material can be found in the Lodish et al Molecular Cell Biology text.
Prerequisites: BIOL 3000 and any one of the following: BIOL 3010, 3030, 3050, 3240, CHEM 4410. |
| BIOL 4910 | Independent Research in the Life Sciences |
| |
| Website 11339 | 001 | IND (2 Units) | Open | 142 / 150 | Masashi Kawasaki | TBA | TBA |
| | Undergraduate research in the field of broadly defined biology under the mentorship of a UVA professor who doesn't belong to the Biology Department. The research mentor must hold a title of Professor, Associate Professor, or Assistant Professor in any departments or programs at UVA (Research Assistant Professors, Research Associates, and Graduate Students are excluded). Students should obtain verbal consent from the professor for mentorship before registering themselves to BIOL4910 on SIS. A form will be sent (every Friday) to the registered students on which they enter information about their mentors and their official approval for mentorship. Please read the syllabus (link below) before you register on SIS. |
| Biomedical Engineering |
| BME 4550 | Special Topics in Biomedical Engineering |
| |
| | Mechanobiology |
| Fall 2024 16663 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 24 / 40 | Brian Helmke | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Biomed Engr & Med Sci 1041 |
| | Why are tumors detectable as stiff lumps? Why do fatty plaques in arteries only occur at certain locations? How does cell sensing of mechanical forces determine what kind of cell it becomes? These questions involve relationships between physical forces and biological mechanisms at the tissue, cell, and molecular length scales. In mechanobiology, we aim to understand how forces cause biological signaling in health and disease. This semester, you will explore examples in biomedical engineering research and in your own lives. We will work together to analyze key papers in the field and to practice explaining how mechanobiology impacts our lives and careers. |
| | Medical Product Development |
| | Med Prod Development Course |
| Fall 2024 20366 | 003 | Lecture (3 Units) | Permission | 11 / 10 | David Chen | TuTh 4:00pm - 4:50pm | Mechanical Engr Bldg 215 |
| | David Chen | TuTh 5:00pm - 5:50pm | Mechanical Engineering 206 |
| | Students will work on product design projects as they brainstorm, draft, and prototype ideas. Industry-marketable skills will be developed and applied to find solutions to current medical devices. Industry experts will guide development and design iterations to provide insight into real-world product development and manufacturing. Students will use CAD and apply knowledge of ISO 13485 to develop a Design History File. |
| BME 6550 | Special Topics in Biomedical Engineering |
| |
| | Optimal Transport |
| | theory and applications in data science and machine learning |
| Website 20231 | 003 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 4 / 20 (7 / 40) | Gustavo Rohde | Tu 4:00pm - 6:30pm | Biomed Engr & Med Sci 1041 |
| | Optimal transport is a mathematical discipline with numerous interesting applications. While traditionally it has found applications in civil engineering (e.g. optimal mass transport) and economics (e.g. traveling salesman problems), optimal transport modeling techniques have recently begun being widely adopted in numerous applications including signal/image processing, machine learning, control, data science and others. This course will introduce students to the mathematics of optimal transport and its modern applications in signal/image processing and machine learning. Specifically, we will describe both the Monge & Kantorovich formulations for the optimal transport problem, solution methods, Wasserstein distances and geometry. We will also describe the concept of transport embeddings, representations, and transforms using linearized optimal transport. Finally we will describe applications of this theory to problems related to data classification, signal estimation and image modeling. Results using real data, together with software, will be demonstrated. |
| College Advising Seminar |
| COLA 1500 | College Advising Seminars |
| |
| | Performing Acts of Justice & Equity |
| | Performing Acts of Justice and Equity |
| Fall 2024 11342 | 030 | SEM (1 Units) | Open | 10 / 18 | Eric Ramirez-Weaver | Fr 11:00am - 12:15pm | Pavilion VIII 108 |
| | Welcome to this special Race, Place, and Equity sponsored College Advising Seminar!
I am delighted that we will have the opportunity to celebrate and think deeply about BIPOC contributions to the performing arts in the Charlottesville area this fall. We will approach our weekly topics from a kaleidoscopic perspective, examining many facets of the cultural landscape in central Virginia through a historical lens.
In particular, we have been offered the great fortune of a community partnership with the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center (located at 233 Fourth St. NW, Charlottesville, VA, 22903 ; see here: https://jeffschoolheritagecenter.org/
Links to an external site. ). Our course convenes on-site with our distinguished colleague, Leslie Scott-Jones, from September 9-30. As you will see in the weekly schedule of events below, Leslie will lead us in our original historical archival investigations into the performance activities of the Jefferson School (f. 1865), the eventual 1894 site on 4th Street to which we journey together, and the 1926 addition of the Jefferson High School. The space has been dedicated to the erudition of African-American children and young adults, even after a new high school opened in 1951, and the Jefferson School became the home for learning of Black elementary schoolchildren in our area until 1965.
In addition, we will be learning from the initial African-American soloist at American Ballet Theatre, when Keith Lee joins us from Charlottesville Ballet on October 20! Sara Clayborne, Co-Director of the ballet, will also share about founding a dance company in central Virginia under Lee’s mentorship.
There will be an opportunity for us to attend a performance, as well! Leslie has invited us to watch her upcoming staging of August Wilson’s King Hedley II on the Charlottesville Players Guild at the Jefferson School, October 13, 2023, in lieu of our weekly class session.
During our weekly meetings, we will learn from Career Services on October 6 and explore a series of dance films and readings designed to get us to think broadly about issues of equity and inclusion in theater and dance. We will examine critically, openly and with kind consideration for all in our course aspects of inclusive performance, celebrating BIPOC contributions to the performing arts, including tap in central Virginia, reflecting by necessity therefore upon the legacy of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and the creation of the Copasetics.
Each week, there will be some dance videos or readings for your consideration, focusing our attention on the topics we will discuss together in our regular class sessions. Some of these will be controversial, and all will challenge us to reflect upon how we can best foster an inclusive performance community respectful of all voices and contributions, for all bodies reveal their truth in their sinews. We best appreciate the art when we respect the journeys of the artist. All such assignments for this course are found on your CANVAS site, “COLA 1500-030," "Performing Acts of Justice & Equity,” typically in the folder for the week, or if a video within the Modules section of the CANVAS site. |
| | Exploring Race and Place through Writing |
| | Walking Charlottesville: Exploring Race and Place |
| Fall 2024 11406 | 034 | SEM (1 Units) | Open | 17 / 18 | Kate Stephenson | Mo 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Lower West Oval Room 102 |
| | By walking together, we will learn about the places and histories around us. The course will be structured around biweekly walks themed around race and social justice. All walks and place-based visits will include time for reflective writing. |
| | Interplay of Language, Culture & Cognition |
| Fall 2024 19961 | 045 | SEM (1 Units) | Closed | 18 / 18 | Jun Wang | Tu 3:30pm - 4:45pm | Fayerweather Hall 215 |
| | We all know a language carries its rich culture behind it. Do you know that the language we speak affects our cognition and worldview, and the way people think and perceive the world is heavily influenced by the language? This course invites freshmen to embark on a fascinating journey exploring the intricate relationships between language, thought, and cultural contexts. We would discuss how language shapes our perception of the world and, conversely, how our cognitive frameworks influence linguistic structures. Students will uncover the profound ways in which language mirrors and molds our cultural and cognitive realities. |
| Commerce |
| COMM 3570 | Topics in Finance |
| |
| | Foundations of Sustainable Commerce |
| Fall 2024 20093 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 32 / 35 (32 / 35) | Mark White | MoWe 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Robertson Hall 260 |
| | Climate change, species extinctions, water scarcity and social inequity are part and parcel of our modern world, and business leaders are recognizing both the opportunities and threats posed by these and other sustainability issues. Wise managers are actively seeking ways to integrate sustainable business practices into their organizations to drive strategic and competitive advantage.
COMM 3570-001 provides instruction in the foundations of sustainable commerce, that is, business activities designed for a finite and equitable planet. The course begins with a review of our pressing sustainability challenges, then describes how the fundamental business disciplines (strategy, accounting, marketing, operations, finance and management) are innovating, operating and facilitating commercial solutions to these issues.
|
| Computer Science |
| CS 4501 | Special Topics in Computer Science |
| |
| | Autonomous Vehicles: Perception,Planning & Control |
| | F1Tenth Autonomous Racing |
| Website 16398 | 006 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 43 / 48 | Madhur Behl | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Rice Hall 120 |
| | Students work in teams to build, drive, and race 1/10th scale autonomous racecars, while learning about the principles of perception, planning, and control for autonomous vehicles. The course culminates in a F1/10 ‘battle of algorithms’ race amongst the teams. |
| CS 6501 | Special Topics in Computer Science |
| |
| | Wireless Sensing for Internet of Things |
| Website 19576 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 5 / 35 | Kun Qian | MoWe 11:00am - 12:15pm | Rice Hall 032 |
| | Wireless sensing technologies repurpose wireless signals for sensing physical environment and gaining situational awareness. Formed by pervasive wirelessly connected devices, the IoT can be turned into a universal sensor network with wireless sensing, enabling the vision of ambient intelligence. This course covers the wireless sensing basics (e.g., radar, Wi-Fi) and cutting-edge applications (e.g., motion tracking, activity recognition, environmental sensing). The evaluation will be based on assignments, a course project, a mid-term exam, and a final presentation. |
| | Evaluation Crisis in Computer Science |
| Website 16941 | 006 | Lecture (3 Units) | Permission | 11 / 35 | David Evans | MoWe 11:00am - 12:15pm | Rice Hall 340 |
| | Over the past two decades, psychology, medicine, and other social sciences have recognized a replication crisis in their work and taken measures to improve the quality of their science. Experimental computer science, which includes nearly all work in computing systems and machine learning, uses different forms of evaluation which do not usually incorporate the complexity of human subjects, but still suffers from a similar crisis. The experiments we do to determine if one approach to building a computing system is better than another often produce misleading or incorrect results, and it can take decades (if ever) for these results to be corrected. The goal of this seminar is to: (1) examine how computer scientists perform evaluations and why our methods are often problematic, (2) look at attempts to reproduce computer science results, and (3) conduct our own experiments and develop methods for improving computer science evaluation.
This will be a largely student-driven seminar, with students working together to analyze works in the literature and develop ideas for how to improve the scientific standards of evaluation. |
| | Autonomous Mobile Robots |
| Website 16577 | 010 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 17 / 20 (33 / 40) | Nicola Bezzo | We 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Rice Hall 120 |
| | Nicola Bezzo | Tu 11:00am - 12:15pm | Olsson Hall 001 |
| | Have you ever wonder how an autonomous car or the Mars rover work? Or how a drone can fly autonomously avoiding obstacles while tracking objects on the ground? ...Then, this is the class for you! |
| | Have you ever wonder how an autonomous car or the Mars rover work? Or how a drone can fly autonomously avoiding obstacles while tracking objects on the ground? ...Then, this is the class for you!
The objective of this course is to provide the basic concepts and algorithms required to develop mobile robots that act autonomously in complex environments. The main emphasis is on mobile robot locomotion and kinematics, control, sensing, localization, mapping, path planning, and motion planning.
The class is organized in lectures on Tuesday and labs on Wednesday where you will have the chance to program state-of-the-art ground and aerial vehicles and participate in a competition during the semester!
Please note that this class is combined in Systems Eng (SYS 6060), Electrical and Computer Eng (ECE 6501), and Computer Science (CS 6501). In case one section is close, please try to enroll in any of the other sections. |
| | Geometry of Data |
| Website 16608 | 013 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 20 / 35 (30 / 48) | Tom Fletcher | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Thornton Hall E303 |
| | Modern data are high-dimensional, multi-modal, and large-scale, for example, images with millions of pixels, text corpora with millions of words, gene sequences with billions of base pairs, etc. However, these data tend to concentrate on lower-dimensional, nonlinear subspaces known as manifolds. Learning and sampling from this real distribution, hence, is of tremendous value. This class covers the mathematical theory of high-dimensional geometry and manifolds and how it applies to the latest advances in artificial intelligence. |
| | Computational Behavior Modelng |
| Website 16687 | 014 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 12 / 23 (16 / 38) | Afsaneh Doryab | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Rice Hall 340 |
| | This course explores the principles, methods, and applications of computational behavior modeling. Through presentations, discussions, and a final project, students will gain a comprehensive understanding of the computational techniques used to model the behavior of complex systems, such as humans, animals, nature, robots, or other computer systems. |
| | Economics of Distributed Systems |
| Website 20190 | 015 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 24 | Matheus Xavier Ferreira | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Rice Hall 011 |
| | Have you wondered how blockchains and cryptocurrencies work to build a global network of users? This course will cover the economic incentives that ensure blockchains operate appropriately and attract a huge user base leading to decentralized protocols that coordinate Billions in value being transferred daily. |
| | Economics and computation aim to understand how economic incentives impact computer systems and how algorithm design can guide the design of decision-making tools and the allocation of resources. We will focus on security and fairness issues that arise when computer systems are decentralized. This interdisciplinary field combines security, distributed systems, theory, economics, business, and law. Topics to be covered include auction design, cryptocurrency, and decentralized finance. |
| | Machine Learning for Software Reliability |
| Website 20676 | 016 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 13 / 24 | Wenxi Wang | MoWe 11:00am - 12:15pm | Rice Hall 011 |
| | Building secure and reliable software systems is essential as modern society heavily relies on software for critical functions and daily operations. Formal reasoning provides a rigorous foundation for enhancing software reliability and security, while cutting-edge research leverages machine learning to improve the scalability and efficiency of these formal methods. This research-oriented course lies at the intersection of software engineering, formal methods, and machine learning. In the first half, the course introduces fundamental concepts in software verification (including popular tools and techniques), formal reasoning (e.g., constraint solving), and machine learning (e.g., Graph Neural Networks, LLM, Reinforcement Learning). The second half focuses on interdisciplinary research, where students will read papers and undertake projects integrating these fields. External speakers may also be invited to give talks on relevant topics.
|
| | Software Security Testing |
| Fall 2024 21261 | 019 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 16 / 35 | Jack Davidson | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Rice Hall 340 |
| | Software Security Testing explores today’s state-of-the-art techniques for uncovering hidden security vulnerabilities in software—software fuzzing. Introductory fuzzing exercises will provide hands-on experience with popular security tools and platforms such as AFL+, AddressSanitizer, ZAFL, TRMC’s Vader Modular Fuzzer, and Google’s OSS-Fuzz. In addition, the course will focus on enhancing the power of software fuzzing using emerging AI techniques such as large language models (LLMs). The course will be a mix of lectures, reading relevant research papers, and a final project. To be successful in this course, it is recommended you have a background in cyber security (an introductory course), systems programming, and C/C++. |
| Electrical and Computer Engineering |
| ECE 3103 | Solid State Devices |
| |
| Website 16057 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 51 / 60 | Xu Yi | MoWeFr 10:00am - 10:50am | Olsson Hall 011 |
| | Due to the high enrollment, ECE3103 will be offered in both the 2024 fall and 2025 spring. The 2025 spring instructor will be Prof. Andreas Beling. Course content will be identical in both semesters. |
| ECE 4502 | Special Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering |
| |
| | Intro to Adaptive Estimation and Control |
| | Introduction to Adaptive Estimation and Control |
| Fall 2024 21270 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Permission | 1 / 10 (6 / 25) | Gang Tao | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Jesser Hall 171 |
| |
Study of model-based adaptive parameter estimation and adaptive control techniques which can effectively deal with systems with uncertain parameters. Development of the gradient, least-squares and Lyapunov algorithms for adaptive parameter estimation of parametric and dynamic models. Design and evaluation of model reference adaptive control, adaptive pole placement control and adaptive robot control systems using such adaptive algorithms.
Prerequisites: APMA2130 (Differential Equations) and ECE2700 (Signals and Systems), or equivalent.
|
| ECE 6501 | Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering |
| |
| | Autonomous Mobile Robots |
| Website 16116 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 12 (33 / 40) | Nicola Bezzo | We 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Rice Hall 120 |
| | Nicola Bezzo | Tu 11:00am - 12:15pm | Olsson Hall 001 |
| | Have you ever wonder how an autonomous car or the Mars rover work? Or how a drone can fly autonomously avoiding obstacles while tracking objects on the ground? ...Then, this is the class for you! |
| | Have you ever wonder how an autonomous car or the Mars rover work? Or how a drone can fly autonomously avoiding obstacles while tracking objects on the ground? ...Then, this is the class for you!
The objective of this course is to provide the basic concepts and algorithms required to develop mobile robots that act autonomously in complex environments. The main emphasis is on mobile robot locomotion and kinematics, control, sensing, localization, mapping, path planning, and motion planning.
The class is organized in lectures on Tuesday and labs on Wednesday where you will have the chance to program state-of-the-art ground and aerial vehicles and participate in a competition during the semester!
Please note that this class is combined in Systems Eng (SYS 6060), Electrical and Computer Eng (ECE 6501), and Computer Science (CS 6501). In case one section is close, please try to enroll in any of the other sections. |
| | Geometry of Data |
| Website 16399 | 005 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 13 (30 / 48) | Tom Fletcher | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Thornton Hall E303 |
| | Modern data are high-dimensional, multi-modal, and large-scale, for example, images with millions of pixels, text corpora with millions of words, gene sequences with billions of base pairs, etc. However, these data tend to concentrate on lower-dimensional, nonlinear subspaces known as manifolds. Learning and sampling from this real distribution, hence, is of tremendous value. This class covers the mathematical theory of high-dimensional geometry and manifolds and how it applies to the latest advances in artificial intelligence. |
| | Geometry of Data |
| Website 16679 | 602 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 0 / 30 | Tom Fletcher+2 | TBA |  TBA |
| | Modern data are high-dimensional, multi-modal, and large-scale, for example, images with millions of pixels, text corpora with millions of words, gene sequences with billions of base pairs, etc. However, these data tend to concentrate on lower-dimensional, nonlinear subspaces known as manifolds. Learning and sampling from this real distribution, hence, is of tremendous value. This class covers the mathematical theory of high-dimensional geometry and manifolds and how it applies to the latest advances in artificial intelligence. |
| ECE 6502 | Special Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering |
| |
| | Intro to Adaptive Estimation and Control |
| | Introduction to Adaptive Estimation and Control |
| Fall 2024 21271 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Permission | 5 / 15 (6 / 25) | Gang Tao | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Jesser Hall 171 |
| |
Study of model-based adaptive parameter estimation and adaptive control techniques which can effectively deal with systems with uncertain parameters. Development of the gradient, least-squares and Lyapunov algorithms for adaptive parameter estimation of parametric and dynamic models. Design and evaluation of model reference adaptive control, adaptive pole placement control and adaptive robot control systems using such adaptive algorithms.
Prerequisites: APMA2130 (Differential Equations) and ECE2700 (Signals and Systems), or equivalent.
|
| Creative Writing |
| ENCW 3310 | Intermediate Poetry Writing I |
| |
| | VIRGINIA (FOR POETS) |
| Fall 2024 19987 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 12 / 12 | Kiki Petrosino | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | New Cabell Hall 038 |
| | This course is open to students with experience in writing & workshopping poetry. To apply: send Professor Kiki Petrosino (cmp2k@virginia.edu) a sample of 4-5 original poems + a cover letter specifying whether you are in any majors, minors, or special concentrations for which this course may be needed/required. Please also specify any other creative writing workshops to which you may be applying. Make sure to send an official request for instructor permission on SIS along with any e-mail requests. Enrollment for returning students begins April 8 & will continue until the section is filled. For full consideration, please apply as soon as possible. Confirmation of your spot in the class may arrive in early summer, but hopefully much sooner. |
| | In this intermediate poetry workshop, we’ll explore our intellectual & artistic connections to place, specifically to UVA & the Commonwealth of Virginia. We’ll read recent published works of poetry by writers with ties to the University, Charlottesville, & the region. We’ll also think about & explore the physical space of Grounds as a site for reading, writing, researching, & sharing poems. Students in this course will engage in a regular writing practice and will take seriously the processes of composition, critique, and revision. We’ll spend a significant portion of each class “workshopping” student poems, but we also will devote time to discussing assigned reading and to performing in-class writing exercises. These activities, plus attendance, participation, & a final portfolio, will inform the grading policy. |
| ENCW 3350 | Intermediate Nonfiction Writing |
| |
| Fall 2024 20001 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 12 / 12 | Anna Martin-Beecher | Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm | Bryan Hall 233 |
| | Admission by Instructor Permission. Please send a sample of your prose writing (around 5 pages) and a brief statement about why this course interests you to am2aw@virginia.edu. Writing sample not required for APLP and APPW students. |
| | Creative nonfiction invites us to activate our curiosity, examine the texture of our lives, uncover meaning in the chaos of experience, question reality, cultivate empathy and become braver thinkers. Expect to create original work in this class, to receive feedback and to read and discuss essays, memoir, literary journalism, imaginative biography and other forms.
This workshop is for students with some experience of creative writing who have already taken 2000 level ENCW classes.
Admission by Instructor Permission. Please send a sample of your prose writing (around 5 pages) and a brief statement about why this course interests you to am2aw@virginia.edu. Writing sample not required for APLP and APPW students. |
| ENCW 3559 | New Course in Creative Writing |
| |
| | New Mythologies |
| Fall 2024 19992 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Permission | 12 / 12 | Jane Alison | Fr 11:00am - 1:30pm | Dawson's Row 1 |
| | To apply, send me (jas2ad) a note saying what draws you to this course, and attach a brief sample of your creative writing. Be sure to apply via SIS, too. Note: if you are in the APLP, this class can count as an upper-level workshop. |
| | A girl runs from a man who wants her, but she can’t run fast enough—so turns into a tree. A young woman craves a boy so much she wraps herself around him and holds him so tightly their two bodies fuse. A girl’s in love with another girl, but this isn’t allowed in her world, yet lo! her wish is granted, and she turns into a boy. Another boy hates his violent father, has to defend his mother, so cuts off his father’s most offensive member and throws it into the sea—and from it spring the spirits of both passion and rage. A woman grieves the loss of her children until she becomes a weeping stone. A man is so greedy that the spirit of hunger infests him, and he can’t stop eating until there’s nothing but his own flesh to eat. An old couple who adore each other can’t bear the idea of being parted, and just as they’re about to die, they turn into trees, entwined . . .
These are ancient stories about primary feelings, primal feelings, caught in the amber of literary myth: turned into beautiful, strange, small objects. In this workshop we’ll look at several such stories each week—drawing first upon Ovid’s Metamorphoses, then branching outward—and each week you will create your own new myth or fabulist story inspired by what you’ve read, a tiny story that isn’t “fantasy” but springs from secret truths and realities you find in these myths.
|
| ENCW 3610 | Intermediate Fiction Writing |
| |
| Fall 2024 19999 | 002 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 12 / 12 | Anna Martin-Beecher | We 3:00pm - 5:30pm | New Cabell Hall 411 |
| | To apply: send Professor Anna Beecher (am2aw@virginia.edu) 3-5 pages of fiction + a cover letter detailing why you'd like to take this course and what classes you have already taken and with whom. |
| | *******THIS CLASS WILL BE TAUGHT BY A NEW PROFESSOR ******* To apply: send Professor Micheline Marcom (mam5du@virginia.edu) 3-5 pages of fiction + a cover letter detailing why you'd like to take this course and what classes you have already taken and with whom. Make sure to send an official request for instructor permission on SIS along with any e-mail requests. Enrollment will continue until the section is filled. Confirmation of your spot in the class may arrive in early summer to mid summer. |
| ENCW 4550 | Topics in Literary Prose |
| |
| | Post-Apocalyptic Narratives |
| | Post-Apocalyptic Narratives |
| Fall 2024 19995 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 11 / 12 | Kevin Moffett | Tu 11:00am - 1:30pm | Bryan Hall 233 |
| | Unless you are in the APLP program, instructor permission required. Please email sem9zn@virginia.edu with 3-5 pages of your writing and a brief statement about why you are interested in the class. |
| | In this course we’ll look at novels and stories set in the aftermath of various cataclysms: nuclear, environmental, biological, spiritual. The post-apocalyptic narrative has long attracted satirists and social critics, sci-fi writers, and, more and more of late, writers of mainstream literary fiction. We’ll examine how it borrows elements from other genres and consider ideas of revelation, nostalgia, assimilation, and re-creation. Authors may include Cormac McCarthy, Ling Ma, José Saramago, Bernard Malamud, Octavia Butler, Walter Miller, and others. You’ll respond to the texts critically and creatively. |
| ENCW 4830 | Advanced Poetry Writing I |
| |
| Fall 2024 19989 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 7 / 12 | Camille Dungy | Mo 2:00pm - 4:30pm | Bryan Hall 310 |
| | *******THIS CLASS WILL BE TAUGHT BY CAMILLE DUNGY, KAPNICK WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE*******
To apply: send Professor Kiki Petrosino (cmp2k@virginia.edu) a sample of 4-5 original poems + a cover letter specifying whether you are in any majors, minors, or special concentrations for which this course may be needed/required. Please also specify any other creative writing workshops to which you may be applying. Make sure to send an official request for instructor permission on SIS along with any e-mail requests. Professor Petrosino will consult with Professor Dungy on permissions. Enrollment for returning students begins April 8 & will continue until the section is filled. For full consideration, please apply as soon as possible. Confirmation of your spot in the class may arrive in early summer. |
| | This workshop is for students with prior experience in writing and revising poetry. The class will involve discussion of student poems and of assigned reading, with particular attention to issues of craft, form, and content. The course will be offered in a hybrid manner, with one in-person synchronous class per month and the rest of the synchronous classes on an online platform. We will work with a variety of workshop models as we explore ways of thinking about how poetry might be written and discussed. Students will be expected to attend class for each session both in-person or online, to write and revise six to nine poems in response to writing prompts, to regularly participate in class discussion, to offer detailed responses to other students’ work, to attend one poetry reading (in person or virtual) and submit a written response to, to turn in close-reading responses to two assigned readings, and to participate in a public presentation near the end of the term. Enrollment by instructor permission.
|
| ENCW 5310 | Advanced Poetry Writing II |
| |
| | POETS' MEMOIRS |
| Fall 2024 19986 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 13 / 12 | Kiki Petrosino | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Dawson's Row 1 |
| | This class is open to graduate & undergraduate students via instructor permission. To apply: send Professor Kiki Petrosino (cmp2k@virginia.edu) a sample of 4-5 original poems + a cover letter specifying whether you are in any programs or special concentrations for which this course may be needed/required. Please also specify any other creative writing workshops to which you may be applying. Make sure to send an official request for instructor permission on SIS along with any e-mail requests. Enrollment for returning students begins April 8 & will continue until the section is filled. For full consideration, please apply as soon as possible. Confirmation of your spot in the class may arrive in early summer, but hopefully much sooner. |
| | In this advanced course, we'll explore several published memoirs by contemporary poets, reading them alongside their books of poetry. Through discussion, workshop, writing exercises & other coursework, we'll attempt to imagine our way through several related questions: how do poets approach the forms & possibilities of memoir? How might a "poet's memoir" work within & against the constraints or expectations of autobiographical writing? How does what we think of as a poet's "voice" shift & change when their writing encompasses both verse and prose? And what new connections--among emotions, narratives, mysteries, & astonishments--can we make in our own writing practice, once we witness how poets work across genres? This class will engage a combination of seminar & workshop-style techniques. For a final project, students will compose & revise a group of original poems alongside one or more works of original lyric prose (short essays, memoir, &c).
|
| English-Literature |
| ENGL 2502 | Masterpieces of English Literature |
| |
| | Four Books, Four Centuries, Four Forms |
| Fall 2024 19788 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 21 / 20 | John O'Brien | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | New Cabell Hall 395 |
| | We will read devote our time together to studying four great masterpieces, works produced over the last four centuries, each in a different genre: a play (William Shakespeare’s King Lear, first staged in 1606); a novel (Jane Austen’s Emma, published in 1816); a poem (T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922); and a film (Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, issued in 1968). We will consider each of these works slowly and carefully. We will also use them as case studies for exploring the strategies that scholars in the disciplines of literature and film criticism have developed to achieve rich understandings of their objects of study. These will include (among other strategies) close reading, source study, comparison of variant editions, and historical contextualization. Our objective is to emerge at the end of the semester with expertise in these four works, and with experience in using different critical strategies to analyze other works in these genres. Requirements: four writing exercises, class participation, final examination.
This course serves as a prerequisite for students who wish to major in English. This course also fulfills the College’s second writing requirement. |
| ENGL 2506 | Studies in Poetry |
| |
| | Introduction to Renaissance Poetry |
| | Practice the art of poetic reading with Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Herrick, and Milton. |
| Fall 2024 19786 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 20 / 20 | Rebecca Rush | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Nau Hall 142 |
| | What is poetry? What sets it apart from other modes of writing, thinking, imagining, feeling? What are the distinctive tools at the poet’s disposal? How do these tools work, and how can we describe their workings? Should poetry be plain or intricate, delightful or didactic, passionate or rational, heavenly or human? In this course, we will explore the many Renaissance responses to these questions by reading a selection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century verse. We will inspect a range of poetic styles and genres, beginning with sonnets by Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and Mary Wroth. Other poets will include Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, John Milton, Katherine Philips, Richard Lovelace, Abraham Cowley, and Andrew Marvell. We will move slowly at first, sometimes reading only one poem per class, and will work together to develop the interpretive skills to unpack a poem. This course also aims to help you sharpen your skills as a writer; we will focus in particular on close reading and on logical organization. The first written assignment will be a bulleted list of observations about a sonnet that you will then transform into a structured close reading paper. You will have the opportunity to revise the first paper based on feedback from your instructor and your classmates.
No prior knowledge of poetry, meter, or rhyme is expected. Lovers and despisers of poetry are equally welcome. The only prerequisite is a willingness to read with the utmost attention—and a dictionary.
|
| | Contemporary Poetry |
| Fall 2024 19823 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 19 / 0 | Jahan Ramazani | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Kerchof Hall 317 |
| | In this seminar, we will examine an array of postwar idioms, forms, and movements. While devoting much of our attention to some of the most influential poetry from the second half of the twentieth century, we will also bring ourselves up to date by examining some of the best poems published in recent years by poets of diverse backgrounds. To hone our attention, we will focus on several specific genres, forms, or kinds of poetry, including sonnets, elegies, and poems about the visual arts. The seminar will emphasize the development of skills of close reading, critical thinking, and imaginative, knowledgeable writing about poetry. |
| | Introduction to Poetry |
| Fall 2024 20635 | 004 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 20 / 20 | Hodges Adams | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | Nau Hall 241 |
| | “I learned / to sit at desk / and condense // No layoff / from this / condensery” —Lorine Neidecker | This class aims to strengthen the skills of close reading and analytical thinking through evaluating poetry. Discussion is the primary format; we will explore various poetic forms and movements and pay close attention to language. Students will read individual poems across a wide variety of styles and time periods, as well as reading two short collections of contemporary American poetry. There will be three essays, one of which will be paired with an in-class presentation. Extensive revision of at least one essay is expected. We may take field trips to some places around Grounds such as the Fralin Art Museum and the Special Collections Library. |
| ENGL 2507 | Studies in Drama |
| |
| | Identity, Race, and Religion in Renaissance Drama |
| Fall 2024 19787 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 20 / 20 | Adriana Streifer | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 368 |
| | How can Hamlet help us understand the sources of modern beliefs about identity and individuality? What can we learn from Othello and The Merchant of Venice about Renaissance understandings of race and religion? In this introduction to the study of dramatic literature, we will study the theater of the English Renaissance in order to help us understand where our modern ideas about identity come from. We live in an era marked by fierce debates about race, religion, nationalism, gender, and sexuality, but these topics were equally pressing (though in different ways) to authors such as Shakespeare and Marlowe, and to their audiences. Our goal is to step outside of ourselves and engage in imaginative time travel, so that we may understand how race, religion, and identity were and are culturally constructed, both in their time, and in our own. As we read, we will ask ourselves: How do dramatic texts destabilize our understandings of identity categories such as race, religion, and gender? What makes drama distinct in this regard from poetry, or prose? How does theater enable competing interpretations, such that marginalized characters can question orthodoxies and push against dominant narratives? As values and social norms change over time, how have scholars, directors, actors, and other artists responded to, reclaimed, and reinterpreted dramatic texts that contain historical, context-specific manifestations of racism and other prejudices? Throughout the course, we will grapple with these questions and with many others that enable us to consider the value of turning to early modern dramatic texts to understand divergent, complex ideas about selfhood and identity. |
| ENGL 2508 | Studies in Fiction |
| |
| | Dystopia |
| | The Dystopian Novel |
| Fall 2024 19822 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 20 / 0 | Mrinalini Chakravorty | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | Kerchof Hall 317 |
| | This course will survey modern dystopian novels. Dystopias offer apocalyptic visions; they summon aesthetics of disease, speculation, pessimism, horror, and dysfunction to warn against seeing modern developments as benevolent. A singular feature of dystopian fiction is its questioning of modern state forms, both totalitarian and democratic. Dystopian novels also ask us to think about how we live our increasingly technological lives. Do conditions of modern living such as of surveillance, conformity, comfort, militarism, mechanization, mobility, reproductive facticity, incarceration, medicalization, and scientificity lead to better futures? The bleak worlds that dystopias imagine starkly suggest that they do not. Instead, dystopian novels ask that readers contemplate, and even critique, the ethical cost of our acceptance of modern social conditions, the depletion of freedom, autonomy, and humanity. Through our reading, we will ask what lessons we are to learn from such bleak and desperate fictions. |
| | Nineteenth-Century Speculative Fiction |
| | Nineteenth-Century Speculative Fiction |
| Fall 2024 19825 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 19 / 20 | Stephen Arata | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Nau Hall 242 |
| | The nineteenth century was an age of lively experimentation in narrative fiction. In this course we will read a range of texts that depart from conventional realism: Gothic tales, science fiction, stories of ghosts and the supernatural. Likely authors include Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Vernon Lee, Bram Stoker, and H. G. Wells. Like all ENGL 2500 classes, this course is designed to help you read closely, think creatively, and write lucidly about literary and other texts. It fulfills the Second Writing Requirement and counts towards the fulfillment of the Artistic, Interpretive, and Philosophical Inquiry requirement.
|
| | Awakenings in Literature and Culture |
| | Narrating Queer Experience |
| Fall 2024 20971 | 004 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 17 / 20 | Rachel Haines | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Shannon House 111 |
| | What does it mean to be awakened? To be aroused or stirred? What is an awakening’s affective contour? Is it socially constituted or a matter of spiritual enchantment? Is it psychic or embodied? Mental or physical? Our course will address these questions to a variety of novels and films, with particular emphasis on narratives of queer experience (or, better, experience queered). In doing so, we will attune to representations of awakenings in literature while also paying close attention—through imaginative close reading—to our own responses to literature. The course will approach "awakenings" capaciously, with possible topics ranging from gender and sexuality to childhood/adolescence and, finally, negative or “toxic awakenings.” Some of the authors we'll encounter include Henry James, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, Nella Larsen, and Alison Bechdel. We will also watch films like Todd Haynes' Carol, Barry Jenkins' Moonlight, and Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Assignments will consist of short weekly discussion posts, three close reading papers, and informal roundtable presentations. |
| ENGL 2599 | Special Topics |
| |
| | Nature and Romanticism |
| Fall 2024 19779 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 20 / 20 | Jon D'Errico | MoWeFr 1:00pm - 1:50pm | New Cabell Hall 395 |
| | In this class we will read a selection of texts exploring the roots of contemporary attitudes toward nature. The readings range from the mid-14th century to the present, and the genres include poetry, short fiction, drama, and novels. Although we will, in passing, consider some literary theory, our focus in this class will be on your close analysis of the texts, via class discussions and your written assignments.
We will explore in broad terms some of the major literary traditions that contribute to modern understandings of nature. We will especially attend to three overlapping themes: the evolving understanding of nature, the relationship between nature and human nature, and the boundaries between the natural and the unnatural.
Along the way, we'll provide guided practice in managing key elements of argument and style. |
| | Criticism in the First Person |
| | Criticism in the First Person |
| Fall 2024 19828 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 13 / 0 | Emily Ogden | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | The Rotunda Room 150 |
| | In this course, we’ll discuss how we know what we know about aesthetic objects like literary texts. What are we claiming when we claim that a work is beautiful? To what extent is such a claim knowledge, and to what extent mere opinion? Our focus will be on the place of first-person experience—the I and what the I knows, sees, and feels--in our aesthetic judgments. We’ll spend about half our time learning to understand Stanley Cavell’s theory of what happens when we claim a work of art is beautiful, with a special focus on what role the first person has in such claims. We’ll spend the other half reading the work of various writers who use the first person prominently in their work. We’ll read critics practicing in the academy as well as critics working as reviewers in the periodical press. Writers we may read include Maggie Nelson, Christina Sharpe, Nathalie Léger, T. J. Clark, D. A. Miller, Elizabeth Hardwick, Cristina Rivera Garza, and others. Students should expect to do a lot of writing. Many assignments will be opportunities to write criticism as a form of creative nonfiction, in the first-person voice. |
| | Literatures of the Nonhuman |
| Fall 2024 19835 | 005 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 20 / 20 | Adrienne Ghaly | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | New Cabell Hall 191 |
| | This course explores ideas of the ‘nonhuman’ in literature. From John Keats’s address to autumn and Franz Kafka’s giant bug, Gregor Samsa, to imagining yourself into another species, ‘alien’ forms of life, and experiments with artificial intelligence, are human and nonhuman distinct categories? Where and how do they overlap, or even merge? The focus will be on developing strategies of close reading and introducing the basics of literary critical analysis through shorter forms in poetry and prose that examine the nonhuman across a range of genres from the nineteenth century to the present. No prior knowledge required. This course fulfills the Second Writing Requirement of 20+ pages of written work. Active class participation, reading responses, shorter pieces of writing, and a final essay. |
| | Ecologies Across Genres |
| | Reading Ecology Across Genres |
| Fall 2024 19847 | 006 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 19 / 20 | Brian Teare | MoWe 6:00pm - 7:15pm | New Cabell Hall 283 |
| | How do literary works represent living ecosystems? How do literary genres - nonfiction, fiction, poetry - attempt to do so by playing to specific strengths like factual reporting, character-based plot, or songfulness? What other species live and thrive inside the built environment of literary worlds? In this course, we’ll discuss how nonfiction writers, novelists, and poets situate words in ethical relation to the natural world. We'll spend some of our time learning about the relationship between what Aldo Leopold calls a "land ethic" and what Kimberly Ruffin calls "social ecology," thus allowing us to think about how the biological sciences and environmental politics inevitably intertwine in literature attempting to represent both ecological and social systems. Some of the worlds we'll inhabit together will include Robin Wall Kimmerer's Gathering Moss, Richard Powers's The Overstory, JJJJJerome Ellis' Aster of Ceremonies, Ann Pancake's Strange As This Weather Has Been, and Lauret Savoy's Trace. We should expect to do a lot of writing in this course, and many assignments will be opportunities to write criticism from an ecological standpoint, in the first-person voice. |
| | Modern Literature and the Quest for Self |
| | Modern Literature and the Quest for Self |
| Fall 2024 20003 | 008 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 18 / 20 | Kate Stephenson | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | John W. Warner Hall 113 |
| | How does modern literature redefine subjectivity? What does it mean to perform the self? How do race, gender, and class complicate these questions? We will focus on short stories, poetry, and novels from the twentieth century. Authors will include Woolf, Plath, Sexton, Morrison, Heaney, Giovanni, and Berry among others. |
| | Motherhood in African American Literature |
| Fall 2024 20899 | 012 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 19 / 20 | Arselyne Chery | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | Bryan Hall 328 |
| | What is (Black) motherhood? This course will explore representations of mothers and mothering in African American literature. How have legacies of enslavement and colonialism shaped the social and political experiences of Black mothers (and Black women as a whole)? Foregrounding a Black feminist analytic to the study of motherhood, the selected course texts will prompt us to consider how the interlocking matters of race, class, gender, sexuality, and (im)migration not only impact the journey of motherhood but also challenge dichotomized, social constructions of ‘good mothers’ vs ‘bad mothers.’ We’ll also look into how form and genre conventions shape the varying portrayals of (Black) motherhood as well. Some of the writers we may read include Harriet Jacobs, Ann Petry, Octavia Butler, Jamaica Kincaid, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison. Students should expect to do a lot of writing, namely close-reading and analytical work. Requirements include three essay projects, active attendance and participation, and discussion posts. |
| | Landscapes of Black Education |
| Fall 2024 20007 | 100 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 16 / 20 | K. Ian Grandison | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | New Cabell Hall 111 |
| | This course examines how seemingly ordinary spaces and places around us, “landscapes,” are involved in the struggle to democratize education in the United States. It uses the African American experience in this arena to anchor the exploration. We explore how landscape is implicated in the secret prehistory of Black education under enslavement; the promise of public education during Reconstruction; Booker T. Washington’s accommodation during early Jim Crow; black college campus rebellions of the 1920s; the impact of Brown v. Board of Education; the rise of black studies programs at majority campuses in the 1960s and ‘70s; and the resonance of Jim Crow assumptions affecting education access in our current moment. We also touch on the experience of other marginalized groups. For example, women’s college campuses, such as those of Mount Holyoke and Smith College, were designed to discipline women to accept prescribed gender roles at the height of the women’s suffrage movement. Armed with this background, on Saturday, Sept. 19, from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., there will be a required field trip to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center and its setting in downtown Charlottesville. This was the site of Charlottesville’s first public elementary and later high school for African Americans. Some of the materials we study include excerpts from the following: Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, Raymond Wolters’ The New Negro on Campus, and James D. Anderson’s The Education of Blacks in the South. Films include Peter Gilbert's With All Deliberate Speed. We’ll explore interpreting historical and contemporary maps, plans, and other design- and planning-related materials to help develop the ability to interrogate landscapes critically. Graded assignments include two midterms, a team research project, a final team project symposium, and an individual critical reflection on the team project. There will be a number of informal in-class and take home exercises connected especially with developing skills in preparation for the midterms, field trip, and final project.
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| ENGL 3220 | The Seventeenth Century |
| |
| | An age of scientific and political revolution |
| Fall 2024 20030 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 17 / 18 | Rebecca Rush | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Bryan Hall 203 |
| | Read Bacon, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Hobbes, Herrick, and Milton. |
| | In this course we will study a period marked by two big-name revolutions—the scientific revolution and the political revolution known as the English Civil War—but our task will be to examine the subtler currents of thought that ran beneath these epochal changes. We will focus in particular on vigorous seventeenth-century debates about the origins of knowledge and the purpose of liberty. Seventeenth-century writers put pressure on all the received ways of explaining the human mind, the natural world, and the political regime. They asked whether we should trust political customs, intellectual authorities, or even our own eyes and minds. They wondered whether goodness, greatness, and honor are meaningful ideas or fictions that had long impeded progress toward certain knowledge and secure peace. They debated about the primary aim of political life and what kinds of freedom are desirable and achievable. As we study political and philosophical prose by Francis Bacon, John Milton, and Thomas Hobbes in conversation with poems and plays by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Robert Herrick, and Andrew Marvell (among others), we will practice reading with the utmost care—and a dictionary by our sides. Our aim will be not only to understand the complexities of these authors’ thought but also to draw out the rich particularities of their language. |
| ENGL 3271 | Shakespeare: Histories and Comedies |
| |
| Fall 2024 13757 | 100 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 49 / 60 | Clare Kinney | MoWe 12:00pm - 12:50pm | John W. Warner Hall 104 |
| | Combative wit; desire and disguise. Guilty kings and uppity women. The performance of power. Gender-bending and genre-bending drama. First years and non-majors welcome! |
| | A survey of the first half of Shakespeare’s dramatic career, focusing in particular on the comedies and history plays. Among the things we’ll be looking at: the intricate relations between desire, disguise and the transformation of identity in plays like The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It; the ways in which various kinds of drama can simultaneously question and reaffirm the status quo; the representation of gender and agency on the comic stage; suggestive connections between comedy and tragedy in Romeo and Juliet; comedy and history in Henry IV part I (and to a lesser extent in Henry V); tragedy and history in Richard II; the pressing of comedy to its limits in Twelfth Night. Lectures will remain attentive throughout to the power of the Shakespearean wordhoard and also to the relationship between play text and performance.
Course requirements: Regular attendance at lectures; regular attendance at (and lively participation in) discussion sections; two 6-7 page papers, midterm and final exams.
|
| ENGL 3275 | History of Drama I: Ancient Greece to the Renaissance |
| |
| Fall 2024 19843 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Closed | 30 / 30 | John Parker | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Dell 2 100 |
| | The first third of this course will cover the drama of classical antiquity in translation, beginning with Greek plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, then moving from there to the Latin plays of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca. The next third of the course will consider the kinds of performance that displaced (and in some cases transformed) these pagan traditions after the Christianization of the Roman empire; we will likely read a liturgical drama, a morality play, a saint play, some vernacular Biblical drama and a secular farce. The final third of the course will cover plays from the Renaissance, focusing particularly on the commercial London stage of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.
A major goal of the course will be to answer some of the questions posed by historical period: what does it mean, in the context of this particular genre, to move from antiquity to the Middle Ages to the Renaissance? How seriously should we take the differences between paganism and Christianity? What portion of early modern drama derives from classical antiquity, what portion from the Middle Ages, and what portion, if any, is new? What does it mean to say that drama by the time of Shakespeare had been secularized? |
| ENGL 3310 | Eighteenth-Century Women Writers |
| |
| Fall 2024 19780 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 23 / 30 | Alison Hurley | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | New Cabell Hall 058 |
| | During the eighteenth century, social, economic, and technological developments in Britain converged to alter the ways in which texts were produced and consumed. The result of these innovations was a print culture that offered women the opportunity to step onto the public stage as professional authors for the first time. Female authors, nevertheless, remained intensely aware of their “delicate situation” within the literary public sphere. They responded to this situation by deploying a variety of authorial strategies that ingeniously combined self-promotion with self-protection in order to legitimize their appearance in print. This class will be particularly interested in examining the relationship between gender and genre in eighteenth-century Britain. Our readings will highlight a series of specific literary forms – drama, poetry, and the novel – each of which implicates gender in distinctive and compelling ways.
Class requirements include frequent discussion thread posts; in-class quizzes; two thesis-driven essays; a poetry annotation assignment; and a “blue book” essay-based final exam.
This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement
|
| ENGL 3380 | The English Novel I |
| |
| | Run Runaway! |
| Fall 2024 19793 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 7 / 30 | Cynthia Wall | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Bryan Hall 328 |
| | In 1775, the German physicist and satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg declared that England had the best novels because England had the best roads. Daughters could escape from their fathers; sons could strike out on adventures; young ladies could make Entrances into the World; criminals could flee their crimes; highwaymen could make their fortunes. This course will explore the ways that eighteenth-century British novels themselves explored time and space, country and city, roads and inns, carriages and ships, in the fiction of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, Tobias Smollett, Jane Austen, and Anonymous. Requirements: Attendance, participation, weekly analytical commentaries, one short (5-7pp.) paper, a midterm, a small group project, and a final exam. |
| ENGL 3480 | The English Novel II |
| |
| | The Way We Live Now: The Novel in the Nineteenth Century |
| Fall 2024 19827 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Closed | 30 / 30 | Stephen Arata | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 168 |
| | You do not have to complete English Novel I to enroll in English Novel II |
| | “Novels are in the hands of us all,” wrote Anthony Trollope in 1870, “from the Prime Minister down to the last-appointed scullery maid. We have become a novel-reading nation.” Indeed, over the course of the nineteenth century the novel became the most popular—and profitable—literary genre in Great Britain. Its success was due to many factors, none perhaps more important than the extraordinary sophistication and emotional power with which novelists set out to portray (as the title of one of Trollope’s own novels puts it) “the way we live now.” More than ever before, novelists were committed to recording the visible world in all its abundant detail while also exploring the complex interior lives of individual women and men. They accomplished these feats, moreover, by way of gripping stories full of adventure, love (lust too), betrayal, mystery, and wonder. In this course we will immerse ourselves in a half-dozen or so of the finest examples of the genre, chosen from among such writers as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, Thomas Hardy, and Trollope himself. Requirements will likely include bi-weekly email responses, two essays, a midterm, and final exam. |
| ENGL 3500 | Studies in English Literature |
| |
| | Faust |
| Fall 2024 20517 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 18 / 30 (18 / 30) | Jeffrey Grossman | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | New Cabell Hall 332 |
| | Goethe's Faust has been called an "atlas of European modernity" and "one of the most recent columns for that bridge of spirit spanning the swamping of world history." The literary theorist Harold Bloom writes: "As a sexual nightmare of erotic fantasy, [Faust] ... has no rival, and one understands why the shocked Coleridge declined to translate the poem. It is certainly a work about what, if anything, will suffice, and Goethe finds myriad ways of showing us that sexuality by itself will not. Even more obsessively, Faust teaches that, without an active sexuality, absolutely nothing will suffice."
Taking Goethe's Faust as its point of departure, this course will trace the Faust legend from its rise over 400 hundred years ago to the modern age. Retrospectively, we will explore precursors of Goethe's Faust – e.g., the English Faust Book, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and perhaps Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker – to which Goethe responded. We will then read Goethe's Faust, parts I and parts II (either in its entirety or in excerpts). Although now a major work in the European canon, Goethe sought in his Faust to radically transform central tenants of the legend and to challenge many conventions of European culture, politics, and society. We will consider as well works like Byron's melancholy drama Manfred, a theater of emotions that explores problems of power, sex, and guilt. And we will venture into the twentieth century, viewing first F.W. Murnau's avant-garde Faust film (1926) and Istvan Szabo’s film Mephisto (1981), which asks whether Goethe's Faust found its apotheosis in Nazi Germany.
Our aims will be to ask why writers repeatedly returned to the Faust legend and how, in re-working Faust, they sought to confront the political, social, and cultural problems of their own times. Although listed at the 3000-level, the reading load and assignments in this course are suitable for students at all levels. (Course is cross-listed as ENGL 3500 and GETR 3600).
|
| | Lit. of Revolutionary Hope and Radical Pessimism |
| | Literatures of Revolutionary Hope and Radical Pessimism |
| Fall 2024 20975 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 5 / 20 | Taylor Schey | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | The Rotunda Room 152 |
| | Which outlook is more conducive to social and political transformation: optimism or pessimism? Does hope produce change, or does it sustain the status quo? Does despair lead to resignation, or does it drive people to action? In this course we’ll explore the literatures of revolutionary hope and radical pessimism, taking a particular interest in works that complicate the distinction between these seemingly antithetical orientations. Our case studies will be drawn from diverse artistic and intellectual movements that have responded to world-changing political events and structural violences, including the French Revolution and its failure (British Romanticism), the rise of fascism that led to WWII (historical materialist poetry and prose), homophobia and heteronormativity (queer theory), and racial slavery and its afterlife (Afropessimism and Black optimism). While our aim will be to understand how political hope and pessimism have functioned in different historical and social contexts, we’ll also keep an eye on their relevance in our own moment. Requirements include two exams, a final essay, and a handful of response papers. |
| ENGL 3540 | Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature |
| |
| | Romanticism |
| Fall 2024 19773 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 28 / 30 | Mark Edmundson | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | New Cabell Hall 058 |
| | Romantic Poetry: We’ll read and interpret the six major English Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron. We’ll reflect on the pleasures of their work, and on what they might have to teach us about love, politics, nature, art, the self, society, and the imagination. We may end with a Jane Austen novel for contrast, probably Pride and Prejudice. Two fact-based exams, one paper at the close.
|
| ENGL 3560 | Studies in Modern and Contemporary Literature |
| |
| | US Modernisms in Word and Image |
| Fall 2024 20027 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 16 / 20 | Joshua Miller | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | New Cabell Hall 283 |
| | How does one write something that’s never been thought? Why would an author write in mixed or invented languages? How do visual images respond to written narratives (and vice-versa)? We will discuss a broad range of novels, short fiction, film, photography, and graphic arts composed between 1898 and 1945 and the historical, political, and cultural trends that they were responding to and participating in. This was an extraordinary and tumultuous period of demographic change, artistic invention, economic instability, racialized violence, and political contestation that witnessed mass immigration, migration, and emigration. In paying particular attention to trends of demographic displacement and change within and across national borders, we’ll consider the heady experiments in language and narrative that took place during the first half of the twentieth century. The historical events of this period—framed by the wars of 1898 and World War II—will provide context for the novels we read.
Some of the broad questions that we’ll track throughout the term include the following. How do these authors define the “modern”? What, for that matter, is a “novel” in twentieth-century U.S. literature? How did these authors participate (and resist) the process of defining who counted as an “American”? What role did expatriates and immigrants play in the “new” United States of the twentieth century? How did modernists narrate the past? How did trends in technology (mass production, cinema, transportation), science (relativity), and politics influence novelists’ roles within U.S. modernity? How did these authors reconcile the modernist imperative to “make it new” with the histories of the U.S. and the Americas? What were the new languages of modernity?
|
| ENGL 3570 | Studies in American Literature |
| |
| | Hemispheric Latinx Literature and Culture |
| Fall 2024 13754 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 22 / 24 (22 / 24) | Carmen Lamas | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Bryan Hall 235 |
| | No waitlist, but spaces often open up. Please come to the first day of class. |
| | This course offers a survey of Latinx literature from a hemispheric perspective. We will examine how the histories of the US, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia come together to produce novels, poems, memoirs and films that are distinctly Latinx. In addition to exploring the integrated global histories that produce latinidades, we will analyze how race, class, gender and sexuality are presented in Latinx literature and other artistic forms. The course will introduce students to the different Latinx national-origin groups and the reasons individuals immigrate to the United States. Students will also read a variety of Latinx texts that demonstrate the hemispheric and trans-American nature of the Latinx experience. All readings, writing, and discussions are in English. |
| | American Wild |
| Fall 2024 19777 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 21 / 22 | Stephen Cushman | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Dell 2 101 |
| | With biblical images of wilderness in mind, seventeenth-century English colonizers of Massachusetts described what they found as another wilderness, howling, savage, terrible. For them it was to be feared, avoided, and, where possible, tamed. Four centuries later, with eighty percent of U.S. citizens living in cities, many of them exposed to wilderness only through calendar pictures or screensaver photos, what meaning or value does American wildness have? Is it only a fantasy image, part of an American brand, as in the phrase “the wild West.” Are wildness and wilderness the same thing? Has the howling, terrible, untamed wildness of the seventeenth-century forest relocated to another sphere, in the wildness of wildfires in California and throughout the west? Is climate the new frontier, the new wilderness, where Americans encounter untamed wildness in droughts, floods, violent storms, and extreme weather? Have we come full circle to more biblical imagery, with apocalypse replacing wilderness as the rubric under which we encounter the wild?
This course will begin with a look at biblical antecedents and their influence on white colonists encountering landscapes inhabited by native people. From there we’ll move to the literature of westward exploration, and further encounters with indigenous populations and their lands, in selections from the journals of Jefferson-commissioned Lewis and Clark. Then it’s on to the mid-nineteenth pivot toward wildness in the eyes of Romantic beholders, foremost among them Henry David Thoreau, patron saint of the environmental movement. Next comes John Muir, whose vision of wilderness preservation begat the U.S. National Park System. Proceeding to the twentieth-century, we’ll add important voices, such as Aldo Leopold’s and Rachel Carson’s and Rebecca Solnit’s, as the preservation impulse merges with concern about public health and social justice. We’ll complete our tour in the twenty-first century by joining the intensifying conversation, along with Robert Bullard, Alice Walker, Linda Hogan, Carol Finney, Lauret Savoy, J. Drew Lanham, and Garnette Cadogan, about whether the visions of Thoreau, Muir, et al. are exclusively white and male.
Open to all. Those in the Environmental Thought and Practice Program welcome. |
| | Contemporary American Fiction |
| | Graphic Novels, Eccentric Narrators, Alternative Histories, Magical Realities |
| Website 19984 | 003 | Lecture (3 Units) | Closed | 22 / 0 | Caroline Rody | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Monroe Hall 118 |
| | Narrative Experiment in Contemporary American Fiction:
Graphic Novels, Eccentric Narrators, Alternative Histories, Magical Realities
Contemporary American fiction brims with surprises. It’s not just that an unprecedent diversity of voices is generating a global literature centered upon U.S. territory, but also that this influx of the world’s energies has accelerated the modern and postmodern experimentation with new ways to tell a story.
In this course we will explore the possibilities generated by narrative innovation of several kinds. We’ll take up from the booming genre of the graphic novel, in which the visual dimension bursts open the conventional boundaries of narrative fiction (in texts like Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, Thuy Bui’s The Best We Can Do, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home). We’ll read novels narrated by outrageous, elusive, sometimes magical voices (in texts like Junot Diaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, and Ruman Alaam’s Leave the World Behind). And we’ll consider novels that re-imagine ethnic American histories by means of inventive strategies: magical, multi-vocal, counterfactual, or speculative (in texts like Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s “My Monticello”).
Requirements: devoted reading and active participation, multiple online postings, leading of class discussion (in pairs), a short and a long paper.
|
| ENGL 3572 | Studies in African-American Literature and Culture |
| |
| | Black Protest Narrative |
| | Black Protest Narrative |
| Fall 2024 19611 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Closed | 30 / 30 (30 / 30) | Marlon Ross | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | Bryan Hall 235 |
| | This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements, and black postmodernism. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion, crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Either directly or indirectly, all of these narratives ask pressing questions about the meaning of American citizenship and racial community under the conditions of racial segregation and the fight for integration or black nationalist autonomy. What does it mean to be “Negro” and American? How should African Americans conduct themselves on the world stage, and which international identifications are most productive? What roles do the press and popular media play in the sustenance and/or erosion of a sense of community both within a racial group and in relation to the country? What are the obligations of oppressed communities to the nation that oppresses them? What role should violence play in working toward liberation? How do intersectional subjectivities like gender, sexuality, religion, class, immigrant status, and color factor into ideologies and strategies of protest? We begin our study with the most famous protest novel, Richard Wright’s Native Son. Then we examine other narratives in this tradition, including works by Angelo Herndon, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gwendolyn Brooks, Malcolm X, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Joseph Beam, Marlon Riggs, and William Melvin Kelley. Films include Joseph Mankiewitz’s No Way Out, Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and The Watermelon Man, and Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied. Written assignments include an in-class midterm, a take-home midterm, a final exam.
|
| ENGL 3790 | Moving On: Migration in/to US |
| |
| Fall 2024 20293 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Closed | 19 / 0 (19 / 0) | Lisa Goff | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 323 |
| | No waitlist, but spaces often open up. Email Prof. Lisa Goff lg6t@virginia.edu if you want to join the class. |
| | “Moving On: Migration In/To the U.S.” examines the history of voluntary, coerced, and forced migration in the U.S. Students will trace changing attitudes about migration over time using a variety of cultural products, including videos, books, documentaries, poems, paintings, graphic novels, photographs, fashion, digital humanities, and academic scholarship. Class participation/contribution is the core of this class. Other assessments include reading responses, presentations, papers, and reflective essays. There will be one scheduled test. Students will be required to volunteer 5-10 hours with a migration-related project during the course of the semester. |
| ENGL 3915 | Point of View Journalism |
| |
| Fall 2024 20295 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 25 / 0 (25 / 0) | Lisa Goff | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | New Cabell Hall 132 |
| | No waitlist, but spaces often open up. Email Prof. Lisa Goff lg6t@virginia.edu if you want to join the class. |
| | This course examines the history and practice of “point-of-view” journalism, a
controversial but credible alternative to the dominant model of “objectivity”
on the part of the news media. Not to be confused with “fake news,”
point-of-view journalism has a history as long as the nation’s, from Tom Paine
and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century to "muckrakers" like
Ida B. Wells Barnett and Ida Tarbell at the end of the nineteenth, and “New
Journalism” practitioners like Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and Barbara
Ehrenreich in the twentieth. Twenty-first century point-of-view practitioners
include news organizations on the right (Fox News, One America News Network)
and left (Vice, Jacobin, MSNBC, Democracy Now), as well as prominent
voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Rebecca Solnit, Jia
Tolentino, and Roxane Gay. We will also consider the work of comedians such as
Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and John Oliver, who pillory the news (and newsmakers) in
order to interpret them.
|
| ENGL 4270 | Shakespeare Seminar |
| |
| | Shakespeare in the Making -- Grow with Shakespeare, through tragedy and beyond |
| Fall 2024 19833 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 2 / 14 | James Kinney | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | New Cabell Hall 038 |
| | Reading approximately one play a week, we will survey a sequence of formal and thematic experiments leading up to and finally beyond the four principal tragedies of state (Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra). How do these dramas revise or reflect on the patterns of Shakespeare's first histories? How are his main generic perspectives related throughout his career? Where do borrowed providential designs first begin to give way to self-conscious authorial reshaping, and how is the tension between these two elements of plotting reflected in each of the tragedies? A few major themes to consider together or singly: succession and ordering regimens, dynastic and cosmic; misrule whether inner or outer, both festive and blighting; the state and the scene of heroic performance; apt improvisation, rehearsal, and ripeness of purpose / apt timing. Class requirements: Lively participation including occasional email responses, one short and one longer essay, and a final exam. |
| ENGL 4500 | Seminar in English Literature |
| |
| | Seven Ages, Seven Questions |
| Fall 2024 19774 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 18 / 18 | Mark Edmundson | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | Bryan Hall 312 |
| | Seven Ages / Seven Questions or How to Live, What to Do.
The course emerges from Jaques’s speech in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” on the seven ages of human life. We’ll consider childhood and education, erotic love, religion, warfare and courage in war, politics, the quest for wisdom, and old age. Readings from, among others, Plato, Beauvoir, Freud, Wordsworth, Schopenhauer, and Marx. Regular writing assignments and a long essay at the end.
|
| | Gothic Forms |
| | Gothic Forms |
| Fall 2024 19794 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 18 | Cynthia Wall | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | John W. Warner Hall 113 |
| | Gothic literature burst onto the scene in the eighteenth century with ruined castles, ethereal music, brooding villains and surprisingly sturdy heroines, all performing as metaphors of our deepest fears and fiercest resistances. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the gothic continued as a genre of cultural anxiety. This seminar will survey gothic literature through both history and genre: the classic novels, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1797), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818); 18thC German vampire poetry and poems by John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Sylvia Plath; the plays of Matthew Lewis and Richard Brinsley Peake; and the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W. W. Jacobs, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King. And we will ask ourselves: What are we afraid of? Active participation, a presentation , weekly short commentaries, one short paper (5-7pp), and one longer research paper (10-12pp). |
| ENGL 4540 | Seminar in Nineteenth-Century Literature |
| |
| | Jane Austen in Her Time and Ours |
| Fall 2024 19782 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 13 / 0 | Susan Fraiman | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Nau Hall 242 |
| | An intensive study of the work of Jane Austen. Take this course if you’re new to Austen or already a fan. Take it for Austen’s epigrammatic sentences and love stories, but also for her biting social commentary and (beneath the light, bright surface) her probing of the darker emotions. How do the novels treat such topics as family conflict, first impressions, sexual jealousy, women’s property rights, New World slavery, and the Napoleonic Wars? Why have Austen’s happy endings been accused of haste? In addition to exploring Austen’s formal strategies, thematic concerns, and engagement with the issues of her time, we will touch on her reception in subsequent eras, including a cinematic interpretation or two. Two papers and a final exam. This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement. |
| ENGL 4560 | Seminar in Modern and Contemporary Literature |
| |
| | Contemporary Poetry |
| Fall 2024 19824 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 14 (10 / 14) | Jahan Ramazani | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | Kerchof Hall 317 |
| | In this seminar, we will read and discuss some of the most influential poetry of the second half of the twentieth century and of the twenty-first century, mostly by American writers from various backgrounds. To hone our attention to poetics, we will focus on several specific genres and forms of poetry, including sonnets, elegies, and poems about the visual arts. How do contemporary poets repurpose, transform, and revitalize poetic traditions? What is the value of poetry for writers of diverse ethnicities, races, nations, movements, social classes, and genders? What is distinctive about poetry as a means for addressing preoccupations such as the self, the environment, race, art, nationality, gender, sexuality, grief, violence, and historical memory? |
| | Caribbean Sci-Fi and Fantasy |
| Fall 2024 19832 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 7 / 18 (7 / 18) | Njelle Hamilton | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 044 |
| | In this advanced undergraduate seminar, you will encounter Caribbean writers working at the cutting edge of Science Fiction/Fantasy, and discover novels, stories, artwork and film that center Caribbean settings, peoples, and culture, even as they expand the definition of genre. Authors and auteurs from the English-, Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean might include: Nalo Hopkinson, Tobias Buckell, Karen Lord, Junot Díaz, Rita Indiana, Marcia Douglas, Ernest Pepin, René Depestre, and Agustín de Rojas. Assignments will include short critical essays and a long research paper where you think through how Caribbean texts redefine, expand, or critique mainstream SF/F. |
| | Photography and Literature |
| | Visual Fictions: Photography and 20th/21st-Century US Literature |
| Fall 2024 20028 | 004 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 8 / 18 | Joshua Miller | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 111 |
| | The emergence of photography in the 19th and early 20th centuries participated in an extraordinary vitality in both visual and literary cultures of the time. The force of new kinds of images and icons was immediate and transformative. Photographs were used in a wide range of ways during this period, from multimedia art forms (collage) to new surveillance methods (mug shots and passport photos) to advertising, journalism, family and personal mementos, among others. This was also the era of mass movements of people (immigration and migration). This course will provide an introduction to the emergence of photography as a popular and artistic medium in the 20th century US, which we will put in dialogue with the literary and cultural movements of realism, modernism, postmodernism, and the as-yet unnamed contemporary. We’ll consider how word-based arts changed—primarily narrative prose and the novel form—in response to the visualities generated by photography.
We’ll read key instances of photographic theory and ask how they also illuminate trends in 20th and 21st century US novels. Some questions we’ll consider include: How did novels respond to the emergence of photography as a new visual medium? How might novels be read as competing and collaborating with photography? How did literary narrative inform the trends and techniques of photography? How did (and do, today) photography and literary narrative respond to the social tensions around immigration and racialization? We’ll read works by some of the most prominent US novelists and photographers as well as those who have been overlooked.
|
| ENGL 4561 | Seminar in Modern Literature and Culture |
| |
| | Literature and Human Rights |
| Fall 2024 19842 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 7 / 18 | Christopher Krentz | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Bryan Hall 334 |
| | What does literature have to do with human rights, with the aspirational effort to ensure the protection of persons everywhere from persecution and deprivation? In this course we will begin by considering the history of human rights, including debates over their legitimacy. Then we will study recent theory on the relationship of rights to literature and read a variety of relevant contemporary fiction. The syllabus is still under construction, but possibilities here include Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Sinha’s Animal’s People, Abani’s Song for Night, and Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis. These works often deal with difficult, troubling topics, but they do so with grace and occasionally unexpected beauty. Requirements include the usual careful preparation and participation, quizzes, a short presentation, a 5-page paper, and a 10-page research paper. |
| ENGL 4580 | Seminar in Literary Criticism |
| |
| | Race, Space, Culture |
| Fall 2024 19614 | 100 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 7 / 18 (7 / 18) | K. Ian Grandison+1 | Tu 5:00pm - 7:30pm | New Cabell Hall 044 |
| | Co-taught by K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross, this interdisciplinary seminar examines the spatial implications at work in the theories, practices, and experiences of race, as well as the cultural implications at stake in our apprehensions and conceptions of space. Themes include: 1) the human/nature threshold; 2) public domains/private lives; 3) urban renewal, historic preservation, and the new urbanism; 4) defensible design and the spatial politics of fear; and 5) the cultural ideologies of sustainability. The seminar foregrounds the multidimensionality of space as a physical, perceptual, social, ideological, and discursive phenomenon. This means melding concepts and practices used in the design professions with theories affiliated with race, postcolonial, literary, and cultural studies. We’ll investigate a variety of spaces, actual and discursive, through selected theoretical readings from diverse disciplines (e.g., William Cronon, Patricia Williams, Philip Deloria, Leslie Kanes Weisman, Gloria Anzaldúa, Oscar Newman, Mindy Fullilove); through case studies (e.g., Indian reservations, burial grounds, suburban homes, gay bars, national monuments); and through two mandatory local site visits: to Monticello on Sunday, Sept. 22, from 1 to 5 p.m.; and to downtown Charlottesville on Tuesday, Nov. 12, from 5 to 8:30 p.m. Requirements include a take-home midterm, a final critical reflection paper, and a major team research project and symposium presentation.
|
| ENGL 4901 | The Bible Part 1: Hebrew Bible / Old Testament |
| |
| Fall 2024 19775 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 15 / 15 | Stephen Cushman | MoWe 11:00am - 12:15pm | Dawson's Row 1 |
| | The stories, rhythms, and rhetoric of the Bible have been imprinting readers and writers of English since the seventh century. Moving through selections from the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, from Genesis through the prophets, this course focuses on deepening biblical literacy and sharpening awareness of biblical connections to whatever members of the class are reading in other contexts. Along the way we will discuss English translations of the Bible; the process of canonization; textual history; and the long trail of interpretive approaches, ancient to contemporary. Our text will be the New Oxford Annotated Bible, 5th ed. All are welcome. No previous knowledge of the Bible needed or assumed.
PLEASE NOTE: Professor John Parker will teach a course focusing on the New Testament in spring 2025. Both courses will read the New Testament gospel of Mark, connecting the semesters, but you do not have to take the fall course as a prerequisite for the spring one. |
| ENGL 5559 | New Course in English Literature |
| |
| | Anne Spencer and/of the Harlem Renaissance |
| | Anne Spencer, Poet & Gardener in Lynchburg: Archives of the Harlem Renaissance |
| Fall 2024 19797 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 15 | Alison Booth | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Bryan Hall 233 |
| | This discussion-based seminar will focus on the celebrated woman poet Anne Spencer (1882-1975), part of the Harlem Renaissance while living in segregated Lynchburg, Virginia. Spencer’s lasting presence in 30 published poems, a preserved house and garden museum, and the papers at UVA as well as in Lynchburg inspire a planned exhibition in Harrison-Small Library September 2024, along with a slowly expanding body of critical studies. We can advance Spencer studies together in light of reading her work in relation to some other writers she interacted with and our theoretical questions about race, gender, place, environment, and cultural heritage, with some consideration of digital humanities. Our work will include exploring unpublished archives (Special Collections), taking a field trip to the Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum, attending the exhibit and associated events, reading biographies and criticism, practicing skills of reading and interpreting poetry, writing two essays, experimenting with digital tools. The Library hopes to generate support for digitizing images and manuscripts in the UVA collection of many of her papers, as well as examination of her books also archived here. There is no scholarly edition of her works, and our studies will advance scholarship on the evolution of her multi-faceted writing practice (in used notebooks, on walls; prose segueing into poetry and back again). |
| ENGL 5560 | Seminar in Modern and Contemporary Literature |
| |
| | Contemporary Poetry |
| Fall 2024 21187 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 14 (10 / 14) | Jahan Ramazani | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | Kerchof Hall 317 |
| | In this seminar, we will read and discuss some of the most influential poetry of the second half of the twentieth century and of the twenty-first century, mostly by American writers from various backgrounds. To hone our attention to poetics, we will focus on several specific genres and forms of poetry, including sonnets, elegies, and poems about the visual arts. How do contemporary poets repurpose, transform, and revitalize poetic traditions? What is the value of poetry for writers of diverse ethnicities, races, nations, movements, social classes, and genders? What is distinctive about poetry as a means for addressing preoccupations such as the self, the environment, race, art, nationality, gender, sexuality, grief, violence, and historical memory? |
| ENGL 5900 | Counterpoint Seminar in Teaching Modern Literature |
| |
| | Teaching Literature with Equity and Justice |
| Fall 2024 19792 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 12 / 15 | Cristina Griffin | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Bryan Hall 310 |
| | This seminar is about how and why teaching literature matters today. How do secondary school and college instructors teach literature in challenging times? How do teachers make tough decisions about what to teach and why? What responsibility do teachers have to promote equity and justice through the literature they teach and the methods they use? In this course, we will tackle these big questions together as we explore what it means to pursue a career in teaching literature to middle school, high school, or college students. Each week, we will weave together your existing knowledge of literature and your emerging knowledge of pedagogy. You will be introduced to theories of learning-focused, culturally relevant, and culturally responsive pedagogy, and you will put your newfound knowledge into practice as we work step by step through designing your own teaching philosophy and materials.
This course will bring together students who already have experience as classroom instructors, students who are in the process of teaching for the very first time, and students who have yet to step up to the front of a classroom in the role of teacher. We will build on this diversity of experiences, learning together how to bring transformative pedagogies into our present and future classrooms. |
| ENGL 8380 | Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction |
| |
| | The Eighteenth Century Novel and Modernity |
| Fall 2024 19789 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 8 / 15 | John O'Brien | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | Brooks Hall 103 |
| | The novel and modernity arrived together in the course of the eighteenth century, and they’ve been intricately interwoven ever since. In this course, we will read some of the landmark works of fiction of this period as a way of exploring the relationship between the novel and the modern world that it described, heralded, mocked, celebrated, and helped bring into being. We will taste the heroic romances of the seventeenth century against which the English novel of the eighteenth frequently set itself against (while occasionally ripping off) before reading a list that includes Eliza Haywood’s erotically-charged short novels of the 1720s, Daniel Defoe’s pseudo-autobiographical “histories,” Samuel Richardson’s compulsively-readable epistolary fictions, Henry Fielding’s “comic-epics in prose;” the late-century emergence of sensational Gothic fictions, and Jane Austen’s wry social satires. We will contextualize these works within the eighteenth-century’s own deep and broad river of writing on prose fiction, and also sample a number of modern critical approaches to the eighteenth-century novel, from Ian Watt’s paradigm-setting The Rise of the Novel to contemporary theorists of the cognitive work involved in reading prose fiction like Blakey Vermeule and Natalie Philips. Requirements: active participation, one short and one more substantial final paper. |
| ENGL 8520 | Studies in Renaissance Literature |
| |
| | Afterlives of the Epic |
| Fall 2024 19834 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 7 / 15 | James Kinney | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | Wilson Hall 244 |
| | What becomes of the epic, especially (but not only) in Renaissance England? Where has it been, and where does it still have to go? Why does the most elevated of literary modes in traditional reckonings end up seeming passe or impossible to so many moderns? Works to be read include Homer's epics, The Aeneid, The Inferno, Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe, The Dunciad, and The Waste Land. Class requirements: lively participation including brief email responses, two shorter or one more substantial term paper, and a final exam. |
| | Sources of Shakespeare |
| Fall 2024 19844 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 15 | John Parker | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 044 |
| | Shakespeare rarely thought up plays on his own. Instead he borrowed plotlines, characters, and, often enough, verbatim wording from previous works while combining them with other materials that he had read. We'll examine his dramas alongside these sources toward the end of developing a deeper understanding of terms like influence, imitation, inspiration, invention, collaboration, allusion, adaptation, quotation, renaissance, revival, remake, and plagiarism.
At the same time we'll need to look at our sources for Shakespeare's plays: some of the most famous exist in multiple, equally authentic versions, though they differ from one another substantially. How do editors decide between these competing sources when they produce contemporary editions? How do you know which version you're reading in a modern textbook?
We'll use this double focus — on the sources Shakespeare adapted to write his plays and on the earliest printed sources for modern editions of Shakespeare — as a way to investigate larger questions about authorship, textual authority, authenticity, and originality. Plays to be considered will likely include The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, The Winter's Tale, plus some plays by others: Seneca's Medea (translated by John Studley in1566), the anonymous King Leir, Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy and Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta. |
| ENGL 8540 | Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature |
| |
| | Jane Austen and Her Critics |
| Fall 2024 19781 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 12 / 0 | Susan Fraiman | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | Bryan Hall 310 |
| | A semester devoted to the patient close reading of Austen’s work, with attention to its historical context as well as formal attributes. Novels will be paired with critical essays illustrating diverse theoretical approaches. Any notion of Austen as a harmless spinster—narrow in her purview, complacent in her outlook—will quickly be dashed. Possible secondary materials include Eve Sedgwick’s queer perspective on Sense and Sensibility, Claudia Johnson’s feminist defense of Pride and Prejudice, Joseph Litvak’s deconstructive analysis of Emma, and Robyn Warhol’s narratological discussion of Persuasion. We may also consider an adaptation or two for screen or stage. Requirements include an article-length paper and a final exam. This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement.
|
| ENGL 8570 | Studies in American Literature |
| |
| | Latinx Literature and History |
| Fall 2024 19622 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 15 | Carmen Lamas | Mo 5:00pm - 7:30pm | Bryan Hall 233 |
| | This seminar provides a comprehensive overview of Latinx literature and histories by engaging the major critical debates in the field of Latinx literary studies (critical race theory, border studies, hemispheric frameworks, among others). We will explore the writings and histories of different national-origin Latinx groups and the construction of the term Latinx. Methodological strategies for researching Latinx topics will be addressed. Those who wish to increase their knowledge of Latinx topics; who wish to contextualize their own projects within Latinx literature and history; and/or who are considering a chapter or dissertation that include Latinx literary expression are encouraged to take this course. Proficiency in Spanish is not required. All readings and discussions will be in English. |
| ENGL 8580 | Studies in Critical Theory |
| |
| | Novel Theory: Current and Emergent |
| Fall 2024 19836 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 15 | Adrienne Ghaly | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Kerchof Hall 317 |
| | This course introduces students to the novel’s social, cultural, and political power through its most significant critical imaginaries, from established theories to emergent ideas. We’ll map a broad range of theoretical and literary historical developments of thinking about ‘the novel’ and its core structures: character, description and reality effects, worlds, centers and peripheries, interiority and free indirect discourse, race, planetary crisis, and more. We’ll investigate the durability of ‘canonical’ thinkers such as M.M. Bakhtin, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Toni Morrison, and Deleuze and Guattari, and explore how recently published and emerging work on the novel from Roland Barthes, Caroline Levine, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Tim Bewes, among others, offer exciting new ways to the think about the novel now. |
| | Introduction to Critical Theory |
| Fall 2024 19841 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 8 / 15 | Nasrin Olla | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | Kerchof Hall 317 |
| | This course introduces students to a wide range of 20th and 21st century theoretical paradigms. These approaches include: poststructuralism, structuralism, postcolonial thought, African diasporic thought, and gender & queer theory. Authors will include: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir and others. This course would be of interest to a wide range of students interested in thinking about continental philosophy, traditions of critique, and postcolonial worlds. |
| ENGL 8596 | Form and Theory of Poetry |
| |
| | To be Grounded: Space, Place, and Setting |
| | To Be Grounded: Understanding Space, Place, and Setting as a Growth Templates for Poetry |
| Fall 2024 19988 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 11 / 15 | Camille Dungy | Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm | Shannon House 111 |
| | *****THIS CLASS WILL BE TAUGHT BY CAMILLE DUNGY, KAPNICK WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE*****
Priority enrollment will be for 1st & 2nd year MFA poetry students, but graduate students from other programs may be admitted, pending instructor permission. If you are *not* in the MFA program, but are a graduate student who would like to add this course, contact Professor Kiki Petrosino at cmp2k@virginia.edu with a brief request & rationale. Professor Petrosino will consult with Professor Dungy on permissions. All e-mail requests for permission should be accompanied by a request on SIS. Enrollment for returning students begins April 8 & will continue until the section is filled. For full consideration, please apply as soon as possible. Confirmation of your spot in the class may arrive in early summer. |
| | This semester we'll be thinking about the role of place and space in poetry. How do specific settings shape the poem on the page? Reading works by poets such as Molly McCully Brown, Anne Spencer, Remica Bingham, Brenda Hillman and others, we'll consider how intersections of geographies, histories, landscapes, flora, demographies, and purpose influence poetic practices. The course will be offered in a hybrid manner, with one in-person synchronous class per month and the rest of the synchronous classes on an online platform. Students will be expected to attend class for each session both in-person or online, to write and revise their own poems in response to class prompts, to regularly participate in class discussion, to offer detailed responses to other students’ work, to attend one poetry reading (in person or virtual) and submit a written response to, to turn in close-reading responses to assigned readings, and possibly to participate in a group presentation near the end of the term. |
| ENGL 8598 | Form and Theory of Fiction |
| |
| | Designing the Novel |
| Fall 2024 19993 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 10 / 15 | Jane Alison | We 2:00pm - 4:30pm | New Cabell Hall 056 |
| | Instructor permission required. To apply, send a note (to jas2ad) telling me about your writing and reading practice, and what draws you to this class. |
| | Writing a novel can feel like being mid-ocean, in the dark, with only a bedsheet to float on. Where is structure? How do you move forward? Do you even know where you are? How on earth do you reach the end? In this course we’ll explore ways of composing longer fictional narratives by examining both classic and more extravagant forms some have taken: we’ll consider linear works based on the dramatic arc, and others that find looser or more experimental shapes; we’ll sample novels that are fabulist or journalistic, densely textured or line-broken, lyrical or faux-documentary. We’ll pay attention to many ways in which narratives create movement and how writers deploy points of view, manipulate time, employ varying techniques of discourse, and press image and syntax into serving vision. Texts might include works by Sándor Márai, Jean Rhys, B. S. Johnson, Edna O’Brien, Alison Mills Newman, Mariama Bâ, Murray Bail, Marie Redonnet, W. G. Sebald, Annie Ernaux, Anne Carson, Alejandro Zambra, Mary Robison, Jim Crace, Jamaica Kincaid, Mieko Kanai. In addition to reading, you’ll experiment weekly with your own writing. |
| ENGL 8810 | Criticism in Theory and Practice |
| |
| | Criticism in the First Person |
| Fall 2024 19829 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 16 / 15 | Emily Ogden | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Cocke Hall 101 |
| | In this course, we’ll discuss the theory and practice of subjective knowledge in literary criticism. Is there such a thing as subjective knowledge (knowledge that depends on and is irreducibly routed through the knower’s perspective), or are such viewpoints mere opinions? What are we saying, exactly, when we say that a work of art is beautiful? We’ll spend about half our time learning to understand Stanley Cavell’s theory of what happens when we make a value judgment about a work of art, with a focus on the role the first person has in such claims. Our study of Cavell’s theory will include some of the aesthetic theorists he has influenced (Sianne Ngai, Imani Perry, Michel Chaouli, and others). We’ll spend the remainder of the semester reading the work of various writers who use first-person perspective in their work. We’ll read critics practicing in the academy, critics working as reviewers in the periodical press, and writers of creative nonfiction. Writers we may read include Maggie Nelson, Christina Sharpe, Nathalie Léger, Roland Barthes, T. J. Clark, D. A. Miller, Elizabeth Hardwick, Cristina Rivera Garza, Monica Huerta, and others. Students will have the opportunity to write criticism in the first person as part of the final assignment. |
| Engineering |
| ENGR 1501 | Special Topics |
| |
| | SURE: How to Perform Research |
| Syllabus 20627 | 001 | Lecture (1 Units) | Closed | 38 / 35 | Brian Helmke | Mo 5:00pm - 5:50pm | Mechanical Engr Bldg 339 |
| | Welcome to SURE (Starting an Undergraduate Research Experience)! Are you an engineering undergraduate student who is interested in getting involved in undergraduate research, but you do not know where to begin? Well, this is the class for you! In this one-credit, Credit/No Credit class, you will learn what undergraduate research is, identify goals for your research experience, and seek out research opportunities while building a community within the engineering school. You will do this through speaker panels, lab tours, mock interviews, group activities, and more. Our goal in this class is to make undergraduate research more accessible for students from all backgrounds and experiences. We are excited to join you as you start your undergraduate research experience. |
| Entrepreneurship |
| ENTP 1501 | Special Topics in Entrepreneurship Management |
| |
| | Money Matters |
| | An introduction to personal finance |
| Fall 2024 20111 | 005 | Lecture (0.5 Units) | Open | 57 / 100 | Roger Martin | no mtgs. 2:30am - 2:50am | Web-Based Course |
| | Class is entirely online and can be completed at your own pace. There is no class meeting time - it is completely asynchronous. |
| | What can you do to improve your financial well-being? What can you learn about your personal finances that will give you more control over your financial life now and in the future? This course will help you understand the financial choices you should be making now and in the future and how to set yourself up for a great start financially when you leave school. It will provide a basic introduction to income taxes, budgeting, insurance, savings goals and investments. All content is online and asynchronous, so you can complete the course at your pace. |
| | Communicating with Gen AI: Tools, Techniques |
| | Tools, Techniques, and Implications of AI-Assisted Writing |
| Fall 2024 21098 | 010 | Lecture (0.5 Units) | Open | 45 / 100 | Kiera Allison | no mtgs. 5:00am - 5:20am | Web-Based Course |
| | This class is fully online and asynchronous. The listed meeting time is merely a placeholder: there are no class meetings and you can watch the lectures and complete assignments at your own pace. |
| | This course explores what it means to be a writer and communicator in the world of Generative AI. You will learn a range of AI-enhanced techniques to improve and accelerate your writing practice—from real-time feedback, to creative spitballing, to enlisting AI agents as proxy readers and editors. At the same time, you will be invited to think critically about the ethical, cognitive, and professional implications of inviting AI into the traditionally human domains of reading and writing. Why do we write, and what happens when we give that work to non-human agents? Is there value to the struggle of putting words to ideas, and does writing lose value without that struggle? How will AI impact how you and others communicate? Can you trust what you read? Will AI take your job?
By creatively engaging the capabilities and risks of AI-assisted writing, this course not only encourages you to be a critical consumer of AI texts; it also challenges and empowers you to consider the writer you can, and want to, be in an era of human-AI coauthorship. |
| Writing and Rhetoric |
| ENWR 1505 | Writing & Critical Inquiry Stretch I |
| |
| | Writing about Culture/Society |
| | Language, Policy, and Politics |
| Fall 2024 10989 | 006 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 14 | Kate Natishan | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | New Cabell Hall 066 |
| | As Edward P.J. Corbett has observed, rhetorical analysis "is more interested in a literary work for what it DOES than for what it IS."
Rhetoric - how words are chosen and used - can impact everything from how we understand problems and create policies to how we engage in politics and create identity. It's never "just words." This class will explore how language use by public figures and citizens impacts how policies are created and written as well as how the political arena is changed by the use of language.
By nature of the subject matter, we will be discussing political, social, and policy issues both past and present. |
| | Writing about Culture/Society |
| | Language, Policy, and Politics |
| Fall 2024 12733 | 008 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 12 / 14 | Kate Natishan | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | New Cabell Hall 066 |
| | As Edward P.J. Corbett has observed, rhetorical analysis "is more interested in a literary work for what it DOES than for what it IS."
Rhetoric - how words are chosen and used - can impact everything from how we understand problems and create policies to how we engage in politics and create identity. It's never "just words." This class will explore how language use by public figures and citizens impacts how policies are created and written as well as how the political arena is changed by the use of language.
By nature of the subject matter, we will be discussing political, social, and policy issues both past and present. |
| ENWR 1510 | Writing and Critical Inquiry |
| |
| | Writing about Digital Media |
| | Writing with AI |
| Fall 2024 11813 | 005 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 18 / 18 | Tyler Carter | TuTh 5:00pm - 6:15pm | Bryan Hall 330 |
| | "Welcome to 'Writing with AI,' a dynamic and innovative course designed to explore the intersection of traditional writing techniques and cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology. This introductory course is ideal for students of all disciplines who are eager to enhance their writing skills and understand how AI can be used as a powerful tool in the writing process."
-Chat GPT-4
Welcome to "Writing with AI." This course explores the relationship between writing technologies—quills and ink, thesauruses, typewriters, computers—and now, Chat-GPT—and texts themselves. Large language models may be newfangled, but they're part of a longer story of technological change and writing craft and what it means to be human that spans thousands of years. Through a series of hands-on experiments with both retro writing tools and AI, we'll hone our descriptive, analytical, and reflective writing skills. We'll also consider questions like these: What does AI mean for labor rights, for intellectual property, for the natural world? How does technology shape our sense of individuality and writing voice? As we rely increasingly on algorithms and machines, what does it mean to be human? |
| | Writing about Culture/Society |
| | Writing about Sports |
| Fall 2024 10490 | 014 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 18 / 18 | Rhiannon Goad | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 064 |
| | With early Homo-sapiens sketching wrestling matches on cave walls, people have written about sports for millennia. Today, writers weave sports into the fabric of our everyday lives. This course continues the prehistoric tradition of writing about sports. In doing so, students explore how athletics serves to negotiate personal identity and test the limits of what it means to be human. Students will select a sports league or athlete to study as an artifact for the semester. After selecting and researching an artifact, students will write an essay reviewing contemporary controversies related to that league. Then, in a series of analytic essays, students apply the readings as lenses to tease out paradoxes about the controversies outlined in that initial paper. |
| | Writing about Identities |
| | Gender in Speculative Fiction |
| Fall 2024 11455 | 018 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 18 / 18 | Spencer Grayson | MoWeFr 9:00am - 9:50am | Bryan Hall 334 |
| | What does it mean to inhabit a gendered body and experience? How are gendered bodies read by others, and how can we use language to articulate our lived experiences of gender? This course will explore how speculative fiction writers imagine diverse genders, embodiments, and expressions. We’ll read a range of short stories, graphic novels, and digital media, and watch segments from TV episodes and music videos. Through these works, we’ll think about gender and writing as both objects—things that are created—and processes—the act of creation. In examining how these works use speculative fiction to construct and reimagine gender, you’ll consider how your own writing, from close readings to argumentative essays, can be transformed through rhetorical technique, organizational strategies, and peer revision. |
| | Writing about Culture/Society |
| | The Good Life |
| Fall 2024 10493 | 019 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 18 / 18 | John Modica | TuTh 5:00pm - 6:15pm | Bryan Hall 312 |
| | The critical theorist Lauren Berlant used the term “the good life” to describe a post-war vision of middle class comfort that, for many Americans, now appears cruelly inaccessible. In classical philosophy and cultural studies more generally, “the good life” refers to our individual and collective fantasies about what it means to live well. Pieced together from messages we receive in culture—socially-transmitted ideas, for example, about security, freedom, love, prosperity, responsibility, and virtue—our sense of the good life motivates us to adopt certain life paths, take certain actions, and pursue certain desires over others. A well-worn cliché instructs us that happiness is within: that only you can determine what kind of life is worth living. But what if our individual fantasies of the good life do not belong to us, either? What if, in fact, such fantasies are the very things that lead us away from a life well-lived? How would we need to reorganize our lives if we began from this basic assumption: that we, as people living in the twenty-first century, are systematically underprepared to act in our own interest?
This course introduces students to fundamentals of critical and creative thinking through a semester-long interrogation of “the good life.” Our primary subject of examination will be our own ideas about the good life: what they are, where they came from, and how the writers on our syllabus elucidate the conditions of our un/happiness. We will work together to arrive at a better understanding of how individual desires interface with society and politics. Assignments include three major essays and weekly short writing assignments, in addition to reading discussions, in-class workshops, writing activities, and individual conferences with the instructor. |
| | Writing about the Arts |
| | The Writer as Public Intellectual |
| Fall 2024 10497 | 026 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 18 / 18 | Kathryn Holmstrom | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Bryan Hall 332 |
| | Writers address the personal outcomes of political life and cultural norms. How do they articulate these conflicts, and when do they step out of their core genre into rhetorical writing and direct civic engagement? This course will study world writers in three broad categories: those who engage these issues as subject matter in their core creative genre, who step outside that genre to write rhetorically or discursively, and who take a public role in civic life outside their lives as writers altogether. Students will write expository essays that build on these models and will present their work in class. |
| | Writing about the Arts |
| | The Writer as Public Intellectual |
| Fall 2024 10498 | 027 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 17 / 18 | Kathryn Holmstrom | MoWe 5:00pm - 6:15pm | New Cabell Hall 044 |
| | Writers address the personal outcomes of political life and cultural norms. How do they articulate these conflicts, and when do they step out of their core genre into rhetorical writing and direct civic engagement? This course will study world writers in three broad categories: those who engage these issues as subject matter in their core creative genre, who step outside that genre to write rhetorically or discursively, and who take a public role in civic life outside their lives as writers altogether. Students will write expository essays that build on these models and will present their work in class. |
| | Writing about Culture/Society |
| | Writing about Sports |
| Fall 2024 11512 | 047 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 18 / 18 | Rhiannon Goad | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Bryan Hall 330 |
| | With early Homo-sapiens sketching wrestling matches on cave walls, people have written about sports for millennia. Today, writers weave sports into the fabric of our everyday lives. This course continues the prehistoric tradition of writing about sports. In doing so, students explore how athletics serves to negotiate personal identity and test the limits of what it means to be human. Students will select a sports league or athlete to study as an artifact for the semester. After selecting and researching an artifact, students will write an essay reviewing contemporary controversies related to that league. Then, in a series of analytic essays, students apply the readings as lenses to tease out paradoxes about the controversies outlined in that initial paper. |
| | Writing about Science & Tech |
| | Writing with AI |
| Fall 2024 11604 | 058 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 18 / 18 | Katherine Churchill | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Bryan Hall 310 |
| | "Welcome to 'Writing with AI,' a dynamic and innovative course designed to explore the intersection of traditional writing techniques and cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology. This introductory course is ideal for students of all disciplines who are eager to enhance their writing skills and understand how AI can be used as a powerful tool in the writing process."
-Chat GPT-4
Welcome to "Writing with AI." This course explores the relationship between writing technologies—quills and ink, thesauruses, typewriters, computers—and now, Chat-GPT—and texts themselves. Large language models may be newfangled, but they're part of a longer story of technological change and writing craft and what it means to be human that spans thousands of years. Through a series of hands-on experiments with both retro writing tools and AI, we'll hone our descriptive, analytical, and reflective writing skills. We'll also consider questions like these: What does AI mean for labor rights, for intellectual property, for the natural world? How does technology shape our sense of individuality and writing voice? As we rely increasingly on algorithms and machines, what does it mean to be human? |
| | Writing about the Arts |
| | Writing Down the Grave |
| Fall 2024 11607 | 062 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 18 / 18 | Hodges Adams | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Bryan Hall 332 |
| | What does good writing actually look like? How is it made? What tools and information does a good writer need? This class focuses on the process of writing, research, revising. Students should expect to read across a variety of genres and forms, both fictional and non-fictional. Research will be considered as a component of both creative and academic writing. Student papers will be peer reviewed and revised multiple times during class. There may be class trips to Clemons Library, the Rotunda, the Memorial to the Enslaved Laborers, and the University of Virginia Cemetery. |
| | Writing about Culture/Society |
| | The Good Life |
| Fall 2024 12175 | 077 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 18 / 18 | John Modica | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | Pavilion VIII 102 |
| | The critical theorist Lauren Berlant used the term “the good life” to describe a post-war vision of middle class comfort that, for many Americans, now appears cruelly inaccessible. In classical philosophy and cultural studies more generally, “the good life” refers to our individual and collective fantasies about what it means to live well. Pieced together from messages we receive in culture—socially-transmitted ideas, for example, about security, freedom, love, prosperity, responsibility, and virtue—our sense of the good life motivates us to adopt certain life paths, take certain actions, and pursue certain desires over others. A well-worn cliché instructs us that happiness is within: that only you can determine what kind of life is worth living. But what if our individual fantasies of the good life do not belong to us, either? What if, in fact, such fantasies are the very things that lead us away from a life well-lived? How would we need to reorganize our lives if we began from this basic assumption: that we, as people living in the twenty-first century, are systematically underprepared to act in our own interest?
This course introduces students to fundamentals of critical and creative thinking through a semester-long interrogation of “the good life.” Our primary subject of examination will be our own ideas about the good life: what they are, where they came from, and how the writers on our syllabus elucidate the conditions of our un/happiness. We will work together to arrive at a better understanding of how individual desires interface with society and politics. Assignments include three major essays and weekly short writing assignments, in addition to reading discussions, in-class workshops, writing activities, and individual conferences with the instructor.
|
| | Writing about the Arts |
| | (Re)Buildings |
| Fall 2024 12176 | 078 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 18 | Gabby Kiser | TuTh 6:30pm - 7:45pm | Bryan Hall 312 |
| | In this ENWR 1510 section, we will focus on representations of different types of buildings and unpack how people operate in and outside of those spaces. Consider houses, malls, and diners, for example; how do each of these settings affect our expectations of creative works that take place in them? Though we may already feel familiar with these places, we will reexamine them through new eyes and welcome myriad interpretations and connotations. While this is a writing course, literature, academic essays, television, video games, and podcasts will be valuable to our conversations. Through this range of mediums, we will navigate and practice writing about the varying affordances and limitations of different mediums and genres. |
| ENWR 2520 | Special Topics in Writing |
| |
| | Writing and Games |
| Fall 2024 20321 | 010 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 16 / 16 | Kate Natishan | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Bryan Hall 330 |
| | “We've been playing games since humanity had civilization - there is something primal about our desire and our ability to play games. It's so deep-seated that it can bypass latter-day cultural norms and biases.” - Jane McGonigal
Play is essential to our growth. Games teach us how to move, how to coordinate our hands and eyes, how to take turns, how to share, how to read people, how to problem solve, how to work as a team… Without games, there is no us.
Games play a central role in our social and private lives, whether we are spectators or players. They also have massive cultural impact, sometimes in ways we don’t expect. In this class, we will examine the role games play in our lives and our culture, and we will explore the ways in which others write about games while developing our skills to do the same.
**Meets second writing requirement.** |
| | Queer Writing: Theory and Practice |
| Fall 2024 20885 | 013 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 16 / 16 | John Modica | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Gibson Hall 241 |
| | Our lives are shaped by language that is not our own. We define ourselves using identity categories, assumptions about nature and culture, and moral and ethical paradigms that we inherit from past generations. Language places limits on our ability to understand ourselves—and others—in our full complexity. This presents major ethical and political challenges. How can we live together when we do not have the means to express our identities, wishes, dreams, and desires? How can we articulate, in clear and precise terms, the actual conditions of our lives? What would it look like to invent a language that enables the kind of life we need, not the life we are made to want?
This course provides an advanced introduction to critical and creative habits of mind through a guided encounter with queer theories and practices of writing. It is designed to cultivate an inquiry-driven approach to writing beyond the level of first-year composition. We will read writings in a variety of genres—prose fiction, autobiography, poetry, critical theory, and cultural criticism—and consider how language opens up new ways for us to understand contemporary issues concerning, but not limited to, accountability, community, emotion, family, justice, labor, love, and memory. We will refine our queer philosophies of writing—what a queer approach to writing or should do today—and attempt to join theory with practice. Writing assignments will be organized around developing a work of queer writing (in any genre) at intermediate length (7-10 pages). Other assignments include reading discussions, short reflective exercises, and 1-on-1 conferences with the instructor. |
| ENWR 3760 | Studies in Cultural Rhetoric |
| |
| | The Cultural Work of Stories |
| Fall 2024 20172 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 16 / 16 | Tamika Carey | Mo 6:00pm - 8:30pm | Bryan Hall 312 |
| | Every culture has its own way of making meaning and communicating through persuasive means. Native American groups, for instance, have retained ceremonial customs and spiritual practices despite the conquests that have shaped this country. Queer communities, for example, have strategic ways that they use to make sense of the world and joy for themselves despite and in relation to heteronormativity. African-Americans, LatinX, and Asian Americans all have strategic language practices and social customs they use to fortify their collective identities and advocate for themselves amid historical hostility. Differently abled people have developed strategic ways of making their needs met despite design choices that disadvantage them. Individuals in this country’s working-class employ strategic techniques to advocate for themselves in challenging environments. This course will explore how these various cultural locations (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, ability, sexuality) impact how people generate rhetorical practices to maintain community and resist social division. Our work will involve exploring a variety of contexts wherein these practices are made, learning methodologies for studying rhetorical production across media and modality, and tracking these practices and their historical developments. Ideally, this work will enrich how you understand and participate in real-world cross-cultural and intercultural communications in professional and public spheres as well as personal encounters. Projects are likely to include: a cultural-message autobiography; an analysis/annotation presentation; and, a final project presentation. |
| Enviromental Thought and Practice |
| ETP 3500 | Topics in Environmental Thought and Practice |
| |
| | Nature Connectedness: Hope, Health, and Community |
| | Pathways for Hope, Health and Community Action |
| Website 20208 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 15 / 20 | Dorothe Bach+1 | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Campbell Hall 108 |
| | Please see website for more info and how to request permission to enroll. |
| | This course explores the critical importance of nature connectedness as a social determinant of health, a social justice issue, the root of pro-environmental behaviors, and a foundation for community building. We ground our study in experiential nature connection activities, scientific readings, the wisdom of local activists, and Indigenous ways of knowing. Together, we will identify and enact mindsets, practices, and perspectives that make way for the shift in consciousness needed for human and planetary health. |
| | Nature Connectedness: Hope, Health, and Community |
| | Pathways for Hope, Health and Community Action |
| Website 20209 | 110 | SPS (0 Units) | Open | 15 / 20 | Dorothe Bach+1 | 09/15 Su 9:00am - 4:00pm | TBA |
| | Dorothe Bach | 10/19 Sa 9:00am - 4:00pm | TBA |
| | Please click on "Website" for syllabus and info about how to enroll. |
| | This course explores the critical importance of nature connectedness as a social determinant of health, a social justice issue, the root of pro-environmental behaviors, and a foundation for community building. We ground our study in experiential nature connection activities, scientific readings, the wisdom of local activists, and Indigenous ways of knowing. Together, we will identify and enact mindsets, practices, and perspectives that make way for the shift in consciousness needed for human and planetary health. |
| French |
| FREN 3031 | Finding Your Voice in French |
| |
| | ON AIR! Finding Your Voice in French: Podcast Edition |
| Fall 2024 10184 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 6 / 15 | Spyridon Simotas | MoWeFr 10:00am - 10:50am | New Cabell Hall 107 |
| | In French the words voix (voice) and voie (way) are homonyms. This is perhaps a happy linguistic coincidence. Or, perhaps, it reminds us that finding your way in the world is often also a process of finding your voice. Keep this homonym in mind as you set out to find your voice in French, because as you become more fluent in the French language you will discover new ways of experiencing the world and new pathways for personal and academic growth. This course will offer you the opportunity to explore and develop your voice in written and spoken French through the creation of a podcast. You will cultivate your own sense of style, tone, creativity, and expressiveness, by drawing on a variety of cultural artifacts as inspiration for a series of writing and recording activities. Whether it means starting to feel more like yourself when you write and speak in French, or enjoying sounding wonderfully different from yourself, this course will encourage you to deepen your appreciation for the profound and transformative process of starting to think in French and to think of yourself as a Francophone person.
Course conducted in French. |
| | ON AIR! Finding Your Voice in French: Podcast Edition |
| Fall 2024 10186 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 9 / 15 | Spyridon Simotas | MoWeFr 11:00am - 11:50am | New Cabell Hall 107 |
| | In French the words voix (voice) and voie (way) are homonyms. This is perhaps a happy linguistic coincidence. Or, perhaps, it reminds us that finding your way in the world is often also a process of finding your voice. Keep this homonym in mind as you set out to find your voice in French, because as you become more fluent in the French language you will discover new ways of experiencing the world and new pathways for personal and academic growth. This course will offer you the opportunity to explore and develop your voice in written and spoken French through the creation of a podcast. You will cultivate your own sense of style, tone, creativity, and expressiveness, by drawing on a variety of cultural artifacts as inspiration for a series of writing and recording activities. Whether it means starting to feel more like yourself when you write and speak in French, or enjoying sounding wonderfully different from yourself, this course will encourage you to deepen your appreciation for the profound and transformative process of starting to think in French and to think of yourself as a Francophone person.
Course conducted in French. |
| Fall 2024 10183 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 16 / 15 | Cheryl Krueger | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | New Cabell Hall 107 |
| | Finding your voice, as a write or a speaker, doesn't happen overnight. Not in the language(s) we have been speaking since we were children, and not in a foreign language. The main goals of this course are to guide you on a life-long journey of self-expression, and to help you become aware of your own best practices for learning French. What are your strengths? How can you convey your ideas in French without translating your words directly from English or other languages you already know? How does improving your writing in French help you to better understand how you write in English? How does engagement with French influence your connections in other courses and in the world around you? Students in FREN 3031 practice both creative writing and more formal genres (such as a film review or a persuasive essay) during in-class writing workshops and individual assignments. Integrated in all activities, a semester-long grammar review guides students to better understand how form and meaning work together.
Students in this section of 3031 co-construct the syllabus, based on their own interests, by assigning and leading discussion of articles in French. They hone listening skills with songs, podcasts, and other audio sources, and explore visual culture via works of art and advertising images.You will be encouraged to take reflective notes in class on your reactions and thoughts about the materials with which you interact.
Materials you will need for this section of FREN 3031:
1) Bourns, Stacey Katz: Contextualized French Grammar (spiral bound or eBook, available through Inclusive Access)
2) a paper notebook of your choice for reflective notetaking in class
|
| FREN 3043 | The French-Speaking World III: Modernities |
| |
| | Great Books |
| Fall 2024 19197 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 17 / 20 | Ari Blatt | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Nau Hall 142 |
| | Rather than focus on any single theme, movement, motif, or overarching problematic, this seminar will examine a few of the most admired and influential novels in the history of modern French literature. Special attention will be paid to the potential uses (but also to the ultimate uselessness) of literature. How might reading fiction (and learning how to read it well) inform our understanding of the world and our place in it? Texts may include, but are certainly not limited to: Balzac’s tale of a young law student’s drive to make it in the big city in Le Père Goriot; Flaubert’s portrait of the original desperate housewife in Madame Bovary; Robbe-Grillet’s scandalously puzzling colonial novel, La jalousie ; Georges Perec's critique of consumer society in the 1960s (Les Choses); and Maylis de Kerangal's mesmerizing, polyphonic novel about love, loss, and the rhythms of our beating hearts (Réparer les vivants). We might also end our semester with an "extremely contemporary" novel published during the last year or two.
Required work will likely include: a decent amount of [fun, illuminating, occasionally challenging but always edifying] reading (no matter how grounded in French culture and history our readings will be, this is still a lit class, after all); active participation in discussion; informal, bi-weekly ruminations on the readings posted to a forum on Canvas; an oral presentation designed to hone your close reading chops; and two or three short, analytical essays. What this course will not include is a lot of "busy work" (and no quizzes or exams). Course conducted entirely in French (save for occasional forays into English when your professor gets overly excited about a turn of phrase, a minor detail, or a map). Prerequisite: FREN 3032. |
| FREN 3585 | Topics in Cultural Studies |
| |
| | History of French Colonialism |
| Fall 2024 21193 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 17 / 19 | Jennifer Tsien | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Wilson Hall 244 |
| | Québec, Haiti, Louisiana, Vietnam, Tunisia, Algeria, Sénégal, Madagascar: at some point or another, these places and many others were part of the French empire. What motivated France to occupy these lands: was it conversion to Catholicism, the lucrative sugar industry that relied on slavery, or military rivalry with other European empires? And what effects did colonialism have on the people of these lands?
No previous knowledge of French history is required. This course will introduce students to the long history of French colonialism around the world. We will take a chronological approach: beginning with the settlement of Canada and continuing to Napoleon's attempts to conquer Egypt, then the French power plays in African and Asia.
Readings and media will include French travelers' description of foreign populations, Native accounts of French interventions, literary and visual works inspired by the colonial situation (including paintings, films, and songs), and key documents from various independence movements. A number of experts in the field will be invited to present their research to the students periodically.
|
| FREN 4560 | Advanced Topics in Nineteenth-Century Literature |
| |
| | 19th-century French Romanticism. |
| | Entre pensée et émotion: sensibilité dans le romantisme français |
| Fall 2024 19198 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 13 / 15 | Claire Lyu | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | French House 100 |
| | Ce cours vous invite à explorer la triple quête––du moi, de la sensibilité authentique et du bonheur––dans laquelle s’engage la jeunesse romantique française de la première moitié du 19ème siècle où de nombreux facteurs culturels, sociaux, historiques et politiques (y compris la tombée de Napoléon Ier) concourent à façonner un courant artistique et littéraire à la fois complexe et contradictoire.
Nous découvrirons l'épreuve de l'âme sensible qui, en essayant de se libérer des contraintes et d'aspirer à un idéal, bute contre le réel et erre sans répit entre l’émotion et la pensée, la mélancolie et l'exaltation, le spleen et l'idéal. Nous dégagerons la pertinence de l'expérience romantique du passé pour notre époque contemporaine tout aussi préoccupée par le moi (ou son image), la mélancolie (ou la dépression) et le bonheur (ou le succès). Ce faisant, nous évaluerons les vestiges de la perspective romantique envers la nature, la conquête du "nouveau monde", la figure de Napoléon et la question du genre dans les soucis majeurs du 21ème siècle—par exemple, le réchauffement planétaire, le traitement des peuples indigènes, le débat sur l’héritage de Napoléon et le mouvement "Me Too"—pour apprécier la distance et la proximité entre l'époque romantique et la nôtre. Une étude approfondie des poèmes, récit, roman et traités/ manifestes nous permettra de mener ensemble un projet collectif de concevoir et de bâtir un Musée du Romantisme. |
| FREN 4585 | Advanced Topics in Cultural Studies |
| |
| | Portraits |
| Fall 2024 13649 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 15 / 18 | Cheryl Krueger | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 107 |
| | An exploration of human portraits in France from prehistoric cave art to the selfie. Students will examine a variety of genres and media including painting, drawing, film, photography, autobiography, autofiction, poetry, essays, and journals. We will focus on narrative believability (in text and image), on the creation of self-image and public persona, and on the mediated self. Coursework includes a final autobiographical, auto-fictional, or biographical audio-visual project.
Pre-requisite: FREN 3031 and 3032 (or equivalent) and one literature or culture course at the 3000 level.
|
| FREN 5510 | Topics in Medieval Literature |
| |
| | Medieval Saints' Lives |
| Fall 2024 19202 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 1 / 5 (9 / 15) | Amy Ogden | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | French House 100 |
| | African saints. Trans saints. Saints’ Lives as media. Saints in material culture and literature and history.
Recent academic enthusiasm for medieval saints’ Lives has begun to uncover the usefulness of this genre for gaining deeper understanding of both medieval and modern attitudes toward a variety of topics, from sexuality and sentiments to materiality and foreign cultures. Reading Lives written between 880 and the late thirteenth century, together with the work of some of the most engaging scholars in the field of hagiography studies, we will investigate a variety of issues that resonate with current interests in the broader fields of medieval and French studies. Readings include the Lives of St. Mary the Egyptian (a courtesan turned hermit), St. Catherine of Alexandria (known for her wisdom), St. Alexis (who abandoned his family), St. Louis IX (king of France), St. Euphrosyne (a woman who became a male monk), and St. Moses the Ethiopian (a brigand turned abbot).
|
| FREN 5540 | Topics in Eighteenth-Century Literature |
| |
| | Monarchy, Tyranny, Revolution |
| Fall 2024 19199 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 2 / 5 (8 / 15) | Jennifer Tsien | We 3:30pm - 6:00pm | New Cabell Hall 038 |
| | This course will cover some of the classics of Ancien Régime France, including Le Cid, Le Mariage de Figaro, and Candide, along with less canonical works by women writers and Haitian revolutionaries. These will be presented within their historical and political context, with an emphasis on the troubled relationship between writers and the king of France, in France and in the colonies. |
| FREN 8510 | Seminar in Medieval Literature |
| |
| | Medieval Saints' Lives |
| Fall 2024 19203 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 8 / 10 (9 / 15) | Amy Ogden | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | French House 100 |
| | African saints. Trans saints. Saints’ Lives as media. Saints in material culture and literature and history.
Recent academic enthusiasm for medieval saints’ Lives has begun to uncover the usefulness of this genre for gaining deeper understanding of both medieval and modern attitudes toward a variety of topics, from sexuality and sentiments to materiality and foreign cultures. Reading Lives written between 880 and the late thirteenth century, together with the work of some of the most engaging scholars in the field of hagiography studies, we will investigate a variety of issues that resonate with current interests in the broader fields of medieval and French studies. Readings include the Lives of St. Mary the Egyptian (a courtesan turned hermit), St. Catherine of Alexandria (known for her wisdom), St. Alexis (who abandoned his family), St. Louis IX (king of France), St. Euphrosyne (a woman who became a male monk), and St. Moses the Ethiopian (a brigand turned abbot).
|
| German |
| GERM 1015 | German for Reading Knowledge |
| |
| Fall 2024 19693 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 9 / 15 (9 / 15) | Cora Schenberg | MoWeFr 1:00pm - 1:50pm | New Cabell Hall 115 |
| | German for Reading Knowledge is offered in two sections. Graduate students should register for GERM 5015; undergraduates (years 1-4) should choose GERM 1015. Undergraduates should note that German for Reading Knowledge does not count toward fulfillment of the language requirement.
|
| GERM 3110 | Literature in German II |
| |
| | Narratives of Trauma and Hope in German Literature from the 1890s to Today |
| Fall 2024 20328 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 9 / 18 | Chrisann Zuerner | MoWeFr 12:00pm - 12:50pm | New Cabell Hall 485 |
| | German 3010 is not required as a prerequisite for this course. |
| | This course seeks to ground students in understanding and grappling with the contentious pasts related to genocides of Europe spanning from the Shoah, Soviet labor camps, to the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. Culminating with a turn to our present moment in history, we will consider current political events and narratives, to examine potential parallels and differences from what we see throughout the other case studies of genocides. Engaging with historical events through a critical perspective of multidirectional memory (Rothberg), this course will examine various aspects of genocide through the means of cultural production (film, novels, etc.). Students will work with diverse texts – from novels (autofictional, fictional, and biographical), to news reports, newspaper articles, films, scholarly articles, etc. to gain an understanding of the events. By the end of the course students will be able to discuss and analyze these various moments in history, to thereby engage with contemporary events – from parallels and differences between the atrocities, as well as to analyze their own placement within history – to work to become engaged citizens in this day in age.
Course conducted in German |
| GERM 3620 | New Voices in German: Transnational and Multilingual Literature Today |
| |
| Fall 2024 19814 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 15 | Julia Gutterman | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | Pavilion VIII 102 |
| | What do German speakers read these days? In “New Voices in German,” we will explore a selection of prose works fresh off the press and ask how these works critically engage with Germany’s multilingual and transnational literary landscape. Readings include Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s "Der Hof im Spiegel," Fatma Aydemir’s "Dschinns," Katja Petrowskaja’s "Vielleicht Esther," Khuê Phạm’s "Wo auch immer ihr seid," and Saša Stanišić’s "Herkunft." See the schedule below for more information on these authors. This course is especially suited to students who wish to enhance their vocabulary through focused reading and develop their writing and conversational skills. GERM 3559 is conducted in German. Prerequisite: GERM 3000 or equivalent.
|
| GERM 5015 | German for Reading Knowledge |
| |
| Fall 2024 20894 | 001 | Lecture (1 - 3 Units) | Open | 9 / 15 (9 / 15) | Cora Schenberg | MoWeFr 1:00pm - 1:50pm | New Cabell Hall 115 |
| | German for Reading Knowledge is offered in two sections. Graduate students should register for GERM 5015; undergraduates (years 1-4) should choose GERM 1015. Undergraduates should note that German for Reading Knowledge does not count toward fulfillment of the language requirement. Graduate students may receive graduate credit for German 5015 and may register for a Grade, Credit/No Credit, or Audit.
|
| German in Translation |
| GETR 3470 | Writing and Screening the Holocaust |
| |
| Fall 2024 19698 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Closed | 30 / 30 | Jeffrey Grossman | Tu 5:00pm - 7:30pm | New Cabell Hall 338 |
| | Description of the Course:
The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard likened the effect of the Holocaust to that of an earthquake that “destroys not only lives, buildings, and objects but also the instruments used to measure earthquakes directly and indirectly.” In the death camp Treblinka, as many as two to three thousand people per day were gassed to death for months on end; at Auschwitz, nearly 1.1 million were killed; and as many as 2 million Jews were rounded up and murdered in mass shootings and associated massacres in Poland, Ukraine, and other locations, mostly in Eastern Europe. How, to follow upon Lyotard, have survivors and others concerned with the events contributing to the Holocaust and with its impact sought to write it? Or to represent it visually, e.g., in film? What role does memory, whether individual or collective, play in their attempts? Can their works give expression to the trauma experienced by the victims and survivors? And if so, how? This course explores different approaches taken by writers and filmmakers and others who have grappled with these questions.
Readings drawn from Primo Levi, Art Spiegelman, Hannah Arendt, Charlotte Delbo, Theodor Adorno, Alexander Kluge, Ruth Kluger, Tadeusz Borowski, and others, and others; screenings of films like Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956); parts of Claude Lanzman’s Shoah (1985), Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), and possibly others.
The course assumes no prior knowledge of the subject matter. Students at all levels are welcome to attend. The course meets the second writing requirement. There is no final exam.
|
| GETR 3559 | New Course in German in Translation |
| |
| | Hollywood Exile: German Filmmakers Flee Fascism |
| | Hollywood Exile: German Filmmakers Flee Fascism |
| Fall 2024 19699 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 16 / 30 (16 / 30) | Paul Dobryden | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 332 |
| | In the 1930s, many people employed in the German film industry whose lives were threatened by fascism took refuge in Hollywood. This course examines the contributions exiled directors, writers, actors, and others made in genres ranging from comedy and melodrama to film noir. In addition to indicting fascist violence, reflecting on the trauma of forced migration, and rousing anti-fascist affect, these films often turned a critical eye on the U.S. Selected films include: FURY (Lang, 1936), CASABLANCA (Curtiz, 1942), A FOREIGN AFFAIR (Wilder, 1948), and ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (Sirk, 1955). |
| GETR 3600 | Faust |
| |
| Fall 2024 19820 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 18 / 30 (18 / 30) | Jeffrey Grossman | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | New Cabell Hall 332 |
| | Goethe's Faust has been called an "atlas of European modernity" and "one of the most recent columns for that bridge of spirit spanning the swamping of world history." The literary theorist Harold Bloom writes: "As a sexual nightmare of erotic fantasy, [Faust] ... has no rival, and one understands why the shocked Coleridge declined to translate the poem. It is certainly a work about what, if anything, will suffice, and Goethe finds myriad ways of showing us that sexuality by itself will not. Even more obsessively, Faust teaches that, without an active sexuality, absolutely nothing will suffice."
Taking Goethe's Faust as its point of departure, this course will trace the Faust legend from its rise over 400 hundred years ago to the modern age. Retrospectively, we will explore precursors of Goethe's Faust – e.g., the English Faust Book, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and perhaps Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker – to which Goethe responded. We will then read Goethe's Faust, parts I and parts II (either in its entirety or in excerpts). Although now a major work in the European canon, Goethe sought in his Faust to radically transform central tenants of the legend and to challenge many conventions of European culture, politics, and society. We will consider as well works like Byron's melancholy drama Manfred, a theater of emotions that explores problems of power, sex, and guilt. And we will venture into the twentieth century, viewing first F.W. Murnau's avant-garde Faust film (1926) and Istvan Szabo’s film Mephisto (1981), which asks whether Goethe's Faust found its apotheosis in Nazi Germany.
Our aims will be to ask why writers repeatedly returned to the Faust legend and how, in re-working Faust, they sought to confront the political, social, and cultural problems of their own times. Although listed at the 3000-level, the reading load and assignments in this course are suitable for students at all levels. (Course is cross-listed as ENGL 3500 and GETR 3600).
|
| Global Studies-Global Studies |
| GSGS 3559 | New Course in Global Studies |
| |
| | The Individual and the World |
| Fall 2024 19210 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 20 | Peter Furia | We 6:00pm - 8:30pm | New Cabell Hall 303 |
| | This course explores the ideal of global citizenship in a practical and applied way. We focus on biographical accounts of individuals living far from home and/or acting on behalf of global principles, while also considering political and psychological criticisms of these practices. |
| | This course explores the ideal of global citizenship in a practical and applied way. We focus on biographical accounts of individuals living far from home and/or acting on behalf of global principles, while also considering political and psychological criticisms of these practices. The course is somewhat unique in that, although students are welcome to choose a traditional academic research question for their final project (e.g., “Was historical figure X a globalist?” or “How does globalism vary with gender?”) they may also choose a more applied and personal topic, e.g., “How feasible would it be for me to impact global issue X?” or, “How might I actually migrate to foreign place Y?” |
| | eGlobal: Sustainable Engagement in Rwanda - Part I |
| Website 20225 | 003 | Lecture (1 Units) | Permission | 24 / 25 | Phoebe Crisman | TBA | TBA |
| | Online Course | Flexible Schedule |
| | eGlobal provides a way for UVA students to have meaningful long-term engagement with international peers. UVA students work with students from the University for Global Health Equity (UGHE) in Rwanda, in teams of four, to investigate global health topics relevant to both countries. The program provides a list of possible topics to work on for groups to choose from (although groups can also define their own topics). Estimated time commitment will be one hour per week on Zoom with the group, and about another hour per week for online research on the topic. The program runs the full academic year, and culminates in an online symposium where all groups present their research findings. For interested eGlobal groups options exist to publish their findings in Conflux, the University of Virginia global health journal.
Questions? Contact course coordinator, Haylee Ressa (qnx7rs@virginia.edu)
|
| | Global Partnership Essentials: Health Engagement |
| | Global Partnership Essentials: Theoretical and Practical Global Health Engagement |
| Website 21192 | 600 | Lecture (1 Units) | Open | 17 / 40 | Scott Heysell+10 | We 5:00pm - 6:00pm | Monroe Hall 118 |
| | This course is an excellent introduction to global engagement. Dinner is provided at each course session. Enrollment is strongly encouraged for students interested in applying for the 2025 Center for Global Health Equity University Scholar Award. |
| | Global Partnership Essentials aims to prepare students for effective and culturally appropriate engagement in Global Health activities by providing a background in Global Health theory, key issues, and culturally appropriate practice. Discussion 1-2 landmark articles and case studies focused on Global Health, using the Partners in Health Engage Curriculum supplemented with other relevant articles authored by global partners and UVA faculty. |
| GSGS 4559 | New Course in Global Studies |
| |
| | The Body Migrant |
| | Medical anthropology, migration, and what the body is |
| Fall 2024 19218 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Closed | 20 / 20 | Levi Vonk | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | New Cabell Hall 287 |
| | Do you have a body? Are you sure? In this course, we’ll try to figure out what the heck actually makes a body—biology, flesh and bone, technology, maybe even immigration documents?
We’ll think about how medicine sees the body—what makes us “healthy” or “sick”—as well as when concepts like race, gender, and sexuality help us understand bodies… and when they don’t. In addition to readings, we’ll watch several movies that portray how 21st century technologies—like cell phones, AI, and even plastic surgery—are changing how we understand what our bodies are. Finally, we’ll also think about how the movement of bodies through mass migration also changes how different societies have understood what a human body is.
Note: Though this is a 4000-level course, all interested students are welcome.
|
| History-General History |
| HIST 3501 | Introductory History Workshop |
| |
| | Into the Archives |
| Fall 2024 13062 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 18 / 18 | Erin Lambert | Tu 5:00pm - 7:30pm | New Cabell Hall 036 |
| | See class details for course description. |
| | In this seminar, we will explore the archive as the foundation of the historian's work, and we will work with archives ourselves. What is an archive, how is it created, and how can historians use it to recover the voices of people in the past? Why do some voices speak loudly in the archive, and why are others silenced? We will read texts from across a broad range of historical subfields and examine how historians use their archives--traditional collections of written documents, as well as non-textual sources such as images, objects, or landscapes. We will use these secondary sources as inspiration for our own work in the archives. Through visits to Special Collections, students will implement a research project that uses primary sources to develop a historical argument. |
| HIST 5002 | Global History |
| |
| | Microhistory, Macrohistory, and the Historian's Craft |
| Fall 2024 19368 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 8 / 15 | Fahad Bishara | Mo 2:00pm - 4:30pm | New Cabell Hall 183 |
| | This course is designed to introduce students to questions of scale, connection, movement, and circulation in history writing. Over the course of the semester, we will think about the analytical and narrative choices we make as historians.but shifting scales between the micro and macro, we think about how to make the large scale past come to life. |
| History-United States History |
| HIUS 3081 | History of the American Deaf Community |
| |
| Fall 2024 20300 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 22 / 25 (22 / 25) | Christopher Krentz | MoWeFr 12:00pm - 12:50pm | New Cabell Hall 338 |
| | Examines the history of deaf people in the United States over the last three centuries, with particular attention to the emergence and evolution of a community of Deaf people who share a distinct sign language and culture. We will read both primary texts from specific periods (by writers like Laurent Clerc and Alexander Graham Bell) and secondary sources (such as Douglas Baynton's Forbidden Signs and Carol Padden and Tom Humphries’ Inside Deaf Culture). We will also view a few historical films. Among other topics, we will consider how hearing society has treated deaf people and the reasons for this treatment; how deaf people have explained and advocated for themselves; how the deaf community complicates our understanding of linguistic and ethnic minorities and of disabled people in the United States; the impact of technology; and what changing constructions of deafness reveal about the history of American culture in general. Requirements will include two papers, quizzes, and active participation |
| HIUS 4501 | Seminar in United States History |
| |
| | Race, Power, and Political Economy |
| | Race, Power, & Political Economy |
| Fall 2024 21277 | 003 | SEM (4 Units) | Open | 5 / 15 (5 / 15) | Andrew Kahrl | We 2:00pm - 4:30pm | Wilson Hall 244 |
| | This research seminar will examine the relationship between struggles for political and economic power and social constructions of race in the past and present. We will read classic texts and recent scholarship on the political economy of race before students embark on individual research projects on a topic of their choosing broadly related to the course’s main theme. |
| Liberal Arts Seminar |
| LASE 2515 | A&S Skills Accelerator-Catalyst |
| |
| | The Writing Lab |
| Fall 2024 14224 | 005 | WKS (2 Units) | Open | 14 / 15 | Cristina Griffin | Tu 9:30am - 10:45am | Pavilion VIII 108 |
| | The capacity to clearly communicate ideas in writing is a prerequisite for nearly any career. In this course, students will practice taking a concept from initial idea to final draft with a focus on professional writing. We will tackle some common professional communication modes together, and practice a variety of ways to make every student a stronger and more confident writer. The bulk of the writing in this course will be student-driven and student-designed, individualized to each student’s particular career goals and fields. Our classroom will function both as a simulation of on-the-job writing and as a safe space for writerly experimentation: students will craft career-based writing projects in order to practice future writing tasks, and our classroom will also function as an experiential lab space for writing, revising, experimenting, failing, and writing again. Students will work with MS Word, Copilot, and test out drafting software (such as Worst Draft). Students will leave this class as more confident and more adept writers, ready—and even excited—to incorporate writing into their future careers. |
| Linguistics |
| LING 2430 | Languages of the World |
| |
| | Formerly ANTH 2430 |
| Fall 2024 19609 | 100 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 52 / 60 | Armik Mirzayan | TuTh 4:00pm - 4:50pm | McLeod Hall 1004 |
| | This course introduces you to the world of linguistic diversity. We seek to understand what languages are, how they are related to one another, where and by whom they are spoken, what is happening to them in this period of rapid global transformation, and why we should care. In order to explore the diversity of languages we first learn some of the vocabulary and analytical tools of linguistics. This toolbox provides a range of technical concepts that enable us to represent and discuss grammatical structures in more precise ways, allowing us to also discuss language histories which form the basis for grouping languages into families. We then use these methods of linguistic analysis we survey the world’s languages region by region, focusing on the shared, unusual, or interesting characteristics exhibited by the languages of each region and learning to appreciate the diversity of human languages. |
| Leadership and Public Policy - Policy |
| LPPP 3559 | New Course in Public Policy and Leadership |
| |
| | Strategic Decision-Making |
| Fall 2024 20221 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 23 / 30 | Alexander Bick | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | New Cabell Hall 383 |
| | How do leaders make choices? What factors weigh most heavily? Where do leaders err – and why? The course explores these questions in the context of national security and foreign policy. Part one focuses on theory and models for understanding and improving strategic decision-making. Part two examines a set of historical cases relevant to today’s most important challenges. Case studies may include the outbreak of World War I, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and tensions over Taiwan. |
| LPPP 5540 | Applied Policy Clinics |
| |
| | Advocacy and Lobbying Clinic |
| Fall 2024 19855 | 001 | WKS (2 Units) | Open | 6 / 12 | Brooke Lehmann | Fr 12:30pm - 3:00pm | Pavilion VIII 103 |
| | Utilizing the instructor’s current clients, students in this clinic will have the opportunity to work on the current social policy priorities of both this Congress and Administration. Over the 10-week clinic, students will be integrated into real-time research and analysis of current relevant policies and become familiar with advocacy activities related to any upcoming Congressional reform efforts. Students will produce work products to support particular advocacy events, including research documents, informative one-pagers for congressional staff, and any other tools required for effective advocacy. To every extent possible, students will have the opportunity to watch hearings/debates and other related congressional events and propose policy solutions directly to the participating client. |
| | Gun Violence Clinic |
| Fall 2024 20362 | 002 | WKS (2 Units) | Open | 6 / 15 | Michele Claibourn | Fr 2:00pm - 4:30pm | Contact Department |
| | Part of the University's Gun Violence Solutions Project, we'll work to support local communities and partners working to prevent and mitigate gun violence in the greater Charlottesville region. |
| | Gun violence has become endemic in the United States with over 40,000 people killed by guns every year. The origins and impacts of gun violence are complex and often conflated in a confusing narrative for residents and policy makers seeking to affect change. This three-year clinic will help synthesize national-level research, review interventions and implementation in other communities, and assess policies and practice with an equity lens to promote a shared understanding of problems and possibilities in our local community.
This fall’s focus will be on problem identification, generating policy briefs that contribute to shared community understanding. We will disambiguate types of gun violence, describe how the challenges and impacts are distributed, and summarize the key causes and consequences, examining how knowledge derived from national and state level research applies to our local context throughout. These materials will be part of a community resource hub to support broader engagement and local efforts to develop policy interventions. |
| LPPP 7700 | Applied Policy Project I |
| |
| Fall 2024 17309 | 004 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 13 / 13 | Daniel Player | We 12:30pm - 3:00pm | New Cabell Hall 268 |
| | This course investigates practical challenges policy researchers face conducting causal impact evaluations. Students develop deep intuition around prominent experimental and quasi-experimental methods through theory and simulation, practice replicating findings from key papers, and present results in compelling, accessible formats. The course assumes a basic proficiency with Stata and prior grad-level instruction in experimental & quasi-experimental methods. |
| Media Studies |
| MDST 2200 | Introduction to Film |
| |
| Fall 2024 12035 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 96 / 99 | Julide Etem | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Wilson Hall 325 |
| | From tracing the evolution of film history to exploring digital streaming platforms, Introduction to Film exposes students to the basic issues, concepts, approaches, theories, and methods in Film Studies. In this course students will learn about how techniques such as editing, cinematography, lighting, and sound influence storytelling and communication. Students will develop viewing skills to adopt an intersectional lens to analyze films and their social, political, cultural, and ideological impact. As they question the responsibilities held by filmmakers and viewers, they will navigate the intricate realm of ethics. The mesmerizing allure of moving images and their multifaceted roles will be a subject of exploration. Students will uncover the relationship between sponsors, producers, distributors, audiences, and cinematic narratives, while dissecting the techniques that empower images to weave narratives, recount histories, shape characters, and confront societal dilemmas. Throughout the course, students will traverse the contours of social, technological, and historical contexts, understanding how these elements both facilitate creativity and impose boundaries. By drawing insights from the annals of cinema’s early days to today’s creations, students will delve into an array of thought-provoking inquiries: Are films agents of societal peril or commercial ventures? Do they serve as conduits of propaganda or windows into the lives of others? These profound questions serve as the cornerstone of this intellectual exploration, offering a richly rewarding engagement with the world of film. |
| MDST 3111 | Food Media and Popular Culture |
| |
| Fall 2024 13175 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 29 / 30 | Pallavi Rao | We 3:30pm - 6:00pm | Wilson Hall 238 |
| | In this course, we ask, how do various media tell the stories of the food that we eat? Food is critical to human survival, but it also constructs identities, it travels and connects people, histories, cultures, and labor and livelihoods. Representations of food in the media across time and place offer us a lens through which we can understand the cultural politics of the food experience--who produce our food, who labor for it, who prepare it, how it represents a culture, who consume it, and who profit from it.
Studying a range of food media genres from food writing and cookbooks to Instareels and food porn, Mukbangs, dietary media, food countercultures, food podcasts, celebrity chefs, travel shows and competitive cooking programming, this course will explore media storytelling about and around food, along with the racial, ethnic, gendered, class, and trans/national complexities that characterize our food narratives. A word of advice not to come to our class hungry! |
| MDST 3510 | Topics in Media Research |
| |
| | Digital Media and the Environment |
| Fall 2024 13079 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 16 / 30 | Lauren Bridges | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Gibson Hall 141 |
| | This course introduces students to the relationship between digital media and the environment. Students will learn critical perspectives to examine cultural representations of digital media, how digital tools shape environments, and the material impacts of digital media technologies on the surrounding natural and built environment. Students will explore topics such as AI and the environment, representations of “green” digital media, the hidden tech supply chain, and the global flows of e-waste. |
| | Children on Social Media |
| Fall 2024 13241 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 30 / 30 | Ashleigh Wade | Tu 3:30pm - 6:00pm | Wilson Hall 214 |
| | How young is too young to be on social media? This course explores the social, practical, and ethical implications of children on social media. We will view and analyze social media content from children ranging in age from 0 - 17 in order to identify and evaluate the benefits and risks of social media at various stages of childhood. Discussion topics will highlight the potential impact social media has on children’s overall well-being. |
| MDST 4510 | Capstone Topics |
| |
| | Creative Labor and the Digital Media Economy |
| Fall 2024 12715 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 20 / 20 | Pallavi Rao | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | New Cabell Hall 183 |
| | Media "products" are not typical commodities, nor is the labor undertaken to produce them typical industrial labor. The added context of digital technologies and media platforms have also transformed "work" in media organizations in fundamental ways. How have algorithms and social media analytics changed expectations of organizational media labor? Why did the Writers Guild of America strike in the summer of 2023 and how were anxieties around digital media and streaming platforms central to this? What is an influencer and is what they do "work"? Can a YouTuber be protected under existing labor laws? Can fans, who freely volunteer so much of their time and labor in online forums, be considered workers? This course is interested in such an examination of media/creative labor as well as the industrial contexts in which creative products are created and distributed.
In our classes, we will explore new theories of what is known as monetizable "creative labor" in the digital economy as well as its non-monetized unpaid avatars. We try to understand how aspiration/hope nurtures new kinds of work in the digital age, how it relates to inequality and precarity in the job market, the media industries' transformations linked to globalization and the spread of digital technologies, and the risky individualization of labor online. Finally, we will study the sociopolitical stakes of such labor by discussing: 1) the tech industry’s impact on media work cultures; 2) the invisible laborers of the online ecology; 3) and emergent economies of platforms. |
| MDST 4660 | Watching the Detectives |
| |
| Fall 2024 19028 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 19 / 20 | William Little | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Cocke Hall 101 |
| | MDST 4660 Professor William G. Little
Fall 2024 Wilson Hall 204
Cooke Hall 101 Office Hours: by appointment
TR 12:30-1:45 e-mail: wgl2h@virginia.edu
Watching The Detectives
This seminar mounts an investigation into the origins and legacy of a distinctive, significant American art form: the portrayal of the private eye. The course will focus on the genre’s exploration of the relationship between detective work and the dynamics of modern industrial and post-industrial life. Students will consider how cases presented in the films dramatize concerns about class, race, gender, urbanization, the rationalization of experience, the disappearance of “real” life, the blurring of boundaries between bodies and machines, the collapse of distinction between private life and public life. Clues to the significance of the detective’s work will be gathered by analyzing the relationship of this work to such modern developments as photography, psychoanalysis, statistical analysis, and the social science of making cases. Substantial consideration will also be given to how the private eye’s authority compares to the authority of the “eye” of the film camera and to the gaze of the film spectator.
Potential Course Films
John Huston, The Maltese Falcon (1941) 101 min
Howard Hawks, The Big Sleep (1946) 114 min
Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo (1958) 128 min
Roman Polanski, Chinatown (1974) 130 min
Francis Ford Coppola, The Conversation (1974) 113 min
Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (1982) 114 min
Kathryn Bigelow, Blue Steel (1990) 102 min
Christopher Nolan, Memento (2000) 116 min
David Fincher, Zodiac (2007) 156 min
Carl Franklin, Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) 102 min
David Lynch, Mulholland Drive (2001) 147 min
Karyn Kusama, Destroyer (2018) 121 min
Park Chan-wook, Decision to Leave (2022) 139 min
Graded Requirements:
Forum Posts (5 @ 4 points each) 20 points
Participation 10 points
Essay #1 (5-7 pages) 30 points
Final Essay (8-10 pages) 40 points
------------
TOTAL 100 points
|
| Music |
| MUSI 2090 | Sound Studies: The Art and Experience of Listening |
| |
| Fall 2024 19666 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 20 / 20 | Noel Lobley | MoWe 9:30am - 10:45am | Wilson Hall 142 |
| | When we think about knowing the world through the senses, we are likely to think first of the visible world. But sound, hearing and listening are crucial too and often take precedence in many communities. Recently scholars in history, anthropology, geography, literary studies, acoustics, music, ecology, environmental science, and art have come together in the field of Sound Studies, reflecting on the role of sounds as forces that flow in and beyond human life. How do sound art, technology, and design create the world we inhabit and our everyday social and political experience? How can vibrations both heal and destroy? What does it mean to experience immersive and embodied sound? We will ponder these and other questions, moving between theoretical, experiential, and creative explorations.
Please note: this course is an introduction to Sound Studies, there is no pre-requisite, and students from all backgrounds, levels and experiences are welcome to come and explore myriad ways to engage with sound. |
| MUSI 2559 | New Course in Music |
| |
| | Women in Jazz |
| Website 21334 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 6 / 10 | Nicole Mitchell Gantt | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | Old Cabell Hall 107 |
| | Women in Jazz is a music class that focuses on the important contributions of women to jazz music, past and present, as instrumentalists, vocalists, composers, arrangers, and producers. Jazz originated in the U.S. as a phenomenon of the 20th Century and quickly spread throughout the globe, by offering artists of all backgrounds a vehicle for innovation, expanded aesthetics and individuality. Jazz has been an important influence in the development of hip hop and other modern musics throughout the world. However, jazz has historically been a male dominated field. Who are the artists whose work emerged to spark gender justice in jazz, what is their music, and what are their stories of inspiration, creativity, struggles and triumphs? Through our exploration of recordings, scholarship, music journalism, video, film and live music performance we will answer these questions, and gain a better understanding of how the politics of gender have challenged jazz music. In learning about the work of important women innovators of jazz, we will learn about numerous musical styles within jazz. Students will develop critical thinking skills while discerning the contrasting perspectives of critics and musicians involved in this vital music.
|
| MUSI 3020 | Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Music |
| |
| Fall 2024 20159 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 20 / 25 | Bonnie Gordon | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Old Cabell Hall 113 |
| | In 1977, NASA launched the space probe Voyager 1 out of our Solar System. It carried a gold-plated copper record called “The sounds of earth,” that, theoretically, would work until eternity. Should a close encounter of the third kind occur, it would include among other things greetings in 55 languages The Queen of the Night’s rage aria from the Magic Flute. 1791 and 2024 were and are unprecedented times. What do music and sound teach us about those times? What sounds fascinated listeners in the 17th and 18th century? The class will tune in to diverse musical selections including symphony and opera to folk song and free improv for keyboard, by composers including but not limited to Handel, Haydn, Vivaldi, De la Guerre, Mozart, Gluck, and J.S. Bach (and his kids). The class takes a global perspective. Chronologically, it centers the 17th and 18th centuries. The course lingers on the history of sound in Early Virginia. Course work will include reading, writing, listening, visits to special collections, making music, and reflection. The course is taught at the music major level. Majors and non-majors are welcome. There are no prerequisites, and knowledge of Western music notation is not required. |
| MUSI 3570 | Music Cultures |
| |
| | Curating Sound: Art, Ethnography, and Practice |
| Fall 2024 19678 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Closed | 20 / 20 | Noel Lobley | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Wilson Hall 142 |
| | This practical and discovery-driven design course explores the intersections of curatorial practice, sound studies, ethnography, composition, sound art, and community arts practice, through a series of engagements linking archival collections, local and international artists and art and community spaces, and the method and philosophies of embodied and experiential deep listening. Drawing from both the histories and potential affordances of sound curation we engage with practical examples ranging from sub-Saharan Africa to Australia, from Europe to New York, and right back here to the Charlottesville and UVA communities, asking what it means to curate local sound within globalized arts circuits. We will explore multiple and diverse case studies where artists, curators, communities, industries and institutions have both collaborated and clashed, as we ask whether it is desirable or even possible to curate the elusive, invasive and ephemeral object, medium and experience of sound.
Throughout the entire course we will be working closely with professional artists and curators most notably Around HipHop Live Café and the Black Power Station based in Makhanda, South Africa, the Kluge Ruhe Museum of Aboriginal Art, and the Virginia Film Festival
Less a lecture format, and more of an interactive workshop, critical and creative content will be explored in an open-pedagogical model where students apprentice as curators and eventually take an active role in curating the class itself. Expect a mix of group project work, individual reflection and portfolio curation, and real-world collaborative work with professional partners. |
| MUSI 4331 | Theory III |
| |
| Fall 2024 19679 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 5 / 15 | Michael Puri | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Old Cabell Hall 113 |
| | In this course we read, analyze, and write music in the western classical tradition to learn how it is formed, from its smallest parts (motives) to its largest wholes (sonatas). We focus on music of the High Classical Era: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Prerequisite: MUSI 3320 (Theory 2) or instructor permission. Send questions to puri@virginia.edu. |
| MUSI 4545 | Computer Applications in Music |
| |
| | Designing Audio Effect Plug |
| | Designing Audio Effect Plugins |
| Fall 2024 12107 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Permission | 14 / 15 | Luke Dahl | MoWe 2:30pm - 3:45pm | Old Cabell Hall B011 |
| | Audio effects are common and useful tools used in the recording, mixing, and mastering of music and sound, as well as in sound design.
This course focuses on understanding, designing and implementing audio effects, and using them for musical projects. We will cover the signal processing involved in effects such as EQ, delay, chorus, flanger, reverb, distortion, and compression, and we will implement these effects as VST or AudioUnit plug-ins by programming in C++ and using the JUCE framework. We will emphasize the musical application of our designs, and as a final project students will create a unique effect that addresses their own musical goals.
In other words we will learn fundamental aspects of digital audio, how audio effects work, how all real-time audio processing works "under the hood", and we will design and build our own audio effects.
Enrollment is by instructor permission. Students are expected to have experience using digital audio tools (for example as covered in Musi 2350 or Musi 3390), and to have an ongoing music-making or sound-based practice. Previous programming experience is _highly_ desirable.
Enrollment requires instructor permission. Please sign up on the Waitlist in SIS and describe your experience with digital audio tools (such as DAWs), your musical experience, your programming experience, your major, and your year.
|
| MUSI 4559 | New Course in Music |
| |
| | The Sound of Film |
| | The Sound of Film |
| Fall 2024 19681 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 13 / 20 | Nomi Dave | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Old Cabell Hall 107 |
| | How do we listen to film? What is the relationship between sound and images? What stories does sound tell? This course will explore the role of sound and listening in film, from lo-fi to hi-fi, from sound effects and ambient noise to voiceovers, music, and sound design. We will consider the history of sound recording in film and will listen to and watch several different examples and techniques of sound story-telling. Students will also learn about different types of microphones, experiment with making recordings, and create their own short sound films. No musical experience necessary. |
| MUSI 4581 | Composition I |
| |
| | Introduction to Music Composition |
| | Composition I |
| Fall 2024 19682 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Permission | 10 / 10 | Leah Reid | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Old Cabell Hall B011 |
| | MUSI 4581 is an upper level music composition course. Students will receive a combination of individual lessons and group sessions. The course will provide a forum for students to listen, discuss, workshop, develop, and explore inspirations, compositions, and ideas.
Over the course of the semester, students are expected to compose a large-scale work or a series of smaller works in the style of their choosing. Students may compose electronic, acoustic, or electroacoustic music.
The course can be repeated for credit with approval of the instructor.
Prerequisite: Students are expected to have some prior composition experience and should be comfortable with standard music notation or DAWs. While not required, it is recommended that students have taken MUSI 3380, 3390, or another course where they have composed prior to taking MUSI 4581. |
| MUSI 7500 | Studies in Pre-Modern Music to 1500 |
| |
| | Premodern Sounds and Cultures |
| | Premodern Sounds and Cultures |
| Fall 2024 19805 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 2 / 10 (2 / 20) | Bonnie Gordon | Tu 5:00pm - 7:30pm | Old Cabell Hall S008 |
| | This course uses sound to explore dynamic and new approaches to the premodern period. It promises a dynamic and dynamic and fresh look at the premodern (loosely conceived as stretching from the 5th c. to 1700) that will privilege new avenues of scholarship focused on a global, transhistoric, and multidisciplinary approach to the past. Presented through a series of sonic case studies and team-taught modules by UVA faculty that will address the long history of slavery, cross-cultural exchange, gender and sexualities, and global religious practices with an eye to encouraging debate and dialogue between faculty and students. Students will be guided in producing a final seminar paper that works across disciplinary boundaries. Modules will include topics like “Travel, Trade Routes and the Sonic Passage” “Joan of Arc and the Voice then and now” The Invention of Race and the Slave Trade,” This seminar is of the music PhD curriculum and the graduate certificate in Premodern Cultures & Communities. |
| Physics |
| PHYS 1110 | Energy on this World and Elsewhere |
| |
| Website 11633 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 36 / 60 | E Dukes | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Physics Bldg 338 |
| | Energy is of paramount importance to civilization, and has been for centuries, although never more than the present day. Much of the things we value and rely on -- food, automobiles, air travel, heating and air conditioning all depend on access to inexpensive sources of energy. Wars have been fought over sources of energy. But what is energy? Is it inexhaustible, or will inexpensive sources of energy disappear in our lifetimes? Will our thirst for energy inevitably lead to climate change and global warming?
Physics 1110 is a course intended to address these issues. Structured so that it is accessible to non-science majors (no Calculus!), this course addresses such topics as the physical nature of energy, the ways in which we produce and consume energy in our society, and how the opportunities energy provides, and the threats that may occur will play into our future. |
| PHYS 5720 | Introduction to Nuclear and Particle Physics |
| |
| Fall 2024 10549 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 15 | Dinko Pocanic | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Dell 1 104 |
| | The course will include weekly homework problem assignments, a midterm exam, student seminar presentations on topics relevant to the material covered, and a final exam.
|
| | This is a “field survey” course meant to acquaint the interested advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate student with the foundations, recent achievements, and current status of the field of elementary particle and nuclear physics. The course nature and its audience require that it be taught on a phenomenological level rather than a rigorous theoretical one. The class provides a springboard for study of field theory for those students who wish to study the subject more deeply. The main prerequisite for the class is a working knowledge of quantum mechanics at the undergraduate level (completion of the PHYS 3550/3560 course series, or equivalent). |
| Psychology |
| PSYC 4500 | Special Topics in Psychology |
| |
| | Consciousness |
| Fall 2024 13798 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 20 / 20 | Tobias Grossmann | Mo 2:00pm - 4:30pm | Gilmer Hall Room 250 |
| | This course explores the scientific study of consciousness, using Anil Seth's book Being You: The New Science of Consciousness as the primary text. Students will engage with key concepts, theories, and empirical research in consciousness studies, covering the nature of consciousness, brain mechanisms, altered states, and the implications for artificial intelligence and ethics. |
| Religion-Christianity |
| RELC 3077 | Christian Theologies of Liberation |
| |
| Fall 2024 20566 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 18 / 20 | Paul Jones | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 315 |
| | “Liberation theology” refers to perspectives that connect theological, ethical, and political inquiry. In the context of Christian thought, it encompasses scholarship that ties reflection on God, Jesus of Nazareth, human beings, creation, the Holy Spirit, and Christian ethics to analyses of race and racism, sex and gender, economic injustice, poverty, sexuality, colonialism, and human rights. Subsequent to an initial engagement with the Bible, early Christian and modern Christian writing, this class focuses on landmark and contemporary texts by liberation theologians, many of whom hail from North and South America. Among the authors considered are James Allison, Marcella Althaus-Reid, Leonardo Boff, James Cone, Kelly Brown Douglas, Ignacio Ellacuría, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Serene Jones, and Pope Francis. Students will be evaluated in light of in-class discussion, weekly journal entries, and a take-home final exam or research paper. |
| Religion-Hinduism |
| RELH 2090 | Hinduism |
| |
| Fall 2024 12952 | 100 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 109 / 120 | John Nemec | MoWe 2:00pm - 2:50pm | Wilson Hall 301 |
| | This course gives a comprehensive look at Hinduism, its major ideas and traditions, reading original texts in English translation. Featured are some of the most vital works in the entire history of religions, including the famed Upaniṣads that inspired T.S. Eliot and others, and the great Hindu epic about war and righteousness, the Mahābhārata. We also read poems of Hindu saints, look at the origins of Sikhism, and discuss the historical connection between Islam and Hinduism in India. A comprehensive survey through literature. |
| South Asian Studies |
| SAST 2050 | Classics of Indian Literature |
| |
| Syllabus 19331 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 25 / 30 | Richard Cohen | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | New Cabell Hall 489 |
| | The course satisfies the Second Writing Requirement. I will sign the electronic form at the end of the semester. |
| | We will explore Indian civilizations through their ‘classic’ texts. I use single quotes around classic because what exactly is a classic text is usually determined by the politics of culture at any given time, as well as the academy, and that can be, as you might imagine, a contestable and controversial business. Therefore, the texts we will encounter in this course have been chosen to represent the diversity of Indian literature, especially highlighting competing voices; basically, because the history of the Indian continent is multi-layered and of extremely long duration, accounting for its complexity. In contemporary India, ‘competing voices’ usually are found in a political context, with a somewhat heavy religio-social undercurrent. Thus, the texts we read in this course often have a Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Islamic, as well as socially hierarchical identity. Thus, you will learn not only about Indian literary history, but also religious and social identities, and how they have changed over time.
Each text we read – and we will debate them in class – will be presented in the cultural and political context they were created, as well as the contemporary context of academia, which has been known on more than one occasion to accept blithely, without enough debate, their relevance in the overall canon of Indian literature.
|
| Spanish |
| SPAN 4559 | New Course in Spanish |
| |
| | Bilingual Literary & Cultural Productions in Spain |
| Fall 2024 20222 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Permission | 16 / 16 | Paula Sprague | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | Shannon House 119 |
| | This course will examine the work of two groups of 20th and 21st century bilingual writers and artists is Spain: those who produce their work in the historic, now co-official, languages of Spain: Euskera (Basque), Catalán/ Valencià, and Galego (Galician), and of work by ‘new’ Spaniards, writers who are first- or second-generation immigrants from various countries. For class we will use Spanish language versions of their work, the language they use to reach a broad audience, to explore diverse expressions of identity and experience and their links to broader contexts. |
| Systems & Information Engineering |
| SYS 5581 | Selected Topics in Systems Engineering |
| |
| | Cyber Systems and Operations |
| Fall 2024 20714 | 003 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 25 | Andrew Schoka | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | Jesser Hall 171 |
| | A case-based exploration of cybersecurity through a systems lens. This course encourages students to view cybersecurity applications across a range of engineering and business disciplines through an attacker’s viewpoint. Emphasis is placed on relating theory to practice via classroom discussion of case studies tied to real-world cyber incidents, attacks, and breaches.
|
| SYS 6060 | Autonomous Mobile Robots |
| |
| Website 16817 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 6 / 8 (33 / 40) | Nicola Bezzo | We 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Rice Hall 120 |
| | Nicola Bezzo | Tu 11:00am - 12:15pm | Olsson Hall 001 |
| | Have you ever wonder how an autonomous car or the Mars rover work? Or how a drone can fly autonomously avoiding obstacles while tracking objects on the ground? ...Then, this is the class for you! |
| | Have you ever wonder how an autonomous car or the Mars rover work? Or how a drone can fly autonomously avoiding obstacles while tracking objects on the ground? ...Then, this is the class for you!
The objective of this course is to provide the basic concepts and algorithms required to develop mobile robots that act autonomously in complex environments. The main emphasis is on mobile robot locomotion and kinematics, control, sensing, localization, mapping, path planning, and motion planning.
The class is organized in lectures on Tuesday and labs on Wednesday where you will have the chance to program state-of-the-art ground and aerial vehicles and participate in a competition during the semester!
Please note that this class is combined in Systems Eng (SYS 6060), Electrical and Computer Eng (ECE 6501), and Computer Science (CS 6501). In case one section is close, please try to enroll in any of the other sections. |
| University Studies |
| UNST 8130 | Teaching & Learning in Higher Education |
| |
| Fall 2024 20481 | 01 | SEM (1 Units) | Open | 8 / 18 | Elizabeth Dickens | Tu 2:00pm - 3:15pm | New Cabell Hall 056 |
| | Where do our teaching practices come from? What do we hope to achieve when we teach, and why do we have those goals?
This seminar invites graduate students to explore theories and philosophies of education in order to guide their own professional development and practices as educators. Through our own educational experiences, we have all inherited a variety of assumptions and beliefs about the purposes and nature of education. In this course, we will unpack and critically reflect on our beliefs and assumptions, contextualizing them through the study of ideas that have significantly influenced educational discourse and the operations of higher education. We will investigate a diverse set of topics, including students' intellectual and social development, social justice, democratic and civic engagement, and what it means to be a critically reflective educator. In this course you will have an opportunity to connect concrete pedagogical practices to theoretical frameworks and to develop an intentional approach to your teaching through thinking reflectively and critically about what we do when we teach and why we do it.
This 1-credit course, graded on a credit/no credit basis, will be held on Tuesdays from 2:00-3:30 pm in Fall 2024. Graduate students from any discipline, with any amount of teaching experience, are invited to enroll. Reach out to Elizabeth Dickens (edickens@virginia.edu) with questions.
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| University Seminar |
| USEM 1570 | University Seminar |
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| | Designing a Carbon Neutral Future |
| | Designing a Decarbonized Future |
| Fall 2024 17776 | 003 | SEM (2 Units) | Closed | 18 / 18 | Ethan Heil | MoWe 1:00pm - 1:50pm | The Rotunda Room 152 |
| | In Designing a Carbon Neutral Future, students will learn about the concept, mechanisms, and pathways to decarbonize our society. Over the semester, students will work in multidisciplinary teams with a local community partner to develop a real-world decarbonization plan. Weekly guest speakers with subject matter expertise will be invited to provide insight and act as a resource for student groups. |
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