UVa Class Schedule - Schedule of Classes with Additional Descriptions

UVa Class Schedules (Unofficial, Lou's List v2.10) New Features

Schedule of Classes with Additional Descriptions - Spring 2025

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I continue to maintain this list of classes, now with UVA support! -- Lou Bloomfield, Professor Emeritus of Physics

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African-American and African Studies
AAS 2500	Topics Course in Africana Studies

	Black Life, Power, and the Archive
Spring 2025 13083	001	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	15 / 15	Shelby Sinclair	TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm	New Cabell Hall 044
	How are archives built and maintained? How can we use historical archives to tell stories about Black life? Students will investigate the politics of knowledge production, power in the archive, and the limitations of various source materials through close reading, conversations with archivists, and hands-on archive exploration. This course develops students' research competencies and general understanding of primary materials, special collections, and critical digital methods through a final assignment on a pre-1999 topic of their choice.
	Race, Class & Gender
Spring 2025 13059	002	SEM (3 Units)	Open	14 / 16	Liana Richardson	MoWe 5:00pm - 6:15pm	New Cabell Hall 287
	While many people in the United States embrace the rhetoric of equality, “the American Dream”, and “the land of opportunity,” why do social inequalities by race, class, and gender continue to be such a persistent feature of our society? The overall goal of this course is to examine the social, political, and economic forces that create, reinforce, and sometimes exacerbate these inequalities, shaping differences in lived experiences and outcomes. First, we will discuss the social construction of race, class, and gender, and their intersections. Then, we will examine policies and practices within the labor market, housing, education, health care, and criminal justice systems that reflect and reinforce the social constructions and perpetuate race, class, and gender inequalities in health, economic, and social well-being. We will conclude by considering potential strategies for disrupting these linkages, as well as the social justice politics associated with them. Documentaries, as well as pop culture media (e.g., music lyrics and videos, social media posts, and movies), will be used throughout the course to illustrate key concepts and realities.
AAS 3500	Intermediate Seminar in African-American & African Studies

	Race, Gender & Environmental Justice-Latin America
Spring 2025 19102	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	15 / 16 (15 / 16)	Kache Claytor	MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm	New Cabell Hall 064
	This course offers an introduction to the concepts and perspectives in environmental justice movements by exploring the intersections of Black feminist activism in Latin America. This course explores the ways that Black women across borders, languages, as well as temporal and spatial markers have responded to injustices that have not only accelerated environmental degradation, but also disproportionately impacted their communities and shaped their experiences. Through a critical examination of case studies, we will analyze how Afro-descendant women have led movements to protect their communities, land, and natural resources. Using an interdisciplinary lens, students will engage with ideas of environmental justice, climate justice, Reproductive Justice, extractivism, colonialism, and sovereignty. This course is designed for students interested in activism, environmentalism, Blackness and Indigeneity, Black feminisms, Latin American politics, and Black consciousness throughout Latin America. Through a mix of readings, films, podcasts, discussions, and community engagement, students will gain a nuanced understanding of the role of Black women in shaping environmental and social justice across diverse contexts.
	Rethinking Race and Gender
Spring 2025 13432	002	SEM (3 Units)	Open	3 / 20	Nasrin Olla	TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm	John W. Warner Hall 110
	This course can be used as a qualification for the Second Writing Requirement.
	In our everyday life, we navigate gendered and racialized realities. In some significant sense, to qualify as a “human,” one must be assigned a gender and race. But what is race? What is gender? How do these concepts come into being across cultures and spaces? In this course, we will approach these big questions by exploring a range of novels, poetry, criticism, and films from the Caribbean, India, the United States, and Africa. Authors will include Gayatri Spivak, Toni Morrison, Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Bell Hooks, Saidiya Hartman, and others. This course aims to develop a theoretical language through which the way race and gender emerge in institutional and informal structures is explored. Through a close reading of a range of texts, we will attempt to think across feminist, queer, and world literatures to develop a set of intersectional terms and concepts.
	Africulture: The African Roots of US Agriculture
Spring 2025 13968	007	SEM (3 Units)	Open	23 / 25 (23 / 25)	Michael Carter Jr.+1	Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm	New Cabell Hall 303
	Led by a practicing farmer-activist, Michael Carter, Jr. of Carter Farms in nearby Orange County, Virginia, we will examine how principles, practices, plants and people of African descent have shaped US agriculture, and thus, the lives of all Americans. By examining a wide range of history, laws, attitudes, cultures and traditions, we will see how many US staple commodities and practices have their roots in Africa and observe cultural similarities between indigenous cultures around the world. While evaluating realities of today’s Black farmers and the innovations they devise to survive in a system stacked against them, we will look for solutions to an array of challenges faced by today's Black farmers in the US food system and across a wide range of environmental and agricultural arenas.
	Race & Medicine in Post-19th Century America
Spring 2025 13972	008	SEM (3 Units)	Open	15 / 16	Liana Richardson	We 2:00pm - 4:30pm	New Cabell Hall 207
	When it comes to race, what do the NFL, Facebook, and the IRS have in common with our health care system? How are cops and doctors similar to each other and to college fraternities? And how did the Civil Rights movement influence health care as we know it today? In this course, we will examine the medical practices involved in the social construction of racial difference and in the persistence of racial inequalities in health during the last 60 years. Drawing from relevant scholarship in sociology, anthropology, and history, we will discuss the origins and consequences of medical racism in contemporary medical research and practice, including the continued role of medicine in racial meaning-making. Case studies about the contemporary (mis)use of race in clinical encounters and in diagnostic and treatment protocols will provide illustrative examples. We will also consider the racialization of various health issues, focusing especially on the sociopolitical contexts in which it occurs and how contrasting schemas of medicalization and criminalization drive the differential labeling and treatment of racial groups as either victims (sick) or villains (bad). In addition to exposing the contradictions between these phenomena and the ethical principles of beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice in medicine, we will conclude by discussing their implications for health equity.
AAS 3559	New Course in African and African American Studies

	Africa's Youth: Cultural & Political Perspectives
Website 19106	002	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	16 / 16	Salma Mutwafy	TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am	New Cabell Hall 364
	Africa’s population is – by far - the youngest in the world. In all other world regions, the median age is more than 30 years. In Africa, the median age is 19 years. The youthfulness of Africa’s population has important implications for further population growth as well as social and political outcomes. In this course, we will examine Africa’s population dynamics and the cultural and political questions they raise. Central to this examination, will be a critical and humanistic sensitivity required in the study of population dynamics. We will draw on academic literature from anthropology, demography, and sociology, as well as popular sources, to understand the determinants and implications of population youthfulness. The course focuses on the following topics: work, politics, popular culture, and migration. This course is suitable for students interested in contemporary Africa, global affairs, population, public policy, politics, and culture.
	Haiti and the US
	Race, Rumor, and Culture
Spring 2025 20594	004	SEM (3 Units)	Open	18 / 25	Shelby Sinclair	TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm	New Cabell Hall 315
	This class will fulfill the second writing requirement.
	Let's unpack Haiti's lore. From zombies and vodou to the sensational headlines animating recent presidential debates, we uncover why Haiti has played a central role in U.S. popular culture for centuries. This course presents the cultural history of Haiti and its relationship to Western powers, most especially the United States and France. We examine the political and cultural foundations of Haiti's globally impactful revolution to overthrow slavery and French colonialism as well as the early twentieth century U.S. occupation and its consequences.
	Reparations&History of the Black Radical Tradition
	Reparations, Abolition, and the History of the Black Radical Tradition
Website 20076	005	SEM (3 Units)	Open	7 / 16	Guy Emerson Mount	Mo 2:00pm - 4:30pm	New Cabell Hall 068
	Beginning with ancient indigenous forms of restorative justice and proceeding briskly into more recent attempts at enacting a transformative justice, this course aims to take a transnational and comparative approach to exploring the history of reparations and abolition from an interdisciplinary perspective. It is an attempt to reimagine the conceptual boundaries of reparations and abolition by situating them firmly within the much broader framework of the Black Radical Tradition. From environmental justice movements, to prison riots, to prefigurative community building efforts this course will be effectively 'queering the archive' in order to reveal reparations and abolition as both historically constituted ideas as well as subversive quotidian practices. While we will take a transnational approach to this project, the ultimate aim of this course (as reflected in its second half) is a greater understanding of the possibilities of reparations and abolition specifically as they relate to slavery, Jim Crow, and post-1968 discrimination against people of African descent in the United States.
AAS 3830	Being Human: Race, Technology, and the Arts

Spring 2025 19101	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	14 / 16 (18 / 24)	Njelle Hamilton	MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm	Dell 2 102
	What makes us human? How did science and technology play a part in racism and the dehumanization of blackness? And how have artists of color re-appropriated science, technology, and science fiction to subvert and resist dehumanization? This course is an introduction to Afrofuturism, exploring the intersections of race and alienness, race and technology, and race and modernity through global futuristic representations of blackness in TV, film, music, art, and literature. In this discussion-based seminar, we will trace “like race” tropes in sci-fi, including aliens, monsters, enslavement, and invisibility. We will think about the various ways that black artists/writers/creators displace or “dimension-shift” the African Diaspora experience to grapple with contemporary and historical issues, and employ science/technology/sci-fi to invent places and conditions where blackness can thrive. Assignments will include literary essays and creative work (short films, artwork, mashups, web-content etc) that reimagine and interrogate representations of race and science/technology in contemporary media. (No artistic talent or experience required)
AAS 4501	Advanced Research Seminar in History & AAS

	Engaging Local Histories: River View Farm
	NOTE: This class does not actually meet from 2:00 - 5:30 p.m. (see below)!
Spring 2025 13431	001	SEM (4 Units)	Open	8 / 10	Lisa Shutt	Th 2:00pm - 5:30pm	Pavilion V 110
	Because we have a number of speakers or short trips over the course of the semester, class will fall WITHIN these times, but will almost always only meet for 2.5 hours per week.
	This course aims to encourage students to situate and shed light on various aspects of Black history and culture in Albemarle County and the surrounding regions through the lens and example of River View Farm and those who established it, lived there, farmed there, and led local and regional communities in a number of capacities. Who were these local leaders? They included a formerly enslaved man, Mr. Hugh Carr (approximately 1843-1914) who was a farm manager on the nearby Woodlands plantation and was able to earn and accumulate enough money to purchase the 58-acre tract that formed the beginnings of River View Farm in 1870. He continued to add to his holding and became an elder in the primarily Black Hydraulic Mills / Union Ridge communities. One of his daughters with his second wife, Ms. Texie Mae Hawkins, was Ms. Mary Louise Carr Greer (1884-1973). She was an incredibly influential educator – a principal of the Albemarle Training School, and a local behind-the-scenes Civil Rights leader. Ms. Greer’s husband, Mr. Conly Greer (1883-1956), was Albemarle County’s first African American Extension Agent. He build a “sanitary demonstration barn” as a teaching tool and rode from one corner of the county to the next on horseback for days at a time to teach Black farmers the newest farming methods supported by the (segregated) Extension Service. Inspired by Mr. Greer, these farmers then taught these cutting edge agricultural skills to their neighbors. Students will learn how to conduct historical and/or ethnographic research including research of archival materials, material culture, and the landscape/built environment. Each student will embark on a semester-long examination of a topic related to River View Farm, the individuals who lived there, and the larger communities of which they were a part. Instruction will include the examination of primary materials in Special Collections at the University of Virginia in addition to secondary readings that provide context about post-emancipation lives of formerly enslaved men and women, the Black Extension Service and Land Grant University system, Black 4-H youth programs, women’s “Demonstration Clubs,” the history of African American education in the region between 1840-1973, Black agricultural history, African American communities such as Hydraulic Mills and Union Ridge, African American foodways, the importance and format of kitchen gardens, garden clubs, museum studies, the historicization and preservation of local Black histories in the 21st century, and many more potential topics. An important part of the mission of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American & African Studies is public outreach. We would like to see our students actively support and engage with communities outside the space and influence of the university. Some classes will be held on the site of River View Farm (now known as Ivy Creek Natural Area) and there will be some trips during class time. Transportation will be arranged or provided.
American Studies
AMST 3559	New Course in American Studies

	Placed and Displaced in America
Spring 2025 20503	002	Lecture (3 Units)	Closed	15 / 0 (15 / 0)	Lisa Goff	TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm	New Cabell Hall 115
	No waitlist but spaces often open up. Email me if you'd like to join the class: lg6t@virginia.edu.
	The history of America is a history of place-making and displacement. Iconic American sites such as Monticello, Walden Pond, and our network of national parks have inspired generations of Americans. But displacement is just as much a part of our national identity—as the stories of Indigenous dispossession, housing discrimination, Japanese internment, redlining, gentrification, and homelessness attest. In this class we’ll critique the “iconic” American places, the ones we brag about, and study the displacement that has characterized our nation since the colonial era—the stories that were long buried, and are still coming to light. We’ll also pay special attention to the placemaking efforts of displaced or marginalized groups—such as Black Americans during the Great Migrations, lgbtq+ communities, immigrants, and survivors of natural disasters such as the Dust Bowl and Hurricane Katrina—who continue to redefine American identity through place-making. To do this we will analyze fiction, journalism, and film, as well as paintings, photographs and other elements of visual culture. We may also spend some time looking at archival sources at Special Collections and in online databases. By the end of the semester, you’ll know how to interpret space and place for insights into race, ethnicity, gender, class, and generation in America.
AMST 4500	Fourth-Year Seminar in American Studies

	James Baldwin
Spring 2025 20950	002	SEM (3 Units)	Open	10 / 18 (10 / 18)	Marlon Ross	TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm	Dell 2 100
	This course focuses on the tumultuous life and diverse works of James Baldwin, whose intellectual influence is still palpable in today’s discussions on race, sexuality, social activism, national belonging, and exile. We’ll study major works from each of the genres that Baldwin engaged, including the novel, short story, drama, poetry, journalism, and the essay. Among the works to be examined are the novels Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and Just Above My Head; plays The Amen Corner and Blues for Mr. Charlie; selected short stories from Going to Meet the Man; essays from Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, and No Name in the Street; and the children’s book Little Man Little Man. In addition to Baldwin’s works, we’ll explore him as a “spokesman” of the Civil Rights movement, and how his high visibility as a public intellectual whose appearances on the new medium of television helped to shape his “celebrity” status. We’ll also address a some of Baldwin’s most crucial intellectual dialogues, including with Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Lorraine Hansberry, William F. Buckley, Eldridge Cleaver, Amiri Baraka, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Toni Morrison, and Tarell Alvin McCraney. We’ll also study films important to Baldwin’s legacy, including Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro and Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk. Assignments include: several short response essays, two critical essays, one team-led class discussion, and a term research paper.
AMST 5500	Graduate Topics in American Studies

	Material Culture: Theories and Methods
Spring 2025 14457	001	SEM (3 Units)	Permission	7 / 18 (7 / 18)	Lisa Goff	Th 5:00pm - 7:30pm	New Cabell Hall 111
	Email me if you'd like to join the class: lg6t@virginia.edu
	“Material culture” is the stuff of everyday life: landscapes and street corners, skyscrapers and log cabins, umbrellas and dining room tables and Picassos and Fitbits. Every thing in our lives, those we choose and those that are thrust upon us, conveys meaning—many meanings, in fact, from the intentions of the creator to the reception (and sometimes the subversion) of the consumer. Interpreting objects, buildings, and places provides insight into the values and beliefs of societies and cultures past and present. In this course we will study theories of material culture, many of which now intersect with literary criticism, from a variety of scholarly disciplines including anthropology, historical archaeology, art history, geography, environmental humanities, American Studies, and literary studies. And we will apply those theories to texts and artifacts of all kinds, from novels and short stories to movies, photographs, historic sites, visual art and culture, fashion and clothing, landscapes, and more. We will read theorists familiar to students of literature, such as thing theorist Bill Brown, but also folklorist Henry Glassie; archaeologist James Deetz; anthropologist Elizabeth Chin, and political theorist Jane Bennett. The class will prepare you to interpret things in ways that illuminate texts, and to read texts in ways that reveal and cultivate the meanings of things.
AMST 5559	New Course in American Studies

	Latinx Literature and the Americas
Spring 2025 19314	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	7 / 15 (7 / 15)	Carmen Lamas	Mo 3:30pm - 6:00pm	Lower West Oval Room 102
	n this course we will read works that situate the Latinx experience in an Americas context. We will read across such genres as the memoir, speculative fiction, romance, YA, graphic novels, historical fiction and poetry. Issues such as border crossing, immigration, and deportation will serve to approach and query Latinidad in/from its many historical, geographic, generic, aesthetic, and political manifestations. We will locate these works in the wider debates regarding engaged literature, language use, translation, and the interdisciplinary nature of Latinx and Latin American literary studies. No prior experience reading Latinx literature is necessary. Final Projects will be based on the student's professional needs and goals.
Anthropology
ANTH 2541	Topics in Linguistics

	French Creole Language Structures
Spring 2025 20497	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Closed	30 / 30	Nathan Wendte	TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am	Clinical Department Wing 2677
	In this course, we will be looking at a subset of creole languages—those whose vocabularies derive primarily from French—and examining their similarities and differences in terms of phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. In doing so, we will also touch on the unique historical circumstances that gave rise to each of these French creoles and what their use is like today. There will be a special emphasis on Louisiana Creole. You will also get a taste of some of the controversies that surround the study of creole languages. This course will give you a broad overview of French creole-speaking societies and enable you to describe language structures common to French creoles. Familiarity with French, though not required, will be useful.
ANTH 5590	Topics in Social and Cultural Anthropology

	A Social Theory of the Corporate Form
	A Social Theory of the Corporate Form
Spring 2025 19647	001	SEM (3 Units)	Permission	6 / 15	Ira Bashkow	Tu 4:00pm - 6:30pm	Brooks Hall 103
	What do Apple, Shell, and Walmart have in common with UVa? All are corporations. But most theories start and end with the business corporation, treating it as a legal entity formed for commerce, with social activity unimportant. But what if we turn this around and instead see corporation-making as a cultural form of social activity, used for diverse purposes? People made corporations in this sense as early as 8,000 years ago. We explore it by studies of archaeology, history, religion, economics, law, kinship, and culture.
	Topics in Social and Cultural Anthropology: Visual
Spring 2025 21056	002	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	7 / 7	Erin Moriarty	Fr 9:00am - 11:30am	Brooks Hall 312
	This course explores the intersection of anthropology and visual media, examining how photographs, films, art, and digital technologies are used to represent and study human cultures. Students will engage with core concepts of visual anthropology, including visual ethnography, representation, and the ethics of visual storytelling. The course offers a comprehensive view of how visual methods are applied in both academic and real-world contexts. Through case studies, film screenings, and expert guest lectures, students will explore the historical and contemporary uses of visual media in anthropology and related fields. Hands-on activities, off-site visits, and team-based projects will provide students with practical experience in visual anthropology methods. These include a mini visual ethnographic investigation on social media practices, visits to museums, expert guest lectures, and in-class movie screenings with discussion. By the end of the course, students will develop both a critical understanding of visual anthropology and the practical skills to conduct their own visual research, preparing them for future applications of visual media in academic, professional, and social contexts.
History of Art
ARTH 2559	New Course in History of Art

	Art and Visual Culture of the Caribbean
Spring 2025 21153	300	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	16 / 50	Tatiana Flores	MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm	Campbell Hall 160
	In 1492, Columbus’ encounter with the Caribbean changed the course of history. Crucial to the development of today’s global economy, the region has nonetheless suffered disregard across many spheres. This course places the Caribbean on center stage, covering the time span of the pre-Conquest to the present. Critical issues addressed include the Caribbean as the site of first contact between Europe and the New World, the visual culture of colonialism, the slave trade and plantation culture, the region as a crucible of modernity, revolutions and revolutionary thought, Black cultural expressions, and the representation of local identities. This interdisciplinary course considers a wide range of visual objects in dialogue with literature, film, performance, music, and intellectual history. The geographical areas addressed include island territories and the countries along the Caribbean basin and their diasporas.
American Sign Language
ASL 3410	Contemporary Disability Theory

Spring 2025 19849	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	18 / 28 (18 / 28)	Christopher Krentz	MoWeFr 12:00pm - 12:50pm	New Cabell Hall 389
	Over the last several decades, thinking about people with physical, cognitive, and sensory differences has moved from a mostly pathological medical-based understanding to a more rights-based framework, although both models persist and overlap. In this course we will consider how conceptions of disability have (or have not) changed, considering such matters as how a disability is defined; disability in American history; autism and neurodivergence; deaf culture and medical interventions; disability and race, gender, class, and sexual orientation; technology; and much more. The class will also consider how these theories relate to the depiction of disabled people in literature and film. Possible texts include Goffman’s Stigma; Wells’ “The Country of the Blind”; Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians; Desai’s Fasting, Feasting; Nussbaum’s Good Kings, Bad Kings; and the films Unrest and Crip Camp. The class will feature a range of learning strategies, from whole-class discussion to smaller-group discussion to short lectures. Requirements will include two papers, quizzes, and active informed participation.
Biology
BIOL 4260	Cellular Mechanisms

	Advances in Precision Drug Discovery & Repurposing
Website 11811	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Permission	52 / 40	Mike Wormington	TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm	Chemistry Bldg 206
	Course Description What are precision drugs? Aren't all drugs precise? Does "precision" equate to better efficacy? fewer side-effects? In simplest terms, a precision drug can be defined as" a drug that is most effective in a molecularly defined subset of patients and for which pretreatment molecular profiling is required for optimal patient selection." Precision drugs have been most exploited in oncology where a number of drugs have been developed that inhibit specific oncogene targets that drive specific cancers. Notable examples include Herceptin (HER2+ breast cancer), Gleevec (BCR-ABL chronic myelogenous leukemia), & Vemurafenib (BRAFV600E melanoma). Progress continues to made in precision oncology with the development of next gen drugs such as antibody drug conjugates, specific oncokinase inhibitors that bind covalently to their targets and novel pan-RAS inhibitors. However, significant advances have also been made in precision therapies that rescue or restore the activity of mutant genes that underlie diverse genetic diseases or chronic conditions such as cystic fibrosis (CFTR correctors & potentiators), hyperlipidemia (HMG CoA reductase inhibitors such as statins & bempedoic acid; PCSK9 blockers), lysosomal storage disorders (Galafold), and even drugs that target mutant mRNAs harboring nonsense mutations (Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy or Cystic Fibrosis Ataluren) or that alter pre-mRNA splicing to "skip" exons containing missense or nonsense mutations (Spinal Muscular Atrophy, Ridsiplam). However, in many cases, the "low hanging fruit" of validated targets for many therapeutic indications, especially oncology, have largely been "harvested" and the identification and validation for new precision targets typically takes years and the success rate of new drug development, both precision and nonprecision is alarmingly low...typically less than 20%. Hence drug repurposing provides an increasingly viable alternative with a significantly shorter time frame and greater likelihood of success. Repurposing and repositioning are often used interchangeably, but repurposing most commonly refers to drugs successfully designed and approved to treat one disease & still do so, but are being tested to treat a different one. Their repurposed mechanism of action and target may or may not be the same as for their original therapeutic use. For example, the repurposing of statins (hyperlipidemia) and metformin (type II diabetes) to treat various cancers, or ozempic (type II diabetes) to promote weight loss and mitigate cardiovascular disease. Repositioning (also referred to as recycling) most commonly refers to drugs taht were initially designed & successfully used to treat one disease, but were shelved for any of several reasons after their initial approval (e.g., lack of efficacy, unanticipated side effects or commercial failure) For example, thalidomide that was initially used to treat morning sickness during pregnancy, but which caused severe birth defects, has been repurposed to treat various cancers. Course Objectives This course will use a case study approach to examine several paradigms of precision drug discovery and repurposing, as well as to investigate new examples of each under development. Assigned reading will come from current review articles and primary research papers. A major objective of this course will be to provide you with an opportunity, to learn how to critically read, interpret, and present in a collaborative, discussion-based format. 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.
Civil Engineering
CE 4500	Special Topics in Civil Engineering

	Artificial Intelligence for Engineers
Website 19612	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	4 / 5 (13 / 30)	Leo Liu	Mo 6:10pm - 9:10pm	Mechanical Engr Bldg 214
	This course aims to provide Artificial Intelligence (AI) knowledge for general engineering students so that they can easily understand and perform complementary AI research and innovations. Distinct from general AI or machine learning courses, this course will start with AI basic concepts, history, applications, and tools. Then, the most classic and popular machine learning techniques in supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning will be introduced. Each topic consists of a lecture to explain theories and algorithms and a computer lab for coding, implementing, or/and applying typical methods. This course is designed by people out of computer science for students who are not majoring in computer science.
Classics
CLAS 2559	New Course in Classics

	Classical Jokes for Modern Folks: Aristophanes
Spring 2025 19279	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	22 / 25	David Williams	TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm	Physics Bldg 218
	The comedies of the Athenian playwright Aristophanes continue to entertain, perplex, enlighten, and offend readers some 2,400 years after their initial productions. Staged during one of the most dynamic and influential periods in western history––a period that encompassed the activity and execution of Socrates, the innovative tragedies of Euripides, and the paradigmatic clash between Athens and Sparta––his plays offer a unique perspective on these vibrant and turbulent times. In this course we will read Aristophanes (in English) as a comic playwright, as a historical source, and as an insightful thinker in his own right. We will engage in historically grounded readings of some of the greatest comic dramas ever produced in order to establish a foundation for approaching a number of topics that remain vital in our contemporary world. These will include the nature of democracy and demagoguery, the problem of intergenerational strife, the value of scientific research, the purpose and power of poetry, and the relationship between satire and politics. In short, we will consider how one great comedian’s hilarious and thoughtful jokes about the most important issues of his day might still speak to those of ours. Students will come away from the course with: • an awareness of the formal features, themes, and comic techniques of Aristophanic comedy • an appreciation of the role of theater and the dramatic festivals in Athenian life • knowledge of the major political and cultural events of the period of the Peloponnesian War (~431 – ~404 BCE) • a nuanced understanding of the value of Aristophanic comedy as a historical source • critical tools for analyzing and thinking about the cultural and political role of comedy in the contemporary world Assessments may include: composing an original comic scene on the model of Aristophanes, writing a critical review of an Aristophanic play, analyzing the humor of a piece of modern comedy, and/or participating in student-led debates.
Commerce
COMM 4560	Topics in Management

	Doing Business in China
	Navigating the cross-cultural challenges
Spring 2025 17661	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	20 / 25	Mark Metcalf	Mo 3:30pm - 6:15pm	Robertson Hall 260
	Non-Commerce 4th-year students may register with the instructor's permission.
	Doing Business in China (“DBi China”) is an introduction to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) cultural anthropological, sociological, and political features that contribute to the nation’s distinctive business practices. The goal of the course is for students to develop an awareness of and appreciation for the breadth of factors that influence Chinese business practices. The course will explore the origins and significance of interpersonal factors such as relationships (guanxi), situational ethics, indirection, and “face” in business interactions and negotiations. Such social norms have deep historical roots in China and have a profound impact on Chinese social relationships, but are frequently sources of frustration (or worse) for non-Chinese people doing business in the PRC. Understanding how and why such factors are employed in Chinese society will help to better identify and appropriately respond to them. We will also discuss historical Confucianism and Daoism, traditional philosophies that continue to influence Chinese society. Case studies will be used throughout the course to provide noteworthy examples of Chinese business practices. For additional context, we will also discuss relevant PRC views regarding history, geography, governance, and global standing; perspectives that greatly influence both domestic and international policy and can impact the business environment. Particular attention will be given to the pervasive and growing influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on PRC society and China’s growing international activities (e.g., the Belt and Road Initiative [BRI]). The course will be conducted as a seminar and students will be expected to actively participate in classroom discussions. Approximately 100 pages of reading will be assigned each week. Three 4-page (1000-word) papers that analyze various practical aspects (i.e., case studies) of business practices will be assigned. The final assignment will be a team project (class presentation & 3000-word-paper) that applies concepts discussed throughout the semester to analyze and respond to a business case that typifies the cross-cultural challenges of doing business in China.
Creole
CREO 1020	Elementary Creole II

Spring 2025 12897	001	WKS (3 Units)	Open	2 / 10	Karen James	MoWeFr 10:15am - 11:15am	TBA
	Haitian Creole—kreyol ayisyen—is spoken by 10 to 11 million people worldwide, most of whom live in Haiti. Learn Haitian Creole and capture the heartbeat of the country via its beautiful and colorful proverbs. The CREO (Haitian Creole) courses are taught online in Zoom by Professor Jacques Pierre (Duke University) through the UVA-Duke-Vanderbilt Partnership for Less Commonly Taught Languages. UVA students enroll in CREO 1020 in SIS. Questions about the Creole curriculum may be directed to Prof. Pierre at Duke (jacques.pierre@duke.edu), and other questions may be directed to Prof. Karen James (ksj7c@virginia.edu) in the French Department.
CREO 2020	Intermediate Creole II

Spring 2025 12701	001	WKS (3 Units)	Open	2 / 10	Karen James	MoWeFr 12:00pm - 12:50pm	TBA
	Haitian Creole -kreyol ayisyen -is spoken by 10 to 11 million people worldwide, most of whom live in Haiti. Learn Haitian Creole and capture the heartbeat of the country via its beautiful and colorful proverbs. The CREO (Haitian Creole) courses are taught by Professor Jacques Pierre (Duke University) through the UVA-Duke-Vanderbilt Partnership for Less Commonly Taught Languages. UVA students enroll in CREO 2020 in SIS. Questions about the Creole curriculum may be directed to Prof. Pierre at Duke (jacques.pierre@duke.edu), and other questions may be directed to Prof. Karen James (ksj7c@virginia.edu) in the French Department.
Computer Science
CS 2501	Special Topics in Computer Science

	Preparing for Undergraduate Research
	Preparing for Undergraduate Research
Spring 2025 21006	001	Lecture (1 Units)	Permission	70 / 80	Briana Morrison	We 5:00pm - 5:50pm	Olsson Hall 009
	This course is designed for first through third year CS students who have not participated in undergraduate research, but want to. This course will prepare you with the skills and knowledge to be a contributor to a research lab on day one. We will cover topics such as how to read a research paper, what is a literature review, what is a research question, what is a research proposal, experiments in CS, overview of research methods, hypothesis testing, peer review, and research ethics.
CS 4414	Operating Systems

	From Boot to DOOM
Website 14983	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	44 / 55 (59 / 75)	Felix Lin	TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm	Olsson Hall 011
	A guided journey starting from bare-metal hardware to a fully functional OS capable of running multiple applications, including Mario and DOOM, on a multicore processor.
	This course is a "guided tour". In one semester, it takes students, who have basic knowledge of the computer software/hardware stack, on the journey of building a modern operating system. Building an OS can be a tough process, and this course is designed to give students continuous rewards -- both intellectually and emotionally -- just as video games or theme parks do. This course will start from bare-metal hardware ("boot") and incrementally build more features, enable more applications, and eventually run a full-fledged OS, which can run multiple applications ("DOOM") and on a multicore processor.
CS 4501	Special Topics in Computer Science

	Analyzing Online Behavior for Public Health
Website 20647	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	33 / 40 (61 / 80)	Henry Kautz	MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm	Mechanical Engr Bldg 341
	People’s online behavior contains signals about their physical and mental health. This course will explore research on using data from users’ interactions with Twitter/X, Google Search, YouTube and other online platforms for tasks ranging from identifying people suffering from anxiety disorder to tracking down restaurants that are sources of food poisoning. We will also read papers on both sides of the ongoing
CS 6501	Special Topics in Computer Science

	CPU/GPU Memory Systems and Near-Data Processing
	Special Topics in Computer Architecture: CPU/GPU Memory Systems and Near-Data Processing
Website 16074	004	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	13 / 30 (15 / 38)	Kevin Skadron	TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm	Rice Hall 340
	Prereq: CS 3130 or similar
	This course will explore the design and optimization of processor memory and storage system, and advanced topics such as emerging technologies and near-data processing.
	Analyzing Online Behavior for Public Health
Website 19572	007	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	28 / 40 (61 / 80)	Henry Kautz	MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm	Mechanical Engr Bldg 341
	People’s online behavior contains signals about their physical and mental health. This course will explore research on using data from users’ interactions with Twitter/X, Google Search, YouTube and other online platforms for tasks ranging from identifying people suffering from anxiety disorder to tracking down restaurants that are sources of food poisoning. We will also read papers on both sides of the ongoing debate about whether social media should be restricted because of potential harm to children or adults.
	Machine Learning in Systems Security
	Machine Learning in Systems Security
Spring 2025 19573	008	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	18 / 38	Wajih Ul Hassan	TuTh 5:00pm - 6:15pm	Rice Hall 340
	The course kicks off with an in-depth understanding of machine learning fundamentals, systems security, and deep learning principles. We will then explore how machine learning algorithms can be leveraged to address prevalent systems security issues, such as malware analysis/detection, spam filtering, anomaly detection, incident response, and credit card fraud prevention. Additionally, we will delve into complex areas, such as adversarial and backdoor attacks on machine learning systems and discuss the security aspects of large language models like ChatGPT.
	Neural Networks
Website 19574	009	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	39 / 45	Hadi Daneshmand	MoWe 11:00am - 12:15pm	Olsson Hall 018
	In this course, we will delve into the mechanisms of neural networks through a combination of experimental observations and theoretical analyses. Specifically, we will examine significant experimental findings that have shaped theoretical advancements in machine learning and present the theoretical frameworks that explain these observations.
	Learning in Robotics
	Advanced mathematical principles for mastering Perception, Planning, and Control in Robotics.
Website 16264	012	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	20 / 38	Madhur Behl	MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm	Rice Hall 340
	Ever attempted to decipher a robotics paper from renowned conferences like ICRA, IROS, or RSS, only to be deterred by complex math? This course is your solution. Designed to equip you for robotics research, we’ll delve deep into its mathematical core at a graduate level. We will cover the mathematical foundations of robotics in this graduate-level course. We will rigorously explore the three pillars of robotics: perception, planning, and control. We’ll commence with theoretical discussions on state estimation methods, including the Kalman Filter, EKF, UKF, and Particle Filters, progress to mapping and visual odometry, and then navigate the intricacies of dynamic programming, control, and planning methods such as LQR and MDPs. Our journey will culminate in reinforcement learning models for robotics, like policy gradients and Q-learning, and specialized topics like foundation models for robotics. To ensure practical application, students will undertake programming assignments addressing real-world robotics challenges. While primarily for graduate students, undergraduates may enroll with the instructor’s approval.
Democracy Initiative
DEM 5500	Topics in the History & Principles of Democracy

	Sound & Democracy
Spring 2025 21025	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	6 / 15	Nomi Dave+1	Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm	Contact Department
	How do sound and listening shape democracy? Who listens? Who has a voice? This interdisciplinary seminar will consider the role of vocal and sonic practices, audio technologies, and ways of listening in politics and democratic process. We will address topics such as defamation and free speech, rap lyrics as criminal evidence, audio live streaming of Supreme Court hearings, street protest and noise regulation, and the vocal politics of race and gender. Our discussions will draw from historical and contemporary case-studies, and across socio-legal studies, politics, music and sound studies, anthropology, and philosophy. Students will engage directly with the Sound Justice Lab. No musical experience is necessary.
Drama
DRAM 1220	Art of the Creature

Spring 2025 19608	001	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	20 / 20	Anne Temmink	Th 9:30am - 12:00pm	Helms Theatre
	This hands-on class will introduce students to the tools, techniques, and problem-solving of building creature puppets. Mentored by professional creature artists, students will explore smaller prototypes: fabricating skin textures and patterns, structures, material experiments, and mechanisms. These will culminate with a wearable creature piece or puppet for the Stan Winston and Steven Warner Festival of the Moving Creature at the end of the semester. We will work both individually and collectively in hands-on exploration through making.
DRAM 3030	Dramaturgy

Website 19659	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	6 / 30	Yunina Barbour-Payne	TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am	Drama Education Bldg 217
	This course offers an immersive exploration into the art of dramaturgy through the lens of Black Feminist playmaking. The guiding question for this course is: What is the role of the dramaturge in the creative process, the impact of cultural heritage on storytelling, and strategies for fostering inclusive dialogue in the designer's room, the rehearsal room, and in the afterlife of performance? Students will engage deeply with a diverse array of storytelling in performance, examining the historical and cultural contexts that shape theater in a given era. Through close reading, critical analysis, and project-based learning, participants will develop the skills necessary to support playwrights and directors, focusing on the unique narratives and aesthetics of Black voices in theater.
DRAM 4592	Special Topics in Drama

	Queer Performance
	Queer Performance
Spring 2025 14298	001	SEM (1 - 3 Units)	Permission	9 / 20	Katelyn Wood	TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm	Drama Education Bldg 217
	This seminar will examine queer performance and its many meanings in the contemporary United States. We will study a wide range of queer-identifying artists and artists with significant queer fan bases. By analyzing these artists' approaches to theatre, performance art, music, digital media, and performance in everyday life, we'll ask: How is performance central to queer joy, community building, protest, and survival? How do queer performance practices intersect with race, class, health, age, and citizenship? We will also read foundational texts in queer studies and engage in various learning activities, such as writing prompts, group discussion, creative practice, and improvisation.
Electrical and Computer Engineering
ECE 3502	Special Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering

	Third-Year Design Experience
	PCB Design
Spring 2025 19579	003	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	29 / 30	Adam Barnes	TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm	Mechanical Engr Bldg 339
	Practical PCB layout and design. Students will design circuits for a motor driver and LCD display to interface with a microcontroller, layout the PCB for their designs, and test the manufactured PCBs. This class is meant to prepare students for their Capstone class. Prerequisite: ECE2600, Pre/Co-requisite: ECE3430
ECE 4502	Special Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering

	Digital Control Techniques for Robotic Systems
Spring 2025 20845	004	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	4 / 15 (11 / 35)	Gang Tao	TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm	Thornton Hall D115
	In this senior and graduate course of Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering, students are provided the opportunities to have a comprehensive study of three main components of digital control systems: digital control system theory, control design and analysis methods, and digital control simulation techniques, through the combined learning of theory and algorithms and training with digital control system Matlab implementations. This course is designed to bring both control system theory and implementation techniques to students, with the help of DC motor and robot system examples. This course covers the fundamental concepts and theorems of signal conversions, signal sampling and holding processes, z-transforms and applications, transfer functions and state-space models of digital control systems, system stability and controllability, and digital PID control and pole placement control; the basic techniques of modeling and analysis of DC motor and robot manipulator systems; and the main digital control system components and their functions and simulation using Matlab implementations.
ECE 5502	Special Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering

	Photovoltaics
Website 16334	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	4 / 10 (12 / 20)	Mool Gupta	TuTh 5:00pm - 6:15pm	Thornton Hall D115
	Solar energy plays an important role in the growth of renewable energy, which will have an important impact on society in meeting its energy needs and improving environmental quality. This course provides an introduction to Photovoltaics and solar energy generation and gives an overview of the subject. The course will describe the operation of photovoltaic cells and efficiency improvements, industrial processes, solar thermal power generation, thin films, and nanomaterials for photovoltaics and future technologies. Undergraduate students are welcome.
ECE 6502	Special Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering

	Digital Control Techniques for Robotic Systems
Spring 2025 20846	007	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	7 / 20 (11 / 35)	Gang Tao	TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm	Thornton Hall D115
	In this senior and graduate course of Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering, students are provided the opportunities to have a comprehensive study of three main components of digital control systems: digital control system theory, control design and analysis methods, and digital control simulation techniques, through the combined learning of theory and algorithms and training with digital control system Matlab implementations. This course is designed to bring both control system theory and implementation techniques to students, with the help of DC motor and robot system examples. This course covers the fundamental concepts and theorems of signal conversions, signal sampling and holding processes, z-transforms and applications, transfer functions and state-space models of digital control systems, system stability and controllability, and digital PID control and pole placement control; the basic techniques of modeling and analysis of DC motor and robot manipulator systems; and the main digital control system components and their functions and simulation using Matlab implementations. Some advanced study of control design and analysis techniques will be added for students in the graduate section in their assignments, to given them the opportunity to learn some higher level materials.
Creative Writing
ENCW 3310	Intermediate Poetry Writing I

Spring 2025 14353	001	WKS (3 Units)	Permission	12 / 12	Lisa Spaar	Tu 11:00am - 1:30pm	Bryan Hall 233
	Intermediate Poetry Writing: Myths of Adolescence & the Literary Imagination Our focus for this writing workshop will be the Crucible of Becoming: Myths of Adolescence & the Literary Imagination. Human development across cultures and time inevitably involves some version or experience of adolescence, a liminal and archetypal territory between childhood and adulthood characterized by exploration, growth, intense feeling, conflict, becoming, power play, transgression, anxiety, and pain. No wonder, then, that writers have been drawn to this difficult, complex period, plundering its emotional dynamics and mythologizing its extremities in novels, short fiction, poems, and plays. In this course, we will plumb notions of adolescence and explore irs versions of it in a variety of ways. The crucial question will not be “What is adolescence?” but rather, “How has adolescence been perceived, remembered, imagined?” As we attempt to articulate the significance of our own accountings of adolescence, we may hope to confront ways in which the young (ourselves) embody our most profound vulnerabilities and possibilities. As we explore this period in poetry, we will examine our own crucible of becoming, perhaps particularly as it relates to the adventure and journey of the University experience. Admission is by permission of the instructor. Please contact Professor Spaar at LRS9E@virginia.edu to indicate your interest in the workshop.
	Revolutionary Poetics
Spring 2025 14354	002	WKS (3 Units)	Permission	9 / 12	Brian Teare	MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm	New Cabell Hall 395
	Instructor Permission is required for enrollment in this class: please request enrollment through SIS and email a writing sample of 4-5 poems with a cover sheet including your name, year, email address, major, prior workshop experience, and other workshops to which you are submitting. Submit your application IN A SINGLE DOCUMENT to Prof. Teare at bt5ps@virginia.edu. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis once registration opens. For full consideration, email your application as soon as possible.
	A revolutionary poetics involves two crucial gestures: turning away from, and turning toward. Poets engaged in individual and/or collective revolution tend to turn away from oppressive ideologies and dead forms and turn toward liberatory expression and living language. For such poets, liberatory forms are not prescribed but discovered, often shaped in response to historical context and personal identity and experience. But how does their work turn away from inherited harms and turn toward alternatives that acknowledge injustice without replicating it, fashioning instead new ways of relating to each other through poetic language and forms? This course will introduce us to contemporary poets whose revolutionary work addresses the collective and personal stakes of writing about climate crisis, religious trauma, war, migration, neurodiversity, gender transition, structural antiblackness, and addiction. The reading component of this course will include books by Oliver Baez Bendorf, H. G. Dierdorff, Rea Visiting Poet Airea D. Matthews, Sahar Muradi, and Adam Wolfond. The workshop component of this course will begin with short poems written in response to prompts derived from our reading. These prompts will be designed to help us think about the flexible, powerful relationship between cultural critique and poetic form, between revolution and the literal letter. The long workshop portion of the course will offer each of us the chance to expand upon those poems in longer manuscripts. Throughout the semester, in both critical discussions and workshops, we’ll discuss the conceptual, political, and poetic aspirations of the work we read, and explore the possibilities of coming together as poets during a time of global flux.
ENCW 3610	Intermediate Fiction Writing

Spring 2025 14357	002	WKS (3 Units)	Permission	11 / 12	Micheline Marcom	We 4:00pm - 6:30pm	Bryan Hall 233
	Instructor permission required.
	Please email me 3-4 pages of creative work + 1 paragraph about your interest in the class to mam5du@virginia.edu
ENCW 4550	Topics in Literary Prose

	Prose Between Fiction and "Non"
	Imagining • Remembering • Finding
Spring 2025 20680	002	SEM (3 Units)	Permission	14 / 12	Jane Alison	We 2:00pm - 4:30pm	Dawson's Row 1
	A seminar for reader-writers who want to explore narrative that blurs the so-called line between fiction and non: autofiction, historical fiction, creative nonfiction, memoir, speculative essay . . . We’ll read specimens of assorted types and lengths—from micro-essay to novel—and see how writers have drawn both energy and form from history, memory, other lives, other stories, facts themselves. Works might include Alvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires, Anna Garreta’s Not One Day, Fleur Jaeggy’s These Possible Lives, Justin Torres’s We the Animals or Blackouts, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion or Happening, Edna O’Brien’s Night, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay, as well as stories and essays by John Keene, Eliot Weinberger, Maria Gainza, and many others. In addition to weekly reading, you’ll play with regular exercises that let you draw upon history or memory or other found material, and you’ll produce a final critical-creative project. Instructor permission required, but all eager readers are welcome to apply. If you’re NOT in the APLP, send me a note (jas2ad) saying what draws you to this class.
ENCW 4810	Advanced Fiction Writing I

	WRITING FROM, TOWARD, INTO, AGAINST —
Spring 2025 20494	001	WKS (3 Units)	Permission	13 / 12	Jane Alison	Fr 11:00am - 1:30pm	Dawson's Row 1
	A class for imaginative and open-minded students who want to explore ways of crafting literary fiction that converses with—or against—other narratives, documents, images, ideas. This will be a largely generative workshop: each week I’ll give you an item with which to engage imaginatively. This entity could be a painting, a scientific discovery, a snip of found dialogue, a photograph of a place, an animal, a piece of furniture, a myth, someone else’s story . . . You’ll write short pieces each week that spring from or against these items, and you’ll gradually develop either a single long project from one of these pieces or create a collage of many: this will be up to you. Along the way, we will also read short and long narratives that likewise speak to or from other documents or texts or paintings or objects . . . Expect to read widely, write lots, and, I hope, find yourself writing about things you never knew intrigued you. INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION REQUIRED. Unless you are in the APLP, please send me (at jas2ad) a note saying what appeals to you about this course, together with a brief (10-page) sample of your creative writing. BE SURE TO APPLY VIA SIS, TOO.
ENCW 4820	Poetry Program Poetics

	ENCW 4820: Poetry Program Poetics
Spring 2025 13639	001	SEM (3 Units)	Permission	10 / 12	Lisa Spaar	We 1:00pm - 3:30pm	Bryan Hall 233
	APPW Poetics Seminar: The Contemporary American Lyric Sequence This seminar for practicing writers will focus on the lyric sequence in American poetry written since 1980. We will begin by exploring pointed gatherings of poems by early American innovators of the lyric sequence—Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Melvin Tolson—but the focus of the course will be on contemporary American poets working in series, both within and across embodiment as a book, including series and sequences by Tom Andrews, Lucie Brock-Broido, Suzanne Buffam, Anne Carson, Lucille Clifton, Safiya Elhillo, Claudia Emerson, Shane McCrae, Harryette Mullen, Arthur Sze, Kevin Young, and others. As we read, we will examine ways in which these contemporary sequences are in conversation with poets working in other cultures, traditions, and lyric modes, both mainstream and experimental. What poems had to have been written in order for these late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century lyric sequences to exist? How has the gestalt of the fragment in modernism and post-modernism contributed to the evolution/devolution of the contemporary lyric sequence? What attracts poets to serial thinking? Is there a poetics of the lyrical sequence? What various formal ruses do poets working in series and sequences deploy and what might writers learn from them? We may have the pleasure of hearing from visitors and make forays into the Fralin Museum of Art and Special collections from time to time, as well. Course work will involve a creative project: the writing of a poetic sequence with accompanying poetics statement. Preference is given to students in the Area Programs in Poetry and Prose Writing, but others are most welcome to apply by contacting Professor Spaar at LRS9E@virginia.edu.
ENCW 4830	Advanced Poetry Writing I

	Instructor permission required.
Spring 2025 14360	001	WKS (3 Units)	Permission	12 / 12	Rita Dove	Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm	Bryan Hall 233
	This workshop is for advanced undergraduate 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. Students will be expected to write and revise six to eight poems, to participate in class discussion and offer detailed notes in response to other students’ work, to complete two assignments generated by writing prompts, to attend and provide a written response to one poetry reading (in person or virtual), to turn in close-reading reviews of two assigned poetry books, and to complete one “wild card” assignment. Instructor Permission is required for enrollment in this class: please apply for instructor permission through SIS. APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS: a writing sample of 4-5 poems with a cover sheet including your name, year, email address, major, prior workshop experience and grade, and other workshops to which you are submitting. Submit your application IN A SINGLE DOCUMENT to Prof. Dove at rfd4b@virginia.edu. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis once registration opens. For full consideration, email your application as soon as possible. The instructor will let all applicants know of their acceptance status before spring classes begin.
ENCW 4920	Poetry Program Capstone

Spring 2025 13576	001	SEM (3 Units)	Permission	10 / 15	Brian Teare	Mo 6:00pm - 8:30pm	New Cabell Hall 044
	For graduating APPW students only. Please request enrollment through SIS.
	The Capstone offers APPW students time and pedagogical space to think beyond the realization of single poems toward the realization of a book-length poetry manuscript. With support from the APPW Director, a graduate student mentor, and most importantly from our APPW colleagues, each of us will gather together a draft collection of our poems for a semester of intensive collaborative editorial work that will encourage us to become more deeply aware of our poetic ambitions and evolving aesthetics. In conversation with editorial feedback, each of us will organize and revise our existing poems and write new work in order to fully realize what poet and critic Natasha Sajé calls the “dynamic design” of our first manuscripts. The course schedule will begin with weekly discussion of assigned readings, followed by collaborative editorial sessions of our Capstone Project drafts. This means that, for the first three quarters of the semester, we will meet as a group, but the latter quarter of the semester will largely consist of independent work and one-on-one meetings. After mid-term, each of us will be assigned a graduate student mentor who will offer the Capstone Project draft a close reading. After this, each of us will meet with the Director to discuss the feedback and devise a final revision strategy. The course will culminate in our Capstone Projects – revised, polished manuscripts of the poetry only we could write – which we will celebrate together at the APPW graduation reading.
ENCW 7310	MFA Poetry Workshop

Spring 2025 14361	001	WKS (3 Units)	Open	8 / 10	Rita Dove	Mo 2:00pm - 4:30pm	Bryan Hall 233
	In this graduate-level workshop, designed for MFA poets in the first two years of the program, students will continue developing their own writing practices while exploring other compositional and critical techniques. We’ll devote most class sessions to reviewing peer-generated poetry, but we’ll also discuss published works by established writers and other aspects of the creative process. In addition, we will examine what it means to “manage” a writer’s life, with particular emphasis on writing routines as well as exploring ways to probe, massage and coax poems into revealing their secrets. Students should be prepared to participate energetically in group critique sessions in addition to polishing their own writing. All students will be required to complete one “wild card” assignment; both first and second-year MFA students will assemble a portfolio of poetry at semester's end.
English-Literature
ENGL 1500	Masterworks of Literature

	Vikings: Myths and Sagas
Spring 2025 19922	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	43 / 60	Stephen Hopkins	TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm	Gibson Hall 211
	Fulfills the AIP req.
	This course introduces students to Old Norse mythology and cosmology, and their adaptation into later medieval prose sagas, such as Egil's Saga, Gunnlaug's Saga, and more. We will begin with Prose and Poetic Eddas, examining their mythic poems and learning essential historical and cultural contexts necessary to appreciate these bodies of myth and legend. We will then consider how the conversion to Christianity (in the summer of 999) changed Iceland’s literary landscape. Yet the heathen myths survived the advent of this new faith, and even thrived. In the back half of the course, we will focus on texts composed well within the Christian era to investigate the various ways in which medieval Icelanders reckoned with the heathen past of their ancestors while working out their own identity in verse and prose. This course fulfills the AIP requirement.
ENGL 2500	Introduction to Literary Studies

	Introduction to Literary Studies
Spring 2025 19940	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	19 / 20	Victor Luftig	TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm	New Cabell Hall 291
	We will read poems, plays, fiction, and essays in ways meant to introduce the study of literature at the college level: we’ll focus on how these types of writing work, on what we get from reading them carefully, and on what good and harm they may do in the world. The texts will come from a wide range of times and places, including works by authors such as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hanbery, Jamaica Kincaid, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Li-Young Lee, and Chimamanda Adichie; we will also attend a readings and two plays, one on Grounds and the other at the American Shakespeare Center. The course is meant to serve those who are interested in improving their reading and writing, for whatever reason, who seek an introductory humanities course, and/or who may wish subsequently to major in English. We’ll discuss the works in class, and there will be in class-quizzes, three papers, and a final exam.
ENGL 2502	Masterpieces of English Literature

	Four Books, Four Centuries, Four Forms
	King Lear, Emma, The Waste Land, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Spring 2025 19915	001	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	20 / 20	John O'Brien	MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm	The Rotunda Room 150
	ENGL 2502: Masterpieces of English Literature MW 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 115 Topic: Four Books, Four Centuries, Four Forms. In this course, we will read four different works produced between 1600 and 2000, each of which is in a radically different form: William Shakespeare’s play King Lear, Jane Austen’s novel Emma, T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, and Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Each of these works is a masterpiece of its kind, an influence to many who followed it, and a work about which many critics have had things to say. They’re all incredibly pleasurable and rewarding as well. We’ll use these masterpieces to explore the kinds of ways that you can approach literary and filmic texts. The course will fulfill the second writing requirement and the AIP Disciplines requirement, and is also a prerequisite for the English major.
	Locating Jane. Or, Putting Austen in her Place
Spring 2025 19929	002	SEM (3 Units)	Open	18 / 20	Alison Hurley	TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am	Shannon House 119
	Jane Austen is everywhere – at movie theaters, on coffee mugs, in myriad sequels, parodies, and re-imaginings of her novels. How is it that an author whose works are so deeply embedded in her own time remains a contemporary phenomenon? How is it that novels depicting a remarkably thin slice of a defunct society enjoy such broad appeal? In this course we will try to answer these questions by “putting Austen in her place.” We will carefully situate Austen’s novels within a number of specific but overlapping interpretive terrains – literary, political, intellectual, and gendered. By deeply contextualizing Austen, I believe we will be in a better position to assess her significance in both her world and in our own. In order to perform this work we will develop the skills necessary for reading and writing effectively about texts. Specifically, we will aspire to read closely, write precisely, argue persuasively, ask good questions, employ strong evidence, and take interpretive risks. We will be reading Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion. This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
	Monsters and Marvels in Medieval Literature
	Click the blue number to the left for a detailed course description.
Spring 2025 20886	003	SEM (3 Units)	Open	19 / 20	Viola Cozzio	TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm	Shannon House 119
	In this course, we will see how medieval literature horrifies, thrills, and dazzles its readers from the medieval period to the present day. We'll read both poetry and prose (most in modern English translation, though we’ll try our hand at a few short passages in older forms of the English language) and find out how monsters and the sensations of fear and wonder helped medieval readers make sense of the world – and how they might do the same for us. Tentative list of readings: Excerpts from Beowulf, Andreas, the Morte Darthur, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; shorter works like the head-chopping Old English Judith, Marie de France’s werewolf story Bisclavret, and Sir Orfeo’s adventures in the fairy kingdom. Requirements for this course: regular attendance and participation in discussion, occasional discussion board posts, four 3-4 page papers, and a 4-5 page revision of one of these shorter papers. This course satisfies the second writing requirement.
ENGL 2506	Studies in Poetry

	Introduction to Poetry
	Reading Poems
Spring 2025 19908	001	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	20 / 20	Henrietta Hadley	TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm	Nau Hall 241
	In this class we'll be reading and talking about poems of many kinds. Reading a poem, we'll ask: What makes it tick? What makes it stop? How does it move us, or not? In addition to individual poems, we'll read books of contemporary poetry by Carl Phillips, Don Mee Choi, Terrance Hayes, Ilya Kaminsky, and Mary Ruefle. For a prose guide through the various terrain of English-language poems we'll have Don't Read Poetry by Stephanie Burt. Over the course of the semester, students will draft, revise, and present a "reader's manual" for a poet of their choice. This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
	Introduction to Poetry
Spring 2025 19947	002	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	18 / 18	Taylor Schey	TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm	Dell 1 104
	You’re likely practiced at comprehending the meaning of any text that you read. But how does language create meaning in the first place? How can a single word generate multiple, even conflicting, significations? How do various arrangements of sounds move us to tears, open new worlds, instigate actions, and give us pleasure? This course offers an introduction to poetry, the only form of literature that requires us to confront these questions head on. Through learning how to engage carefully with the subtleties and formal elements of poetic language (including meter, rhyme, figure, diction, sound, and syntax), you’ll hone your skills of close reading and critical thinking and learn how to use them beyond the classroom. Plus, through assignments both analytical and creative, you’ll become a stronger writer. Our readings will span from the early modern period to the present, covering an array of poetic styles, forms, and genres as well as a wide range of authors, from William Shakespeare and John Keats to M. NourbeSe Philip and Layli Long Soldier. All students are welcome, and no prior knowledge is expected. This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
	Hybrid Poetry
Spring 2025 19989	003	SEM (3 Units)	Open	17 / 20	Jeddie Sophronius	MoWeFr 9:00am - 9:50am	Kerchof Hall 317
	Hybrid Poetry When an experience defies the confines of a single genre, it opens up a world of hybridity. In this course, we will examine hybrid poetry collections that blend verse, prose, drama, visual art, collage, and documentation to confront systemic oppression and the histories of war; poems whose forms challenge dominant narratives while also celebrating joy and kinship. From Tina Chang's Hybrida to Cynthia Dewi Oka's A Tinderbox in Three Acts, we will study the work of contemporary poets who employ cross-genre and interdisciplinary methods to transform their practices into acts of survival. This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
ENGL 2507	Studies in Drama

	Tragedy and Transgression
	Click blue number to the left for full course description.
Spring 2025 19931	001	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	16 / 0	Clare Kinney	TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm	New Cabell Hall 056
	Passion, murder, mayhem: stepping beyond all norms, moving into the terrible unknown.
	To transgress is literally to “step across”; at the core of tragic drama is somebody’s movement beyond and outside laws and cultural norms. This movement into the terrible unknown is what we’ll be focusing upon in this course—there’ll be passion, mayhem, and a very high body count. What new visions, what new experiences do tragic protagonists acquire as a result of going “beyond the pale”? What kind of language can claw significance from the extreme edge of suffering? What exactly is “tragic knowledge”? And why, for so many hundreds of years, have audiences (and actors!) been fascinated by the spectacle of other people’s agony? We’ll address all of these questions (and many more) as we read works spanning over two millennia. Tentative Reading List: (all non-English works will be read in translation!): Sophocles, Oedipus the King and Antigone; Euripides, Medea; Shakespeare, Macbeth; Akira Kurosowa, Throne of Blood; Henrik Ibsen Hedda Gabler; Athol Fugard, The Island; Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman; Martin McDonagh, The Pillowman; Caryl Churchill, A Number. Requirements: Regular attendance and active participation in discussion; shorter and longer writing assignments together totaling 20 pages; a final exam. This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
ENGL 2508	Studies in Fiction

	The Historical Novel
Spring 2025 19912	001	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	18 / 18	Debjani Ganguly	TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm	New Cabell Hall 064
	ENGL 2508 Seminar course in Modern and Contemporary Literatures THE HISTORICAL NOVEL Instructor: Prof Debjani Ganguly Tue-Thu: 2:00-3:15pm Venue: New Cabell 064 Office Hours: Tue 12:00-1:00pm; Wed12:00-1:00pm, Bryan Hall 106 This course will explore the relationship between literature and history. Specifically, we will focus on the emergence of the historical novel in early nineteenth century Britain and trace its global evolution into the twenty-first century. Historical fiction and films have proliferated in recent years. Can any novel set against a recognizable historical backdrop be considered a historical novel? How factual and realistic do historical novels need to be, and how do they navigate the relationship between individual and collective destinies? What specific modes of characterization do such novels call for? How are ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ recalibrated in counter-factual historical novels? The seminar will explore these questions by focusing on five novels that bring alive key revolutionary moments in modern history. They are Walter Scott’s Waverley (the Jacobite Revolution in Scotland in 1745), Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (the French Revolution in 1789), Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (the British Opium Trade with China between 1791 to 1858), Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (the rise of fascism in the 1930s), and Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (the Nigerian Civil War from 1967-70). We will also read excerpts from the works of literary theorists who have helped us understand the historical novel and its subgenres. Requirements: two take home essays and an oral presentation. This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
	Science Fiction
	Science fiction novels (mostly)
Spring 2025 19923	002	SEM (3 Units)	Open	17 / 18	Patricia Sullivan	TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am	Bryan Hall 203
	Like to sink into a book that challenges the ways we think about ourselves by imagining other worlds, speculative futures, aliens, artificial intelligences, cyborgs, technology and society at its best and possible worst, and more? We will read several books or pieces of short fiction that are classified loosely as science fiction, though there may be some overlap with other genres such as speculative fiction or climate fiction. We will also practice close reading strategies, reflect on acts of literary interpretation through brief references to critical essays, inquire into some of the functions and effects of fictional narratives, and practice constructing reflective, analytical, and argumentative essays. Generally, students can expect to write regular reading responses and exploratory pieces, participate in and lead seminar discussions, write three short essays, and take a brief final exam. The majority of our readings will be novels (entire books), with the occasional story, novella, or film. Texts might include (but are not limited to) the following: Parable of the Sower, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Bête, Arrival, The Left-Hand of Darkness, Frankenstein, or All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries. This course fulfills the second writing (and writing-enhanced) requirement and the AIP requirement (artistic, interpretative, and philosophical inquiry). ENGL2508 also prepares students interested in the English major for upper-level coursework in literature, though all majors are welcome.
	The Novel of Upbringing
Spring 2025 19994	004	SEM (3 Units)	Open	18 / 20	James Kinney	TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm	Shannon House 111
	The Novel of Upbringing -- How does the fictional representation of upbringing reflect on the cultural uses of fiction in general as well as the actual work of becoming adult? Works to be studied: Jane Austen, Emma; Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn; Tom Perrotta, Joe College; Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Perfectly Fine. Class requirements: Lively participation including including 8 brief email responses, one short and one longer essay, and a final exam.
	The Novel in US Literary History
	The Novel in U.S. Literary History
Spring 2025 19997	005	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	16 / 0	Victoria Olwell	TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm	Kerchof Hall 317
	In this course, you’ll investigate history of the novel in the U.S., examining genres and styles that emerged over the decades and centuries. I change the syllabus year to year, but in the past the course has included works by Hannah Webster Foster, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, Nella Larsen, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, and Celeste Ng. The course will help you strengthen your writing by asking you to write a combination of informal and formal writing assignments. The informal writing assignments will give you a chance to work on your fluency as a writer while also expanding your ideas about the novels you’ll read. The formal assignments will guide you through the process of developing and revising polished essays. By completing this course, you’ll satisfy the Second Writing Requirement. Extra bonus: While the course is designed for students headed towards any major, it also serves as a prerequisite for the English major, for those who are interested.
	Writing the Great House in English & Amer. Fiction
	From Austen to Morrison: Great House Fiction
Spring 2025 20000	006	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	19 / 0	Caroline Rody	TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm	John W. Warner Hall 113
	ENGL 2508: From Austen to Morrison: Great House Fiction The great house of English literature is a house most everyone knows: pictured imposingly on the cover of English paperbacks, setting the magnificent scene from the summit of a green lawn in BBC and Hollywood frame shots, serving as stage for plots of romance and intrigue in countless novels. Though always a site of inequality—the affluent “upstairs” and the servants “downstairs”—and though recently treated with strong irony and critique, it is nevertheless embraced in English literary tradition as ours, indigenous, part of the landscape. In American literature, not so. Founded on the dream of breaking away from the house of the Old World, U.S. literature tends to treat the very fact of a big, impressive house as in and of itself an affront, an edifice built on exploitation, not our house at all, but an outrage on the American landscape. From this beginning developed a literary history of suspect, spooky, even downright evil American houses, from the enslaving plantation house to the haunted house that is itself a murderer, as well as a contemporary sub-genre that treats the great American house as a morally reclaimable fixer-upper. This course will take up fiction and film that demonstrates the literary topos of the great house in transformation, a figure for nations changing in time. We will study and write about short fiction, novels and novel excerpts, and four films by (or adapting) some of the following authors: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, E.M. Forster, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Jean Rhys, Shirley Jackson, Lore Segal, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Ian McEwen, Louise Erdrich, Alison Bechdel, Gish Jen, Mat Johnson, Helen Oyeyemi, and Joe Talbot/Jimmie Fails. Requirements include active reading and participation, multiple short papers, one of which is a revision, frequent short Canvas posts, and a group leading of one class. This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
ENGL 2560	Contemporary Literature

	Contemporary Global Literature
Spring 2025 20939	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	19 / 20	Christopher Krentz	MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm	Cocke Hall 115
	One could claim with some justification that the most inventive and important contemporary fiction in English comes from places other than Great Britain and the United States. In this class we will explore some of this Anglophone literature and consider whatever issues or concerns it raises, from the legacies of colonialism to ways that culture, race, class, gender, violence, and religion show up in diverse societies in the Global South. Syllabus is still under construction, but we will likely study Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (Nigeria), Narayan’s The Painter of Signs (India), Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (South Africa), Rushdie’s story collection East, West (India and the United Kingdom), and Danticat’s stories in Krik? Krak! (Haiti). Moreover, we’ll concentrate on developing analytical and writing skills, which should help students succeed in other English and humanities classes. This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
ENGL 2599	Special Topics

	Painting and Prose
Spring 2025 19927	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	17 / 18	Cynthia Wall	MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm	Brooks Hall 103
	Somebody once said, “Ut pictura poesis,” or, “Poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent poetry.” But what does that mean, exactly, and how does it work? Humans have told stories about famous paintings, and painted famous stories, all in attempt to figure out ourselves and our world. This course explores the many ways that art has imagined literature, and literature art, from Ovid and the Bible, through Shakespeare and Milton, Pope and Hogarth, Blake and Keats, Rossetti and Tennyson, to the fin de siècle and Oscar Wilde. This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
	King Arthur in Time
Spring 2025 19930	002	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	20 / 20	Courtney Watts	TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm	Kerchof Hall 317
	King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table are a romanticized staple in nostalgic notions of the medieval past. But who is King Arthur, and where did his legend come from? This course will chart the history of King Arthur in literature, from his early Welsh origins through medieval chronicle and romance, modern poetry and novel, and contemporary film. Along the way, we will consider how the changing historical context and conventions of genre shape and transform the Arthurian mythos. Whenever they were written, texts about King Arthur are always set in the mythic past, shrouded by the mists of half-forgotten history. How does the past function in the world of literary imagination? And what are the political uses of the imagined past? As we read famous works of literature, whether from the twelfth century or the twentieth, we will explore not only medieval narrative but also narratives about the Middle Ages. As writers, we will step into the unfolding history of Arthurian narrative to speak back to these texts and the critics who read them.
	How to be Ethical?
Spring 2025 19996	005	SEM (3 Units)	Open	18 / 20	Nasrin Olla	TuTh 5:00pm - 6:15pm	Kerchof Hall 317
	How do novels, poetry, and philosophical texts teach us to relate ethically toward the stranger, the foreigner, or the other? How do we understand different cultures and peoples without reducing them to our already established frames of reference? How do we imagine otherness? This course approaches these big questions by exploring representations of the stranger and the foreigner in African and African diasporic literature. We will look at texts by Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon alongside reflections on the relation between ‘ethics and aesthetics’ by Immanuel Kant, Michel Foucault, and others.
	The Literature of Alienation
Spring 2025 20026	006	SEM (3 Units)	Open	16 / 20	Shalmi Barman	MoWe 5:00pm - 6:15pm	New Cabell Hall 332
	Why do we sometimes feel separated, cut off, or estranged from the world, other people, or our own selves? Are such feelings temporary aberrations or ‘normal’ symptoms of modern life? This intro-level course in literature will tackle these and other questions by reading works of fiction, prose, and poetry from the long nineteenth century that represent alienation as both subjective and objective — both something felt internally and an effect of one’s external circumstances. In this course, we will pay attention to how writers like Alfred Tennyson, Herman Melville, Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and others used language and imagination to express conditions of alienation. We will examine how literary modes like myth, fantasy, gothicism and humor can animate alienated characters. And we will, through class discussion and writing assignments, think about the choices that open up to us when we identify and come to terms with alienation in our own lives. Requirements: 1 short paper, 2 long papers, a final exam, class participation. This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
ENGL 3162	Chaucer II

	Chaucer's dream poems
Spring 2025 20847	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Permission	17 / 25	Elizabeth Fowler	TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm	Dell 2 102
	Four wild, beautiful medieval poems about virtual sensory perception, love, grief, philosophy, feminism, art; no pre-req; checks pre-1700 req; click the blue course number for more info.
	Poetry can produce real bodily experiences—including laughter, tears, heat, taste, a sense of being intensely present—by means of marks on a blank page, even if they were made by someone who’s been dead for hundreds of years. How does it do that? With that question in mind, we’ll read four poems Geoffrey Chaucer wrote about his dreams together with some poems he had read and some short essays on art, dreams, sensory experience, and virtual reality. The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, and The Legend of Good Women are surreal, sweet, funny, philosophical, emotionally intense, feminist, and visually overstimulated poems. Dreams seem to provide Chaucer with a way of thinking about “para-sensory,” virtual experience and its relation to grief, love, and the other passions (the word medieval writers used for “emotions”). We'll be interested in how specific forms of language (image, metaphor, verb tense, and so on) work to produce the cognitive, emotional, and sensory effects of virtual experience. We’ll go slowly, so you can learn to “close read” poetry, and so you’re OK if Chaucer’s Middle English is new to you. There are no pre-requisites except a joy in thinking and a love of language. We will meet outside, weather permitting. This fulfills the pre-17th c requirement.
ENGL 3260	Milton

	At the crossroads of antiquity and modernity
Spring 2025 19904	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Closed	19 / 0	Rebecca Rush	TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am	New Cabell Hall 485
	Click blue numbers to the left for a full course description.
	In this course, we will investigate the political, religious, and poetic debates of seventeenth-century England by focusing on a poet who had a habit of inserting himself into the major controversies of his age. In addition to tracing Milton’s career as a poet from his earliest attempts at lyric poetry to his completion of his major works Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, we will read selections from his prose, in which he advocated beheading the king, loosening divorce laws, and abandoning pre-publication censorship. We will debate about how to reconcile Milton’s radicalism with the more backward-looking aspects of his poetry and prose. (He consistently looked to ancient Greece and Rome as political and poetic models. He wrote in genres like the sonnet and the epic that were downright outmoded by the seventeenth century. And he often based his arguments for radical liberties on appeals to reason, truth, and temperance.) As we unravel the peculiar intellectual positions of a poet who stood at the crossroads of antiquity and modernity, we will also attend to what makes him distinctive as a poet, including his ear for the rhythms of verse and his dedication to producing lines that are thick with learned allusions, etymological puns, and interpretive ambiguities. No prior knowledge of Milton or the seventeenth century is required; the only prerequisite is a willingness to read slowly, attentively, and with a dictionary at hand. This course satisfies the pre-1700 requirement for the English major.
ENGL 3300	English Literature of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century

Spring 2025 19917	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	15 / 18	John O'Brien	MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm	Bryan Hall 330
	In this course, we will read important works in English from what scholars sometimes call “the long eighteenth century,” a period that begins in the middle of the 1600s, since so many things of lasting importance happened then and lasts until at least 1800. We will read works from the British Isles, but also colonial America, which was, after all, a part of Great Britain until the end of the American Revolutionary War. This was an extraordinary period, one that witnessed, among many other things: a massive expansion of print media that resulted in the emergence of periodical literature and the novel; political revolutions in England, America, France, and Haiti; the intensification of the slave trade and the emergence of an international abolitionist movement. We will read works from authors such as Joseph Addison, Aphra Behn, Margaret Cavendish, Olaudah Equiano, Anne Finch, Samuel Johnson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Phillis Wheatley. This course will fulfill the English major requirement for a course in literature between 1700 and 1900, and non-majors are welcome as well. This is also a low-cost course, as our readings will all be found in a digital “anthology” of literature in English that I am collaborating on with students here and faculty at other universities. Requirements: two essays, reading quizzes, midterm and final examinations.
ENGL 3500	Studies in English Literature

	Literary Games
	Co-taught with Jason Bennett
Spring 2025 14394	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Permission	22 / 28	Brad Pasanek	MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm	New Cabell Hall 368
	This course in “extra-literary” criticism tasks English majors and other students with investigating the ways video games are available for interpretation and formal analysis. We will read game studies and literary theory, play games, and—take note!—learn to build them. Students will be introduced to the narrative scripting language Ink and the Bitsy and Godot game engine. (No prior experience with programming required.) Our main effort is to check and test literary theory in "defamiliarized" ludic contexts, designing sprites and worlds and complicating traditional intuitions about narrative, characters, and fiction by means of game experiences. Students will prototype a literary game for their final assignment.
ENGL 3540	Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature

	Dangerous Women
Spring 2025 19933	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Closed	25 / 25	Cristina Griffin	TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm	Dell 2 101
	When the phrase “nasty woman” rose to the forefront of our cultural discourse a decade ago, the label rested on a long-standing conception that women can be dangerous just by being women. In this class, we will look at the particular formations of dangerous women that materialized in the nineteenth century, an era in which women simultaneously remained held down by the law and yet unbound by newly possible social roles. Across texts by Jane Austen, Mary Prince, Christina Rossetti, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, and Thomas Hardy, among others, we will consider what precisely made women dangerous as well as the other side of the coin: what put women in danger? What forms of female agency, sexuality, or sociability generate power and which engender fear? And what do we make of men’s roles: what does it look like to be a dangerous man or a man in danger? How do nineteenth-century notions of danger reify a gender binary and what are the ways in which this binary breaks down or becomes fluid? By reading texts across genres (some novels, short stories, poems, essays, and a play) we will immerse ourselves in the particular history of gender, fear, and power articulated by nineteenth-century writers while also avidly seeking out points of connection between these Victorian conceptions of dangerous women and those of our own twenty-first century. This course satisfies the 1700–1900 requirement for the English major, and is also open to non-majors. Students in this course are forewarned that they will be in danger of reading dangerously fascinating texts, and will be expected to generate dangerously fascinating ideas in response.
	Global Nineteenth Century Fiction
Spring 2025 19943	002	Lecture (3 Units)	Closed	25 / 25	Stephen Arata	MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm	New Cabell Hall 315
	In this course we will read novels and short stories (all superb examples of narrative art) drawn from a range of cultures and countries. The overarching goal is to engage with these works not from the perspective of their separate national traditions but with an awareness of the novel as a transnational literary form, bound up in networks of authors and readers stretching around the globe. Likely candidates for the syllabus include Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Vernon Lee (England), George Sand and Honoré de Balzac (France), Mikhail Lermentov (Russia), Multatuli (Denmark), Benito Pérez Galdós (Spain), Machado de Assiz (Brazil), Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (India), and Mary Prince (Bermuda). Course requirements will include two 5-6 page essays, a final exam, and a handful of shorter writing assignments. All the readings will be in English. This course can be used to fulfill the 1700-1900 period requirement for the English major.
ENGL 3559	New Course in English Literature

	Placed and Displaced in America
Spring 2025 20027	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Closed	15 / 0 (15 / 0)	Lisa Goff	TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm	New Cabell Hall 115
	No waitlist but spaces often open up. Email me if you'd like to join the class: lg6t@virginia.edu.
	The history of America is a history of place-making and displacement. Iconic American sites such as Monticello, Walden Pond, and our network of national parks have inspired generations of Americans. But displacement is just as much a part of our national identity—as the stories of Indigenous dispossession, housing discrimination, Japanese internment, redlining, gentrification, and homelessness attest. In this class we’ll critique the “iconic” American places, the ones we brag about, and study the displacement that has characterized our nation since the colonial era—the stories that were long buried, and are still coming to light. We’ll also pay special attention to the placemaking efforts of displaced or marginalized groups—such as Black Americans during the Great Migrations, lgbtq+ communities, immigrants, and survivors of natural disasters such as the Dust Bowl and Hurricane Katrina—who continue to redefine American identity through place-making. To do this we will analyze fiction, journalism, and film, as well as paintings, photographs and other elements of visual culture. We may also spend some time looking at archival sources at Special Collections and in online databases. By the end of the semester, you’ll know how to interpret space and place for insights into race, ethnicity, gender, class, and generation in America.
	Diary Fiction
Spring 2025 21077	002	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	16 / 18 (17 / 20)	Lorna Martens	TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm	Pavilion VIII 102
	For description, click on schedule number to the left.
	Diary Fiction - Lorna Martens Diaries are for intimate secrets? Yes--but not just! People have kept journals for many reasons. There are travel journals and sea logs, records of everyday life, testimonials to alarming events, gossipy accounts of social interactions, notebooks for capturing one's momentary aperçus and ideas, and so forth. Fiction writers, however, have invented many more uses for the diary form than these! The diary's strict yet elastic form (first-person periodic narration) has offered creative writers many intriguing possibilities beyond imitating the styles of real diaries. An ideal outlet for sincere self-expression, for intimate confessions, the fictive diary is also as if made to order for creating an unreliable narrator, one whose views are undercut by the plot. If a second voice is introduced alongside the diarist's monologue, this can destabilize the diarist's account, whereas, conversely, a diarist's truthful account can overthrow a second narrator's misguided opinions. Writing from day to day, a diarist is ignorant of what the future holds. Such blindness toward the future has inspired many writers to use the diary form for suspense stories (e.g., Dracula). In this course we will focus on the ways in which writers have imaginatively exploited the diary's formal features. We will also consider how diary fiction evolved from the late eighteenth century, when the first fictive diaries were written, to the present. We will read several masterpieces of diary fiction--novels--including Sartre's Nausea and Frisch's I'm Not Stiller, and otherwise stories from a brand-new anthology of short diary fiction. Students will have an opportunity to try their hand at writing a diary (easy!) and/or diary fiction.
ENGL 3560	Studies in Modern and Contemporary Literature

	A Survey of Significant Modern Poets
	MODERN POETRY
Spring 2025 19919	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	22 / 25	Mark Edmundson	TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm	John W. Warner Hall 110
	ENGL 3____ MODERN POETRY: The mid-twentieth century sees a surge in excellent poetry in the United States. Much of the best of it deals with the question of America. Who are we? Where are we as a nation? Have we gone radically wrong? If so, what can we do (if anything) to right ourselves? Robert Lowell will set the tone for the course, with his reflections on the national condition, culminating in his masterpiece, “For the Union Dead.” We’ll also read Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amy Clampitt, Robert Hayden, and the Jameses: Dickey, Wright, and Merrill. We’ll connect the poets’ vision of America to our current state and see what we might learn from them. There will be a mid-term quiz, a final quiz, and a paper at the end on the poet you care about most.
	Fiction in the Age of Modernism
Spring 2025 19944	002	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	24 / 25	Stephen Arata	MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm	New Cabell Hall 315
	The time period covered in this course is roughly 1890-1960: the age of Modernism in the literatures of Europe and the Americas. We will read novels and short stories from across a range of cultures and countries that explore the question of what makes a work of fiction not just “Modern” but “Modernist.” Likely authors include Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, Jean Toomer, Jean Rhys, Samuel Beckett, Haldor Laxness, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Andrade, Knut Hamsen, Vladimir Nabokov, and Nella Larson. Course requirements will include two 5-6 page essays, a final exam, and a handful of shorter writing assignments. All the readings will be in English.
	The Literature of Extinction
Spring 2025 19951	003	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	10 / 18	Adrienne Ghaly	TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm	New Cabell Hall 068
	How do works of modern and contemporary literature respond to species extinction and help us understand the sixth mass extinction the planet may be entering? How has the diminishment of species and biodiversity been thought about and written about in poems, novels, and essays? Where and how do we find evidence of extinctionary pressures in literary texts? From dodos to whales to insects and de-extinction technologies, this course explores biodiversity loss and species extinctions across genres, time periods, and ecosystems to ask how literature thinks about, records, and represents violence against nonhuman life. We’ll read texts that imagine extinction, grapple with knowledge and feelings around biodiversity decline and species revival, and we'll reframe literature not explicitly ‘about’ extinction as records of widespread impacts on nonhuman life. Assignments are two essays, some shorter pieces of writing, and engaged participation in discussion.
	Being Human: Race, Technology, and the Arts
	Global Afrofuturism
Spring 2025 19981	004	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	18 / 24 (18 / 24)	Njelle Hamilton	MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm	Dell 2 102
	What makes us human? How did science and technology play a part in racism and the dehumanization of blackness? And how have artists of color re-appropriated science, technology, and science fiction to subvert and resist dehumanization? This course is an introduction to Afrofuturism, exploring the intersections of race and alienness, race and technology, and race and modernity through global futuristic representations of blackness in TV, film, music, art, and literature. In this discussion-based seminar, we will trace “like race” tropes in sci-fi, including aliens, monsters, enslavement, and invisibility. We will think about the various ways that black artists/writers/creators displace or “dimension-shift” the African Diaspora experience to grapple with contemporary and historical issues, and employ science/technology/sci-fi to invent places and conditions where blackness can thrive. Assignments will include literary essays and creative work (short films, artwork, mashups, web-content etc) that reimagine and interrogate representations of race and science/technology in contemporary media. (No artistic talent or experience required)
ENGL 3610	Global Cultural Studies

Spring 2025 19910	100	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	116 / 120 (116 / 120)	Michael Levenson	MoWe 12:00pm - 12:50pm	Minor Hall 125
	Global Cultural Studies offers an interdisciplinary approach to our present-day world against the background of its recent past. Engaging a wide variety of media (film, popular song, avant-garde art, memoir, political philosophy, etc.), the course examines conditions and conflicts in China, India, North and South Africa, and the Middle East. Urgent social-cultural issues – such as the global plight of refugees, the place of Gandhi in present-day Indian politics, the campaign for international human rights, the resurgence of religious faith, the crisis of the environment, the rise of authoritarian nationalism, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza – will be nodal points of concern. At every stage we consider the making of the world since 1945, the pressing difficulties that now confront it, and the fragile state of hope.
ENGL 3690	Memory Speaks

Spring 2025 21235	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	10 / 20 (10 / 20)	Lorna Martens	TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm	Pavilion VIII 102
	For description, click on schedule number to the left.
	Memory Speaks Memory is a crucial human faculty. Our ability to remember our own past is one of the things that make us human. Memory has long been thought to ground identity: without memory, one has no sense of self. Memory has been seen as fundamental to psychic health, and even as a remedy in times of trouble, as well as essential to our ability to imagine the future. Remembering has its delights. Certainly the idea of losing one’s memory, through shock or illness for example, is terrifying to contemplate. Yet having too many memories of the wrong kind is believed to endanger our equilibrium. Maddeningly, given its power to make us healthy or sick, memory often lies beyond our conscious control. It operates according to its own laws, giving us what we want only sometimes. Undeniably useful, it has also been seen as deceptive. It is demonstrably suggestible. It is not surprising, therefore, that memory is a subject of vital importance in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences alike. This course will focus on individual memory and in particular on autobiographical memory (our memories of our own lives). We will read autobiographies and works of fiction, written from the early twentieth century to the present, by Patrick Modiano, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, and Marguerite Duras. We will also study two films on the theme of memory: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Inside Out. Concurrently, we will read psychological, psychoanalytic, and neuroscientific work on memory. Some attention will be paid to the issues of false memory, external memory, and mediated memory, as well. Two short papers, presentations, exam.
ENGL 3840	Contemporary Disability Theory

Spring 2025 20840	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	18 / 28 (18 / 28)	Christopher Krentz	MoWeFr 12:00pm - 12:50pm	New Cabell Hall 389
	Over the last several decades, thinking about people with physical, cognitive, and sensory differences has moved from a mostly pathological medical-based understanding to a more rights-based framework, although both models persist and overlap. In this course we will consider how conceptions of disability have (or have not) changed, considering such matters as how a disability is defined; disability in American history; autism and neurodivergence; deaf culture and medical interventions; disability and race, gender, class, and sexual orientation; and much more. The class will also consider how these theories relate to the depiction of disabled people in literature and film. Possible texts include Goffman’s Stigma; Wells’ “The Country of the Blind”; Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians; Desai’s Fasting, Feasting; Nussbaum’s Good Kings, Bad Kings; Novic’s True Biz; and the films Unrest and Crip Camp. The class will feature a range of learning strategies, from whole-class discussion to smaller-group discussion to short lectures. Requirements will include two papers, quizzes, and active informed participation.
ENGL 4500	Seminar in English Literature

	The Frankenstein Circle
Spring 2025 19926	002	SEM (3 Units)	Open	11 / 18	Cynthia Wall	MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm	Brooks Hall 103
	“I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva. The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts. The tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation. Two other friends and myself agreed to write each a story, founded on some supernatural occurrence. The following tale is the only one which has been completed.” So Mary Shelley reminisced about the famous weekend at the Villa Diodati (when she was still Mary Godwin). The two friends were the poets Lord Byron and her lover Percy Shelley. The tale was Frankenstein. (For the record, one Dr Polidori was there as well, and he did finish his tale, “The Vampyre”; it’s on the syllabus.) With Frankenstein as our central text, we will also read works by Percy, Byron, Polidori, and William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft (Mary’s parents), excerpts from Mary’s journals, and selections from Mary & Percy’s mammoth reading lists for 1814-1818 (John Milton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Maria Edgeworth, M. G. Lewis, Sir Humphry Davy, Captain James Cook). This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement for the English major.
ENGL 4520	Seminar in Renaissance Literature

	Renaissance and Reformation
	Read Petrarch, Machiavelli, Luther, Erasmus, Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare
Spring 2025 19905	001	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	20 / 18	Rebecca Rush	TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm	New Cabell Hall 383
	Click blue numbers to the left for a full course description
	This course pursues the ramifications of the Reformation and the Renaissance in the poetry, prose, and drama of sixteenth-century England. We will read selections from seminal continental works by Petrarch, Machiavelli, Luther, Erasmus, and Calvin. We will then think about how English writers—including Thomas More, Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Richard Hooker—responded to these authors’ efforts to renovate understandings of politics, piety, and human nature. As we read each work with the utmost care, we will encounter questions such as how free is the will? Are faith and reason reconcilable? Is beauty an obstacle or a spur to higher things? What is the source of corruption (in the church, in the state, and in the individual) and can it be remedied? Is there a difference between a tyrant and a prince? What is the best way to read—does good reading require learning ancient languages or seeking out the original manuscripts? What are the limits of human knowledge, and is it possible to know too much? Readings will include selections from Luther and Erasmus’s debate on free will, Machiavelli’s Prince, Calvin’s Institutes, More’s Utopia, Wyatt’s lyrics and satires, Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Defense of Poesy, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, and Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1. No prior knowledge of early modern literature or religion is required; the only prerequisite is a willingness to read slowly, attentively, and with a dictionary at hand. This course satisfies the pre-1700 requirement for the English major.
ENGL 4560	Seminar in Modern and Contemporary Literature

	Contemporary Women's Texts
Spring 2025 19928	001	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	14 / 0	Susan Fraiman	TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm	Dawson's Row 1
	This course takes up recent Anglophone works by women across multiple genres and referencing a range of cultural contexts. Primary texts include visual as well as literary forms. A selection of secondary materials will help to gloss their formal, thematic, and ideological characteristics while giving students a taste of contemporary theory in such areas as gender, queer, and postcolonial studies. Possible works (still to be determined) include fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, and Chimamanda Adichie; a graphic narrative by Roz Chast; a play by Annie Baker; experimental, multi-genre works by Claudia Rankine, Saidiya Hartman, or Maggie Nelson; a neo-Western film by Kelly Reichardt; images by South African photographer Zanele Muholi. Among our likely concerns will be the juxtaposition of verbal and visual elements in a single text; depictions of queer, raced, immigrant, and transnational subjectivities; narratives that make “truth claims” and how such claims affect the reader; representations of growing up, aging, migration, maternity, violence, marriage, creativity, diverse sexualities, and work; ties and tensions among women across boundaries of place, generation, class, and race. One project of the course will be to explore its own premise that “women’s texts” is a useful and meaningful category. Two papers and a final exam. This course is intended for 3rd- and 4th-year English majors or other advanced students with a background in literary/cultural/gender studies.
	American Novels, American Controversies
	ENGL 4560: American Novels, American Controversies
Spring 2025 19998	002	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	17 / 0	Victoria Olwell	TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am	Brooks Hall 103
	When novels are published, they enter the public sphere, joining in the whole buzzing cacophony of contemporary culture. Often, novels step into ongoing public discussions about things that are not novels – political issues, contemporary developments in the social world, ideas about history, social inequality, scientific advances, and the like. Novels do this in a wide variety of ways, but, always, they operate through the specific formal characteristics of the novel (plot, character, narrative, the premise of fiction, etc.) and carry with them the distinctive history of the novel as a genre. In this course, we’ll consider contemporary U.S. novels that explicitly take up current issues in the public sphere. We’ll read these novels on their own terms, but also in the context of two other genres: contemporary non-fiction on the same issues and literary criticism on the form and history of the novel. We’ll ask, what are the distinctive ways in which novels add to public discussion? By the way, I chose novels that meet two requirements. First, they have received a great deal of critical attention and acclaim, meaning that we can consider them to be novels with a hearty public presence. Second, I select only novels I find aesthetically compelling and intellectually enchanting, because one way that novels engage the public is by grabbing readers’ interest. Coursework includes 2 short and a final paper of around 10 pages.
ENGL 4561	Seminar in Modern Literature and Culture

	Poetry in a Global Age
	no prerequisite; no instructor permission needed
Spring 2025 19949	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	13 / 18	Jahan Ramazani	MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm	Bryan Hall 328
	A seminar about world poetry in English. We read the vibrant anglophone poetries of India, Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, Ireland, Black and Asian Britain, and Indigenous and diasporic America. They bring new worlds, new idioms, and new literary possibilities into English. Issues to be discussed include the historical memory of colonization and enslavement; global challenges such as war and the climate crisis; transformations of world-traveling poetic forms and modernist strategies. Featured writers include postcolonial poets such as Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Lorna Goodison, NourbeSe Philip, A. K. Ramanujan, Okot p’Bitek, Christopher Okigbo, and Daljit Nagra, and modernists like T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and Claude McKay.
	The Queer Novel
	A survey of modern queer literature.
Spring 2025 19992	002	SEM (3 Units)	Open	9 / 18	Mrinalini Chakravorty	TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm	New Cabell Hall 036
	What is “queer” about the novel? This course will grapple with this question by examining the rich legacy of non-normative sexual expressions and orientations in the literary arts.
ENGL 4570	Seminar in American Literature since 1900

	James Baldwin
Spring 2025 19978	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	10 / 18 (10 / 18)	Marlon Ross	TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm	Dell 2 100
	This course focuses on the tumultuous life and diverse works of James Baldwin, whose intellectual influence is still palpable in today’s discussions on race, sexuality, social activism, national belonging, and exile. We’ll study major works from each of the genres that Baldwin engaged, including the novel, short story, drama, poetry, journalism, and the essay. Among the works to be examined are the novels Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and Just Above My Head; plays The Amen Corner and Blues for Mr. Charlie; selected short stories from Going to Meet the Man; essays from Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, and No Name in the Street; and the children’s book Little Man Little Man. In addition to Baldwin’s works, we’ll explore him as a “spokesman” of the Civil Rights movement, and how his high visibility as a public intellectual whose appearances on the new medium of television helped to shape his “celebrity” status. We’ll also address a some of Baldwin’s most crucial intellectual dialogues, including with Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Lorraine Hansberry, William F. Buckley, Eldridge Cleaver, Amiri Baraka, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Toni Morrison, and Tarell Alvin McCraney. We’ll also study films important to Baldwin’s legacy, including Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro and Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk. Assignments include: several short response essays, two critical essays, one team-led class discussion, and a term research paper.
	Caribbean Latinx Literature
Spring 2025 19984	002	SEM (3 Units)	Open	8 / 18 (8 / 18)	Carmen Lamas	We 3:30pm - 6:00pm	New Cabell Hall 036
	In this course we will explore novels, memoirs, short stories and poems by Latinx writers from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. While these writers’ genealogies emerge from these island countries, we will analyze how their lives in New York, New Jersey, Boston and Miami impact how they narrate the Latinx experience as situated between the US and their home countries in the Caribbean. All readings, discussions and assignments are in English.
ENGL 4590	Seminar in Literary Genres

	Writing the Great House in English & Amer Fiction
	From Austen to Morrison: Great House Fiction
Spring 2025 20001	002	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	17 / 0	Caroline Rody	TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm	New Cabell Hall 485
	ENGL 4590: From Austen to Morrison: Great House Fiction The great house of English literature is a house most everyone knows: pictured imposingly on the cover of English paperbacks, setting the magnificent scene from the summit of a green lawn in BBC and Hollywood frame shots, serving as stage for plots of romance and intrigue in countless novels. Though always a site of inequality—the affluent “upstairs” and the servants “downstairs”—and though treated recently with strong irony and critique, it is nevertheless embraced by English literary culture as ours, indigenous, part of the landscape. In American literature, not so. Founded on the dream of breaking away from the house of the Old World, U.S. literature tends to treat the very fact of a big, impressive house as in and of itself an affront, an edifice built on exploitation, not our house at all, but an outrage on the American landscape. From this beginning developed a long literary history of suspect, spooky, even downright evil American houses, from the enslaving plantation house to the haunted house that is itself a murderer, as well as a contemporary sub-genre that treats the great American house as a morally reclaimable fixer-upper. This course will take up fiction and film that demonstrates the literary topos of the great house in transformation, a figure for nations changing in time. We will study and write about short fiction, novels and novel excerpts, and four films by (or adapting) some of the following authors: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, E.M. Forster, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Jean Rhys, Shirley Jackson, Lore Segal, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Ian McEwen, Louise Erdrich, Alison Bechdel, Gish Jen, Maria Semple, Mat Johnson, Helen Oyeyemi, and Joe Talbot/Jimmie Fails. Requirements include active reading and participation, 20 pages of writing divided into two papers, frequent short Canvas posts, and a group leading of one class. This course meets the second writing requirement.
ENGL 4902	The Bible Part 2: The New Testament

Spring 2025 19999	001	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	14 / 0	John Parker	MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm	New Cabell Hall 056
	The stories, rhythms, and rhetoric of the Bible have been imprinting readers and writers of English since the seventh century. Moving through much of the New Testament, from the Gospels to Revelation, 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 New Testament; 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 is needed or assumed. It can be taken before or after the Bible Part 2: The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, taught by Professor Stephen Cushman.
ENGL 5060	The Sonnet Revised and Revisited

	Click blue number to the left for full course description.
Spring 2025 19932	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	13 / 16	Clare Kinney	TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm	Bryan Hall 203
	Sonnets: their delights, their transformative practices, and their multifarious agendas, from the 16th century to yesterday.
	“A chamber of sudden change”; “a meeting place of image and voice”; “a game with mortal stakes”; “the collision of music, desire and argument”: these are some of the ways that poets and critics have described the sonnet. Starting with the Petrarchan experiments of Renaissance Europe and extending our reach through the Romantics and the modernists to Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Kiki Petrosino, Terrance Hayes, and others, we will consider the persistence and the many metamorphoses of the form. Sonnet writers construct a “a moment’s monument” for religious, political, philosophical and meta-poetical purposes as well as to anatomize desire, and when they present sonnets in sequence they make lyric do something of the work of narrative. Every time a sonnet is written, its author becomes part of a very long literary conversation and may make that intervention the occasion to set thought and feeling in a new dialogue, to reconsider “the contradictory impulses of being in the world,” to talk back to tradition, to make the dead speak again, to re-make and re-break the rules of form. Exploring the history, poetics (and the race and gender politics) of this tenacious short form, we will consider the craftiness of craft and the particular power of “bound language.” In addition to addressing a wide selection of sonnets written from the 16th century to yesterday, we will also read critical writings on the sonnet by a variety of scholars and poets. Requirements: lively participation in discussion; a series of discussion board responses to readings, one 6-7 page paper; a presentation on a contemporary sonnet of your own choice; a substantial final project (critical or hybrid creative-critical). This course can satisfy the pre-1700 requirement for PhD, MA and undergraduate students: contact instructor for more information.
ENGL 5190	The Bible

	The Bible
Spring 2025 20999	001	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	13 / 0	Stephen Cushman	We 10:00am - 12:30pm	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 and the New Testament, from Genesis to Revelation, 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.
ENGL 5500	Special Topics in English Literature

	Milton and Whitman
Spring 2025 21000	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	12 / 15	Mark Edmundson	TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm	Bryan Hall 310
	ENGL 5___ MILTON AND WHITMAN: We’ll read with care and imagination what are perhaps the two greatest long poems in English, John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Both are works of palpable genius, but of very different kinds. Milton’s poem is committed to hierarchy, order and degree. In his cosmos, justified subordination and command are the highest ideals. (Though he is constantly challenging them.) His world at its best is firmly, yet flexibly ordered. He is a brilliant exemplar of true conservatism. Whitman is much different. “Unscrew the locks from the doors / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jams,” Walt chants. Whitman wants to dissolve all needless boundaries in the interest of perfect democratic equality. He wants to undo the barriers between old and young, rich and poor, women and men. And he does so, at least imaginatively, in “Song of Myself.” We’ll read the poems for what they are in themselves. But we’ll also consider them as brilliant exemplars of the progressive mind and its conservative counterpart. Students may be surprised as to where their allegiances lie. With any luck, we’ll all find ourselves, in the words of Wallace Stevens, “more truly and more strange.” A mid-term paper, a final essay, and some short writing assignments.
ENGL 5510	Seminar in Medieval Literature

	Old Norse Language and Literature
Spring 2025 20824	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	14 / 15	Stephen Hopkins	TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am	Dawson's Row 1
	Learn to read and translate sagas and eddic myths! Enjoy exploits of gods and Vikings! Open to grads and undergrads!
	This course provides an introduction to the language and literature of medieval Iceland (also called Old Norse or Old Icelandic, roughly 800-1400 CE), and the goal is to arrive at a sound reading knowledge of the Old Norse language. Drawing upon Byock’s textbook, Viking Language, the first half of the semester focuses on internalizing the basics of Old Norse grammar and vocabulary. While acquiring these rudimentary linguistic skills, we will practice translating bits of prose and poetry (The Prose Edda, Egils Saga, et al.) as supplied in the textbook. After midterms, we will translate The Tale of Thorsteinn Staff-Struck. The course will also include secondary readings to orient us towards Old Norse genres, contexts, and critical/theoretical approaches prevalent in the field today, with an emphasis on the history of the conversion and the importation of writing technologies (i.e., basic paleography).
ENGL 5530	Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Literature

	The Literature of British Abolition, 1750-1810
Spring 2025 14603	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	8 / 15	Michael Suarez	Tu 3:30pm - 6:00pm	Pavilion VIII 102
	How did Great Britain come to abolish the slave trade in 1807 and what roles did literature play in enlightening readers to the barbarities of this human traffic? Reading works such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, and a variety of poems, both canonical and from relatively unknown voices, we will attempt to immerse ourselves in the literature of British abolition. Juxtaposing such writings with visual materials (viz., the slave ship Brooks), abolitionist political pamphlets, and letters in the C18 public press will give greater depth to our discussions. Finally, we will read Caryl Phillips’ novel Cambridge and reflect on how a literature of abolition might function in our own time. This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement.
ENGL 5559	New Course in English Literature

	Textual Accessible Sustainable Teachable Exp.
	TASTE and Digital Approaches
Spring 2025 19946	003	SEM (3 Units)	Open	4 / 15	Alison Booth	TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am	Wilson Hall 244
	This course is recently reposted at 5000-level to allow students at varied levels to take it.
	This seminar, introducing various digital approaches to studies of literary texts in various genres and media, is designed to be teachable and accessible by and for advanced undergraduates and graduate students at any stage in any humanities area. No prior experience in digital studies or coding is expected; the tech-adverse need not fear. Our focus is textual studies of post-1800 literature in English. Students may design their coursework to fulfill the course requirement “from 1700 to 1900,” while some of our texts will be post-1900. TASTE fulfills an elective for the graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities (DH). It should be welcoming to anyone who likes to read or edit closely and who is curious to experiment. Sustainable, like accessible, has several meanings: in the environment as well as in DH (will it last?). Some literature is sustained (canonical) because taste (then or now) tells us to reread it and help make it more accessible. Something that we cannot dispute (personal taste) is deeply political and changeable. We will read selected sources about taste: as aesthetic concept; as class and gender code; as racial/ethnographic/international divide; as connection between the body and cultural history; as related to property/propriety of sexuality. Among our aims is to cultivate our taste for written descriptions of interior decoration, fashion, food and dining, as well as people, buildings, and landscapes. Readings will include Jane Austen’s Persuasion; Elizabeth Gaskell’s novella Cousin Phillis; selected poetry from different contexts (prospects; country houses; beloveds), including African American and from former British colonies; short stories (some classics like Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” Carver’s “Cathedral”); a unit on consumer culture including foodways; opportunities to work with AI-generated text, GoodReads or other reviews, and accessible textual analysis tools. One short, one longer essay; frequent short assignments on texts; a class presentation; participation in a joint project on passages in the ~400 analyzed short biographies of women in Alison Booth’s Collective Biographies of Women as they reveal biographers’ evaluations of historic women related to taste. Texts have not been ordered at the bookstore; part of our project will be identifying and working with library and online sources and comparing editions.
	Latinx Literature and the Americas
Spring 2025 19985	004	SEM (3 Units)	Open	7 / 15 (7 / 15)	Carmen Lamas	Mo 3:30pm - 6:00pm	Lower West Oval Room 102
	In this course we will read works that situate the Latinx experience in an Americas context. We will read across such genres as the memoir, speculative fiction, romance, YA, graphic novels, historical fiction and poetry. Issues such as border crossing, immigration, and deportation will serve to approach and query Latinidad in/from its many historical, geographic, generic, aesthetic, and political manifestations. We will locate these works in the wider debates regarding engaged literature, language use, translation, and the interdisciplinary nature of Latinx and Latin American literary studies. No prior experience reading Latinx literature is necessary. Final Projects will be based on the student's professional needs and goals.
ENGL 5580	Seminar in Critical Theory

	Material Culture: Theories and Methods
Spring 2025 14511	001	SEM (3 Units)	Permission	7 / 18 (7 / 18)	Lisa Goff	Th 5:00pm - 7:30pm	New Cabell Hall 111
	Email me if you'd like to join the class: lg6t@virginia.edu
	“Material culture” is the stuff of everyday life: landscapes and street corners, skyscrapers and log cabins, umbrellas and dining room tables and Picassos and Fitbits. Every thing in our lives, those we choose and those that are thrust upon us, conveys meaning—many meanings, in fact, from the intentions of the creator to the reception (and sometimes the subversion) of the consumer. Interpreting objects, buildings, and places provides insight into the values and beliefs of societies and cultures past and present. In this course we will study theories of material culture, many of which now intersect with literary criticism, from a variety of scholarly disciplines including anthropology, historical archaeology, art history, geography, environmental humanities, American Studies, and literary studies. And we will apply those theories to texts and artifacts of all kinds, from novels and short stories to movies, photographs, historic sites, visual art and culture, fashion and clothing, landscapes, and more. We will read theorists familiar to students of literature, such as thing theorist Bill Brown, but also folklorist Henry Glassie; archaeologist James Deetz; anthropologist Elizabeth Chin, and political theorist Jane Bennett. The class will prepare you to interpret things in ways that illuminate texts, and to read texts in ways that reveal and cultivate the meanings of things.
	Intro to Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing
Spring 2025 14614	002	SEM (3 Units)	Open	6 / 15	David Vander Meulen	Fr 9:30am - 12:00pm	Bryan Hall 233
	ENGL 5580-02 David Vander Meulen F 09:30AM-12:00PM (Bryan 233) This course in textual criticism deals with some of the fundamental problems of literary study: ● If a work exists in multiple forms and with different wording, what constitutes "the text"? ● How are such judgments made and standards determined? ● How are verbal works as intellectual abstractions affected by the physical forms in which they are transmitted? ● If one is faced with the prospect of editing a work, how does one go about it? ● How does one choose an edition for use in the classroom? ● What difference does this all make? The course will deal with such concerns and will include: ● A short survey of analytical bibliography and the solution of practical problems as they apply to literary texts. ● Study of the transmission of texts in different periods. ● Consideration of theories and techniques of editing literary and non-literary texts of different genres, and of both published and unpublished materials. The course will build to the preparation of a scholarly edition by each student. The class on books as physical objects, ENGL 5810, provides helpful background but is not a prerequisite. This course satisfies the Graduate English requirement for the history of criticism or literary theory.
ENGL 8005	Intro to the Environmental Humanities

Spring 2025 14545	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	9 / 15 (9 / 15)	Adrienne Ghaly	TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am	Bryan Hall 233
	How do the arts and the humanities contribute to conversations about the environment and the fate of our planet? How are they responding to the environmental challenges of the Anthropocene, the geological age in which humans (some more than others) shape Earth systems? This course introduces the questions, methods, and arguments that organize work in the environmental humanities (EH). The seminar’s primary objective to is to advance graduate student capacities to use skills, knowledges, tools, and archives of the humanities to advance pluralist, integrated understandings of environmental issues. In support of that purpose, the seminar develops critical reflection on conceptual, theoretical and methodological questions in EH about disciplinarity, collaboration, innovation, and public engagement. The course materials draw from literary and cultural studies, philosophy, history, anthropology, and religion. This graduate seminar is open to MA and PhD students from any discipline, including the sciences and social sciences. This class is collaborative by design, with guest speakers from across UVA presenting over the course of the semester. It also fulfills one of the requirements for the graduate certificate in Environmental Humanities.
ENGL 8262	Spenser

	Edmund Spenser in Faery Land
Spring 2025 19942	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	13 / 15	Elizabeth Fowler	TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm	Dell 1 104
	The extreme art of the settler-colonial frontier
	The extreme art of the settler-colonial frontier—-stringent, searching, terrifying, ambitious, violent, feminist, fantastic, surreal, comic—-Spenser's poetry and prose, almost all written in Ireland, has provoked much of the best work by early modernists over the last three decades. We'll attempt immersive reading, make forays into the work of the in-progress Oxford Spenser edition, and grapple with problems poetic, editorial, theoretical, ecological, aesthetic, moral, historical, and jurisprudential. Spenser is soaked in Malory, Chaucer, Vergil, Homer, Aristotle—-and English-language authors in all the ensuing centuries are soaked in him, from Shakespeare to Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Yet where else can you get a dominant female knight, an elusive queen of faerie, queer sex scenes of many variations, a dragon who vomits books, joyous rivers in hats getting married, the invention of the words “self” and “emotion,” cannibals singing Petrarchan blazons, and a sex-positive, anatomically correct Mound of Venus? (BTW, Milton says Spenser is a better teacher than Aquinas, and was he ever wrong?) Our goals will be to collaborate on a working sense of Spenser’s poetry and its bibliography, to get good at immersion in lots of material while keeping what’s important to you above the waterline, to become articulate about poetry and able to move around within it while developing interesting trains of thought, and to hone all those skills both in seminar conversation and in your prose. This course checks the pre-1700 requirement.
ENGL 8500	Studies in English Literature

	Oceanic Connections
Spring 2025 19914	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	2 / 15	Debjani Ganguly	Tu 3:30pm - 6:00pm	Dell 1 104
	ENGL 8500 Graduate Seminar in Global English Literature and Culture Oceanic Connections: Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds Instructor: Debjani Ganguly Tuesdays: 3:30-6:00pm Wilson Hall 142 Office Hours: Tues-Thu: 12.00-1.00pm or by appointment, Bryan 106 The course will explore the emergence of the ‘ocean’ as a powerful rubric in global and hemispheric literary studies. The fluidity of the ocean as against terrestrial borders gives new meaning to categories like empire, diaspora, postcolonial, slave, settler, and indentured labor. Through novels, philosophical tracts, and theories of history, we will study the import of the transatlantic slave trade and its traumatic entanglement with global histories of modern maritime colonialism including those of Indian Ocean worlds. Specifically, we will trace connections across the Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds through the novels of Barry Unsworth, Fred D’Aguiar, and Amitav Ghosh, and the narrative non-fiction of Paul Gilroy. The course will include excerpts from the work of Edouard Glissant, the famous exponent of Caribbean Creolite, from an anthology of black narratives that emerged during the transatlantic slave trade, and from Ian Baucom’s philosophical history of the Zong massacre of 1781. Primary Texts Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger Fred D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic
	Black Women's Rhetorics
Spring 2025 19982	002	SEM (3 Units)	Open	8 / 10	Tamika Carey	Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm	New Cabell Hall 042
	This seminar introduces Black women’s rhetorical practices as a critical tradition. Through an interdisciplinary lens grounded in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies scholarship and informed by work in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and literary criticism, we will work to identify the techne, the praxis, and the implications of Black women’s choice to use written, visual, and aural strategies to shape and reshape themselves and their worlds. By necessity, we will consider questions such as: how do Black women define and name conditions of their subjectivity and the constraints to their public participation and livelihood? What is the connection between Black feminist thought and Black women’s literacies? Which genres, arguments, and strategies do they rely upon to address personal or sociopolitical concerns? What might Black feminist/womanist rhetorical criticism or pedagogy involve? And, what are their rhetorics of survival and pleasure? Ideally, this work will enable us to outline how Black women’s rhetorics operate as interpretive, interventionist, and instructional resources. Our readings will involve a combination of primary texts and critical writings. The scholars and public intellectuals we are likely to engage include: Jacqueline Jones Royster, Marcyliena Morgan, Elaine Richardson, Gwendolyn Pough, Carmen Kynard, Patricia Hill Collins, Brittney Cooper, Moya Bailey, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jennifer Nash, and Adrienne Maree Brown. Assignments may include: a discussion leading and course presentation activity, short weekly writing assignments, and a seminar-length essay.
ENGL 8540	Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature

	Race-Making and Romanticism
Spring 2025 19948	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	5 / 15	Taylor Schey	Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm	New Cabell Hall 411
	This course explores how British literature of the Romantic era (1780s – 1820s) registers and participates in processes of race-making that have shaped the modern world. Taking our cue from theoretical readings in Black studies, we’ll investigate how the racial order of chattel slavery was insidiously strengthened during the historical period in which its economic infrastructure began to be dismantled. While we’ll study some poems and novels that directly address the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery (e.g. abolitionist poetry; The Woman of Colour; Mansfield Park) and a couple that reflect the popularization of racial science (e.g. Frankenstein), we’ll be especially interested in interrogating how the development of seemingly unrelated political movements (e.g. white feminism; popular radicalism), literary conventions (e.g. the ballad revival; the aesthetics of the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque), and Romantic ideals (e.g. community, liberty, the power of poetry, the human) are connected to the broader consolidation of antiblackness and white-supremacist logics in the nineteenth century. This seminar satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement. It also introduces students to an influential tradition of theoretical work in Black studies. Authors include Jane Austen, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hannah More, Mary Robinson, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Southey, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth; theorists include Rizvana Bradley, Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, bell hooks, Christina Sharpe, Hortense Spillers, Rei Terada, Alexander Weheliye, Frank Wilderson, and Sylvia Wynter.
ENGL 8560	Studies in Modern and Contemporary Literature

	Poetry in a Global Age
Spring 2025 19950	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	7 / 14	Jahan Ramazani	MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm	New Cabell Hall 038
	How does poetry articulate and respond to the globalizing processes that accelerate in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? In this seminar, we consider modern and contemporary poetry in English in relation to transnational, global, world literary, and postcolonial theory and history. Issues to be explored include the historical memory of colonization and enslavement, global challenges such as war and the climate crisis, and transformations of world-traveling poetic forms and strategies. We closely read the vibrant anglophone poetries of India, Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, Ireland, Black and Asian Britain, and diasporic and Indigenous America, which bring new worlds, new idioms, and new literary possibilities into English. Postcolonial writers enrich poetry in English by hybridizing local traditions with the poetic inheritances of the global North. Forged in response to an increasingly globalized world, the innovations of transnational modernist writers provide crucial tools that the poets of the global South repurpose. Featured writers include postcolonial poets such as Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Lorna Goodison, NourbeSe Philip, A. K. Ramanujan, Okot p’Bitek, Christopher Okigbo, and Daljit Nagra, and modernists like T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and Claude McKay.
ENGL 8596	Form and Theory of Poetry

	What is Lyric?
Spring 2025 19974	001	SEM (3 Units)	Permission	13 / 15	Sumita Chakraborty	We 2:00pm - 4:30pm	Shannon House 109
	Lyric poem, lyric voice, lyric speaker, lyric reading: these and other similar terms share one strange, variously theorized, and often-contested word at their core. This course will explore a range of theories of the lyric from Aristotle and Horace to more contemporary figures like Gloria Anzaldúa, Édouard Glissant, and the scholars who make up the recent turn to “New Lyric Studies.” We will also explore how poetic schools that critique the lyric—such as conceptual poetry and language poetry—define and contest it. MFA and PhD students are most welcome, as the assignments for this course will include both creative and critical options.
ENGL 8598	Form and Theory of Fiction

	The Short Story
Spring 2025 19986	001	SEM (3 Units)	Permission	13 / 15	Kevin Moffett	Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm	New Cabell Hall 066
	A foray into the short story as a discrete form, its constraints and possibilities. We’ll consider how story writers distill time and compress language to generate volatility and produce resonant echoes in a confined space. We’ll discuss Poe’s single effect and other apparent truisms and entertain, examine, revise, and perhaps debunk them. We’ll read minimalists, maximalists, and mediumalists, the formulaic and the formally inventive. Texts will be chosen with the aim of showing the plasticity and playfulness of the form: possibly Chekhov, Angela Carter, Barthelme, Shirley Jackson, Vladimir Sorokin, Edward P. Jones, Joy Williams. From week to week students will read and write briskly in a variety of modes, culminating in a story project in the second half of the semester.
Engineering
ENGR 4880	Business and Technical Leadership in Engineering

	The Halsey Course
Spring 2025 15446	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	22 / 27 (28 / 35)	Don Dunham	TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm	Rice Hall 032
	Feel free to email Don Dunham about this class at djd4fu@virginia.edu or call at 832-291-6356. We have only 4 spaces left.
	This class is great for fourth year engineers getting ready to go out into the work world. The intent is to give you insight, tools, and practice on non-engineering topics that will help you excel in the work world. It is fun, full of Harvard Business Cases, TED talks, videos, group work and guest lecturers. Instructor is holding 4 hours of office hours and is happy to give advise about anything as mentorship is a key attribute for him.
Entrepreneurship
ENTP 1501	Special Topics in Entrepreneurship Management

	Money Matters
	An introduction to personal finance
Spring 2025 17684	005	Lecture (0.5 Units)	Open	60 / 100	Roger Martin	Mo 2:00am - 2:20am	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.
Writing and Rhetoric
ENWR 1506	Writing & Critical Inquiry Stretch II

	Writing about Culture/Society
	Culture, Games, and Writing
Spring 2025 12062	005	SEM (3 Units)	Open	11 / 12	Kate Natishan	TuTh 8:00am - 9:15am	New Cabell Hall 042
	First Writing Requirement; part 2 of 1505/1506 stretch.
	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 a 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. As well as writing about games, students will have the opportunity to write for a game. Syllabus
ENWR 1510	Writing and Critical Inquiry

	Writing about Culture/Society
	The Good Life
Spring 2025 11495	003	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	18 / 18	John Modica	TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm	Bryan Hall 310
	What does it mean to live a good life? As we build a life for ourselves, what are the fantasies, dreams, and desires—conscious and unconscious, culturally-endorsed and deviant—that shape our path? What happens when the life we want does not line up with the life we need: when the visions of “the good life” that are available to us actually betray our full complexity, our ideals, and/or the public good? What if, as people living in the twenty-first century, we are systematically unprepared to live good, meaningful lives? What kind of habits do we need to consciously develop to achieve the life we need, if not necessarily the life we want? This first-year writing course is designed with your general education in mind. It will introduce evidence-based approaches to reading and writing that will make the challenges of college more approachable and personally rewarding. In doing so, it will help you develop sophisticated habits of mind that are necessary for living in a politically and emotionally complex world. Assignments include three major essays and short weekly writing assignments, in addition to readings, in-class discussions and writing activities, and individual conferences with the instructor.
	Writing about Identities
	Gender in Speculative Fiction
Spring 2025 11016	017	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	18 / 18	Spencer Grayson	MoWeFr 10:00am - 10:50am	Bryan Hall 310
	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 short stories, play digital games, and watch TV episodes, music videos, and video game cutscenes. 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 the Arts
	Cemetery Literature
Spring 2025 11837	027	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	18 / 18	Hodges Adams	TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm	Kerchof Hall 317
	What does good writing actually look like? How is it made? What tools and information do a good writer need? This class focuses on the process of writing, research, and 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 will be class trips to Shannon Library, the Rotunda, the Memorial to the Enslaved Laborers, and the University of Virginia Cemetery.
	Writing about Culture/Society
	The Good Life
Spring 2025 12096	039	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	18 / 18	John Modica	TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm	Bryan Hall 332
	What does it mean to live a good life? As we build a life for ourselves, what are the fantasies, dreams, and desires—conscious and unconscious, culturally-endorsed and deviant—that shape our path? What happens when the life we want does not line up with the life we need: when the visions of “the good life” that are available to us actually betray our full complexity, our ideals, and/or the public good? What if, as people living in the twenty-first century, we are systematically unprepared to live good, meaningful lives? What kind of habits do we need to consciously develop to achieve the life we need, if not necessarily the life we want? This first-year writing course is designed with your general education in mind. It will introduce evidence-based approaches to reading and writing that will make the challenges of college more approachable and personally rewarding. In doing so, it will help you develop sophisticated habits of mind that are necessary for living in a politically and emotionally complex world. Assignments include three major essays and short weekly writing assignments, in addition to readings, in-class discussions and writing activities, and individual conferences with the instructor.
	Writing about the Arts
	(Re)Buildings
Spring 2025 12098	041	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	18 / 18	Gabby Kiser	MoWe 8:00am - 9:15am	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.
	Writing about the Arts
	Cemetery Literature
Spring 2025 12100	043	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	18 / 18	Hodges Adams	TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm	Bryan Hall 312
	What does good writing actually look like? How is it made? What tools and information do a good writer need? This class focuses on the process of writing, research, and 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 will be class trips to Shannon Library, the Rotunda, the Memorial to the Enslaved Laborers, and the University of Virginia Cemetery.
	Writing about the Arts
	Writers on Writing
Spring 2025 12102	046	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	18 / 18	Zoe Kempf-Harris	TuTh 5:00pm - 6:15pm	New Cabell Hall 036
	When we read a poem, play, or novel, we are presented with a final, published edition. But what about the abundant process materials, documentary clues, and fragments that give us insight into the writing process? Examining authors’ diaries, letters, drafts, and margin notes, this course invites readings of finished literary writings alongside the documents and materials that precede, accompany, and follow their creation. Looking at works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Philip Pullman to name a few, we will reunite published texts with these ancillary materials and writings—and in doing so, we will learn more about the dedicated writing practices of our favorite authors as models for our own. This writing course serves as an introduction to the academic paper techniques that will prove useful throughout one’s coursework at UVA, in English and across other disciplines. Discussions and course assignments will especially encourage the crafting of arguments through careful attention to authorial intent, process, and effect.
	Writing about the Arts
	Writing about Television
Spring 2025 12103	047	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	18 / 18	Cristina Griffin	TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am	Bryan Hall 332
	In this class, we will practice critical inquiry and hone our writing skills by engaging with one of the most familiar aesthetic forms of the last century: the television show. As we watch, read, discuss, and write about television together, our goal will be to approach this familiar form with a fresh perspective, not taking anything about television for granted. How do the formal elements of television shows build compelling worlds? How can we analyze these tv worlds while also valuing the emotional impact of television? How do television shows critique and generate culture? How do shows build arguments about experiences of race, gender, sexuality, and class? Television shows use words to build fictional worlds that have a giant impact (for better or worse) on the world in which we live. In that spirit, we will take seriously how we can develop our own writing and re-approach our practices of world-building and meaning-making through our words.
	Writing about Culture/Society
	Writing about Public Health
Spring 2025 13382	048	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	18 / 18	Rhiannon Goad	MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm	Bryan Hall 310
	With false data and unsourced health guidance littering our social media feeds, we live in a dangerous era of medical misinformation. Developing practical skills to communicate accurate medical information could save someone's life. In this course, you will develop storytelling skills and sharpen your ability to identify misleading medical information. In a series of essays, you will practice writing about medicine.
	Writing about Culture/Society
	You and A.I.
Spring 2025 12258	054	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	18 / 18	Piers Gelly	TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am	Bryan Hall 310
	The title of this course is "You and A.I." This semester, we will practice college-level writing by attempting to answer a question that all of us should find urgent and provocative: in the age of generative artificial intelligence, do we need first-year writing courses like this one? You have probably heard of generative A.I., either as a general term or by the names of the major generative A.I. platforms: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, or Google’s Bard. These platforms are trained on astonishingly large collections of human-written text, which they have “read” and scanned to detect patterns. Based on those patterns, they can produce texts of many different genres when prompted to do so. Let’s set aside (for now) the question of whether these generative A.I. models produce good writing. The point is that their writing is rapidly getting better. Soon, generative A.I. programs will be capable of producing college-level essays of sufficient quality to pass a course like this one. The question we urgently need to answer, then, is what college writing instruction should look like in the new world we’re about to enter—if we haven’t passed this turning point already.
	Writing about Culture/Society
	Writing & AI
Spring 2025 12260	056	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	18 / 18	Kevin Smith	TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm	Bryan Hall 334
	Generative AI has been—to put it mildly—a disruptive force. Public discourse around generative AI tends towards extremes: pessimists lament the end of work/school/thinking; meanwhile, the techno-optimists predict a utopia brought about by Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). It is clear that something has changed/is changing. Organizations from elementary schools to universities have had to adapt by creating policies and norms around the use of generative AI. The New York Times has sued OpenAI (maker of Chat-GPT) for copyright infringement. What can we make of this cultural moment? What does it mean for us as writers and learners? From targeted ads to TikTok influencers, BeReal to ChatGPT, much of our cultural experience is shaped and informed by digital technologies and much of our writing and communication circulates online. But the relationship between writing, technology, and culture is not a new one—throughout history, writing technologies like the printing press, the telegraph, and the internet have caused massive disruptions to the status quo. In fact, writing itself is a technology that fundamentally changed culture when it was invented, as Socrates famously details in Plato’s Phaedrus. This section of 1510 will examine historical, current, and future trends in this nexus of writing, technology, and culture. We’ll ask, among other questions: What is our relationship to the technologies we use and how do those relationships intersect with our reading and writing practices? What is the future of writing now that large language models and generative AI have become effective at (some kinds of) writing? What can the past tell us about the future of writing and generative AI?
	Writing about Culture/Society
	You and A.I.
Spring 2025 12480	058	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	18 / 18	Piers Gelly	TuTh 8:00am - 9:15am	Bryan Hall 310
	The title of this course is "You and A.I." This semester, we will practice college-level writing by attempting to answer a question that all of us should find urgent and provocative: in the age of generative artificial intelligence, do we need first-year writing courses like this one? You have probably heard of generative A.I., either as a general term or by the names of the major generative A.I. platforms: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, or Google’s Bard. These platforms are trained on astonishingly large collections of human-written text, which they have “read” and scanned to detect patterns. Based on those patterns, they can produce texts of many different genres when prompted to do so. Let’s set aside (for now) the question of whether these generative A.I. models produce good writing. The point is that their writing is rapidly getting better. Soon, generative A.I. programs will be capable of producing college-level essays of sufficient quality to pass a course like this one. The question we urgently need to answer, then, is what college writing instruction should look like in the new world we’re about to enter—if we haven’t passed this turning point already.
ENWR 2510	Advanced Writing Seminar

	Writing about Culture & Society
	Queer Writing: Theory and Practice
Spring 2025 13428	003	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	16 / 16	John Modica	TuTh 5:00pm - 6:15pm	Bryan Hall 310
	An advanced introduction to college-level writing through queer theory, literature, and art
	Our lives are shaped by language that is not our own. We interpret our emotional, social, and political lives using identity categories, assumptions about human nature and culture, and moral and ethical paradigms that are the products of history. Language places a limit on our ability to understand ourselves, others, and the world in their full complexity. This presents some major problems. How are our lives impoverished by the lack of a language that can dignify our deepest wishes, dreams, and desires? What would it look like to articulate, in clear and precise terms, the ways we actually live? A language that enables a richer, fuller, more meaningful form of living: what would it look and feel like? This course is an advanced alternative to the first writing requirement. It introduces evidence-based approaches to reading and writing that will enable success in college, but it does so through a method of instruction that is more demanding than traditional first-year writing courses. This section, specifically, focuses on queer theories and practices of writing. We will examine how generations of activists, scholars, and artists have used writing to expose the contradictions of our political systems and fundamentally transform how people live for the better. In doing so, you will practice transferrable critical and creative thinking skills while developing your identity as a politically-engaged intellectual. Writing assignments will be organized around developing a work of (critically) queer writing in any genre. Other assignments include reading discussions, short weekly writing assignments, in-class writing activities, and individual conferences with the instructor. No prior experience with gender and sexuality studies is necessary.
ENWR 2520	Special Topics in Writing

	Personal Writing: Experience and Expression
Spring 2025 20495	008	SEM (3 Units)	Open	15 / 16	James Seitz	TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm	Astronomy Bldg 265
	This course involves students in various forms of writing that encourage rather than inhibit use of the first-person pronoun, drawing on evidence that the most powerful writing often makes use of an “I.” Essays, polemics, reviews, parodies, op-eds, and more—we’ll read and write a wide range of genres in which the writer’s life, observations, and viewpoints engage with the world around them.
	Writing and Games
	Writing and Games
Spring 2025 20810	010	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	15 / 15	Kate Natishan	TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm	Dawson's Row 1
	Fulfills Second Writing Requirement
	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 a 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. As well as writing about games, students will have the opportunity to write for a game.
ENWR 3550	Advanced Topics in Digital Writing and Rhetoric

	Mapping
Spring 2025 19722	001	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	16 / 16	Kevin Smith	TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm	Bryan Hall 334
	Maps are ubiquitous and central to our engagement with the world, yet we seldom consider them as rhetorical texts—that is, as pieces of persuasive communication. This class explores maps and mapping as a form of writing that is tied to technology, history, culture, identity, and politics. Students will learn how to better read and interpret maps; how to use mapping to describe, analyze, and engage with places; and how to create multimodal texts informed by spatial thinking.
ENWR 3740	Black Women's Writing & Rhetoric

Spring 2025 19724	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	15 / 16	Tamika Carey	TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am	New Cabell Hall 594
	This course explores how Black Women use writing, literacy, speaking, and performance rhetorically to build the worlds they want to live in and the lives they deserve. Specifically, the course will teach you how to understand: 1) rhetoric as techne, or an art, that members of this group use to take action towards their social and political needs; 2) rhetoric as a lens for analyzing and critiquing the choices and consequences of literature, communication, and discourse; and 3) rhetoric as a resource for developing voice, style, and flavor in writing. Projects are likely to include: a discussion leading presentation; an analytical essay, and a final project.
Enviromental Thought and Practice
ETP 3500	Topics in Environmental Thought and Practice

	Africulture: The African Roots of US Agriculture
Spring 2025 14571	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	17 / 20 (23 / 25)	Michael Carter Jr.+1	Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm	New Cabell Hall 303
	Led by a practicing farmer-activist, Michael Carter, Jr. of Carter Farms in nearby Orange County, Virginia, we will examine how principles, practices, plants and people of African descent have shaped US agriculture, and thus, the lives of all Americans. By examining a wide range of history, laws, attitudes, cultures and traditions, we will see how many US staple commodities and practices have their roots in Africa and observe cultural similarities between indigenous cultures around the world. While evaluating realities of today’s Black farmers and the innovations they devise to survive in a system stacked against them, we will look for solutions to an array of challenges faced by today's Black farmers in the US food system and across a wide range of environmental and agricultural arenas.
French
FREN 3031	Finding Your Voice in French

Spring 2025 11864	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	9 / 15	Karen James	MoWeFr 12:00pm - 12:50pm	New Cabell Hall 407
	This course offers you the opportunity to develop your own voice in written and spoken French while gaining confidence in your command of grammar for effective communication and your ability to revise and edit your own written work. Finding your voice doesn't happen overnight, though—not in the language(s) we have been speaking since we were children, and not in a foreign language. Beyond your progress this semester, the main goals of this course are to guide you on this life-long journey, to help you become aware of your own best practices for learning French, and to consider how acquiring advanced proficiency in French intersects with and contributes to other personal, academic, and professional interests and goals. Engaging with diverse voices from France and the francophone world through short literary texts, documentary film clips, songs, social media sites, and other contemporary media, we will explore how language is used to express identity, narrate the past, communicate opinions about the world’s great challenges, and persuade others to take action. Building on insights from these sources, you will practice both creative and more formal genres of writing (a persuasive essay, for example) with the support of in-class collaborative workshops. Through an informal blog, you will share your individual interests and discoveries with your classmates and establish a regular habit of communicating your thoughts, opinions, and reflections in French. Integrated in all these activities, a semester-long grammar review will guide you to better understand how form and meaning work together in the process of expressing yourself in French.
Spring 2025 13372	003	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	15 / 15	Cheryl Krueger	TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm	New Cabell Hall 291
	Finding your voice in French as a writer or speaker doesn’t happen overnight. Not in the languages(s) we have been speaking since we were children, and not in a foreign language. The main goals of this course are to prepare you for more advanced French courses, 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 to other courses and to 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 interest by assigning and leading discussion of articles in French. They home listening skills with songs, podcasts, and other audio sources, and explore visual culture though via art works and advertising images. You will be encouraged to take reflective notes in class on your reactions to the materials and Ideas with which you interact.
FREN 3032	Text, Image, Culture

Spring 2025 11866	002	SEM (3 Units)	Open	6 / 15	Amy Ogden	TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm	French House 100
	Contemplative reading and writing
	This section will explore ways of using contemplative practices to - become more observant of how French-speaking artists (authors, filmmakers, poets, etc.) communicate through diverse media; - rebalance writing habits to transform anxieties into productive energy; - discover the joys of reading in French and sharing one's enjoyment with others both orally and in writing.
FREN 3034	Advanced Oral Expression in French

	FREN 3034 Advanced Oral Expression in French: Musically Speaking
Spring 2025 21198	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	14 / 15	Christopher Ice	MoWeFr 10:00am - 10:50am	New Cabell Hall 368
	In this course, popular music of the Francophone world from the beginnings of recording technology to the present will serve not only as an object of study, but also as a tool to develop speaking and listening skills in French. Students will expand their comprehension and interpretation abilities through close listening and lyric analysis. They will learn about influential musicians through biopic films based on singers’ lives, interviews, documentaries, and readings. An exploration of a wide variety of musical genres—including French chanson, different varieties of rock, pop, hip hop, rap, slam, zouk, and raï—will provide insight into artistic and cultural movements, as well as different perspectives on French-speaking societies in the 20th and 21st centuries. Presentations, participation in and leading of class discussions, creative and cultural projects, and interviews are just some of the ways in which students will engage with course material and actively work to improve their oral expression. No prior knowledge of music is required. Prerequisites: completion of or concurrent enrollment in FREN 3031
FREN 3043	The French-Speaking World III: Modernities

	How the Old becomes New
Spring 2025 19663	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	12 / 20	Claire Lyu	TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm	Nau Hall 142
	In this course, we will reflect upon some of the key questions that arise when we engage in the process of literary, artistic, or intellectual creation. How do we make something new out of what is old? How do we nurture originality in the face of mounting societal pressures to conform? How can we learn from the past without becoming subservient to it? By examining the works of modern and contemporary writers, artists, and intellectuals who engage in explicit dialogue with the views and voices of their predecessors, we will explore different ways in which innovation stems from tradition. We will read the French writer Colette who, in writing a memoir of her parents, comes to discover how her identity is shaped by what she has inherited from each of them; the French-Chinese writer Cheng who, elected to the French Academy, writes in a French imbued with Chinese language and thought; the Belgian-Rwandan musician Stromae who rewrites and performs in the 21stcentury, the aria of Bizet’s 19th-century opera, which, in turn, was inspired by a short story published earlier by Mérimée; and the Belgian feminist philosopher Despret who revisits the thesis of human exceptionalism that undergirds Descartes’ philosophy of the 17thcentury by reapproaching it from multiple perspectives that respond to the ethical, political, and ecological exigencies of our own century.
FREN 3050	History and Civilization of France: Middle Ages to Revolution

Spring 2025 14037	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Closed	15 / 15	Gary Ferguson	TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm	French House 100
	In this course you will explore your interests and deepen your knowledge of the major events, political figures, and the artistic, cultural, and intellectual movements, prior to the Revolution, that have shaped France as we know it and whose legacy is seen and felt to this day. Setting the stage with a survey of prehistoric and Roman Gaul, we will focus on the thousand-year period known as the Middle Ages, followed by the Renaissance, the Classical Age, and the Enlightenment. Subjects will be discussed both in terms of their original historical context and their evolving significance, sometimes contested, to later and present generations. Films, visual images, and primary documents will supplement readings from secondary historical texts. Through reading, discussion, in-class presentations, and research papers, you will continue to improve your comprehension and oral and writing skills in French.
FREN 3559	New Course in French and Francophone Cultural Topics

	Cultivating Your Voice in French
Spring 2025 19771	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	14 / 15	Amy Ogden	TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm	Bryan Hall 330
	... Through Theater
	Building on skills acquired in FREN 3031 (Finding Your Voice in French), this class helps students reflect on and become more confident in their oral use of French. Students will learn key principles of French phonetics, intonation, and rhythm, and practice applying this knowledge by reading aloud and performing plays in a supportive and comfortable atmosphere. Throughout, students will consider the role of the whole body in communication; explore the relationship between identity/character/mood and oral expression; and develop habits of noticing and assimilating new phrases. Pre-requisites: FREN 3031 must be completed before this class; FREN 3032 must be completed before or during this class.
FREN 4031	Writing With Style and Precision

Spring 2025 14038	001	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	15 / 15	Gary Ferguson	TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm	French House 100
	In this course you will review and extend your knowledge of French grammar and style, becoming more confident about how best to structure the French language and how to express yourself with clarity and concision. Regular short writing assignments will begin with the analysis of a model text. You will revise first drafts of compositions in response to feedback and through peer editing in order to produce a polished final version. Key aspects of grammar, such as tense use – especially the past tenses – the subjunctive, participles, and so on, will be studied systematically and in response to questions that arise through the collective writing process.
FREN 5560	Topics in Nineteenth-Century Literature

	Senses of Fiction
Spring 2025 14042	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	6 / 15 (6 / 15)	Cheryl Krueger	Tu 3:30pm - 6:00pm	New Cabell Hall 407
	How has literary criticism engaged with the senses, and how does engagement with the senses lead us to reconsider the relationship between literature and material culture, science, affect, nature, and the environment? To answer these questions, we will focus primarily on olfaction, taking into account more broadly how we read fiction and the spectrum of senses. Nineteenth-century France saw a surge of interest in smells and odor perception. Health reformers mapped the foul odors of Paris’s public spaces while individuals attended to the scent of their homes and their bodies. This heightened interest in eliminating, masking, and improving odors corresponded to an uneasy relationship between humans and their primitive past. Olfaction was generally considered a less refined, more animalistic sense. After all, as Freud pointed out, bipedal creatures rely on visual horizons, not scent trails, for safety. Quadrupeds sniff the ground; humans read poetry. Yet it is difficult to write about olfactory perception without turning to poetic devices such as metaphor and simile. To write about scent is to join a mode of communication unique to humans, with a sense considered by many to be an evolutionary throwback. Nonetheless, writers from Apollinaire to Zola have earned accolades and infamy for how vividly their words evoke smells. In this course we will explore the stench of city streets, the fragrance of perfume, olfactory perception and language, and the often surprising scent references in nineteenth-century works by authors including Baudelaire, Desbordes-Valmore, Zola, Huysmans, and Rachilde. Reading related texts of the era (books of etiquette, hygiene manual, scientific treatises, the popular press), we will consider how fiction and extra-literary writing on olfaction met, permeated, and illuminated one another. •Though the course it situated at a croisement of smell culture and literary culture and the nineteenth century we will also provide an introduction to 19th-century French literature in general, dealing with selected texts •Likewise, our focus on olfaction may will inevitably overlap with attention to the five iconic senses. •You will explore the relations between language and the senses, especially smell. •You will practice close reading of primary texts. •You will read literary texts with cultural history in mind. •You will practice formulating questions about the works you read. •You will share some of your work with the other students in the class and respond to their work. •You will examine the ways in which scholars of literature formulate research questions and write articles. •All students will present a close reading of a text to the class and lead a discussion of that passage •Students registered as 5560 will turn in a revised and written version of that close reading. •Students registered as 5560 will practice answering an essay question outside of class for the final exam. •Students registered as 8560 students will practice writing a scholarly paper with a specialized readership in mind •Through hands-on experiences (Ateliers olfactifs) you will have chances to explore your own relationship to smell perception and the language used to communicate about smell. What is the course level? • Open to graduate students with reading knowledge of French (primary works are in French) •Course conducted in French and English (depending on students’ backgrounds and the language of secondary readings) • Written work in French for most French MA students, or English for students from other departments and French PhD students writing their theses in English • MA candidates sign up for 5560 • PhD candidates sign up for 8560 • Advanced undergraduates may take 5560 with instructor permission
FREN 5570	Topics in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature

	Contemporary Fiction
	25 Years of French Literature of the Twenty-First Century, or French Fixxion Now!
Spring 2025 19713	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	0 / 10 (4 / 15)	Ari Blatt	Fr 9:30am - 12:00pm	French House 100
	When I first taught an iteration of this course, in the early aughts, contemporary French literature seemed to be in crisis. In his incendiary rant La littérature sans estomac (2002), for example, Pierre Jourde lamented the lack of aesthetic standards in the production of contemporary French fiction, claiming instead that the market had been overrun by mediocrity. Similarly, Jean-Philippe Domecq created a stir when he attacked a certain cadre of literary critics who, he claimed, do nothing but elevate the vast array of livres de divertissement to the status of “high art.” Acclaimed (and highly provocative) author Richard Millet, in L’Enfer du roman: Réflexions sur la postlittérature (2010), issued a scathing critique of the contemporary novel, lashing out against its role in the degradation of the French language. And in one of the few articles on the state of the field to have ever appeared in the New York Times, Alan Riding pondered the curious state of “French” literature in 2006, a year in which not only were the winners of four of the country’s most esteemed literary prizes awarded to “foreign” authors (American Jonathan Littel, to cite one example, won both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix de l’Académie française for Les Bienveillantes), but one of the most popular novels of the year (in France as well as in the US) was actually written in the 1940s by a Russian-born émigré who would later disappear in the camps (Irène Nemirovsky, Suite française). All of which seemed to beg the question, as Riding asked: “Is French literature burning?” Lately, however, after many years marked by the legacy of the retour au récit (Echenoz, Toussaint, Redonnet, Michon…), signs of a new kind of creative and even socially-conscious dynamism have emerged. From the roman d’enquête, “reparative” narratives informed by an ethics of healing and care, innovative “image-texts,” récits de filiation, and documentary-style exofictions to novels that exhibit a fascination for animots and a particularly Gallic iteration of eco-consciousness (I’m not sure whether to call it “nature writing” or not), the literary scene seems to have been enlivened by the inescapably present world in which authors—indeed, in which all of us—dwell. The recent crowning of Annie Ernaux as the latest Nobel Prize winner marks this moment—and seems to acknowledge this trend—in a significant and symbolic way. Rather than propose a definitive answer to Riding’s problematic and expressly provocative question, then, this survey of some of the most acclaimed and/or widely read prose works of the last 25 years (more or less) invites participants to ascertain the situation for themselves. Along with introducing a number of essential and readily available resources for scholars and enthusiasts of contemporary French literature, including the major journals, anthologies, radio programs, websites, and blogs, the course will also seek to provide opportunities to read and, more importantly, critique cutting-edge criticism on the works under consideration. Consider this part of the seminar a practicum on critical writing about contemporary French writing. While we will read all primary texts (and some critical analyses) in French, the course will be taught in both French and English depending on the object of our analysis (and, of course, on our collective mood).
FREN 5585	Topics in Civilization / Cultural Studies

	Intimacies of French Empire
Spring 2025 19711	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	1 / 10 (8 / 12)	Jennifer Sessions+1	Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm	Pavilion VIII 102
	The central goal of this interdisciplinary seminar is to explore the intimate as an essential site for understanding the workings of colonial power and the experiences of those subjected to it in the French empire from the seventeenth century to the present. We will begin with foundational scholarship in postcolonial studies on the management of bodies and sentiments in imperial contexts and then explore a new wave of scholarship that challenges us to expand our conceptions of the intimate beyond the biopolitics of sexuality and reproduction. Three overlapping questions will orient our exploration: First, what are the relationships that constitute “domains of the intimate” in colonial and postcolonial contexts? Second, and related, what are the spaces of the intimate? Finally, what are the material forms through which intimacy is created, articulated, negotiated, and challenged? Readings will cover a broad chronological span from the early modern period to the postcolonial present. We will have the opportunity to discuss some of these texts with their authors, who will join our seminar in person or virtually.
FREN 8585	Seminar in Cultural Studies

	Intimacies of French Empire
Spring 2025 19712	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	3 / 5 (8 / 12)	Jennifer Sessions+1	Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm	Pavilion VIII 102
	The central goal of this interdisciplinary seminar is to explore the intimate as an essential site for understanding the workings of colonial power and the experiences of those subjected to it in the French empire from the seventeenth century to the present. We will begin with foundational scholarship in postcolonial studies on the management of bodies and sentiments in imperial contexts and then explore a new wave of scholarship that challenges us to expand our conceptions of the intimate beyond the biopolitics of sexuality and reproduction. Three overlapping questions will orient our exploration: First, what are the relationships that constitute “domains of the intimate” in colonial and postcolonial contexts? Second, and related, what are the spaces of the intimate? Finally, what are the material forms through which intimacy is created, articulated, negotiated, and challenged? Readings will cover a broad chronological span from the early modern period to the postcolonial present. We will have the opportunity to discuss some of these texts with their authors, who will join our seminar in person or virtually.
German
GERM 2559	New Course in German

	Reading German Stories and Histories
	Reading German Stories and Histories
Website 20838	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	5 / 15	Cora Schenberg	MoWeFr 10:00am - 10:50am	New Cabell Hall 115
	In this course, students will practice and improve their language skills through reading a diversity of short German texts; we will also view and discuss films and short plays. Topics include poster exhibitions about the Weimar Republic and Germany from 1919-2019; texts will range from modern German literature to language history to everyday life during the Third Reich. These texts will be interspersed with regular grammar exercises and review. Requirements include regular attendance, tests, presentations, and essays. GERM 2559 can be taken for credit toward the German major or minor. Prerequisite: GERM 2020 or the equivalent.
GERM 3510	Topics in German Culture

	German Cinema
Spring 2025 20577	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	5 / 30	Paul Dobryden	TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm	New Cabell Hall 332
	This survey course examines the history of German cinema from the Weimar Republic to the present. We will study films by directors such as Fritz Lang, Douglas Sirk, Helke Sander, and Fatih Akin, who are considered part of the canon of German cinema even as they interrogated the boundaries of the nation. In so doing, we will examine how film was itself an important vehicle for defining Germanness, for both domestic and international audiences. Studying German cinema alongside Germany’s complex history can will offer insight into how stories and images help construct, problematize, or contest definitions of national belonging.
German in Translation
GETR 3420	German Intellectual History From Nietzsche to the Present

	W.E.B. Du Bois and German Social Theory: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Weber
Spring 2025 19824	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	16 / 40 (16 / 40)	Michael Wellmon	MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm	New Cabell Hall 309
	Looking back on his decades-long study of Black Americans in 1944, W.E.B. Du Bois observed that he had overestimated the power of reason and higher education to lead to political reform and human freedom. Although he had studied in Berlin and immersed himself in German philosophy and social theory, he had, he wrote, failed to grasp “how little human action is based on reason” and to appreciate “the economic foundations of human history.” In this class, we’ll try to understand what Du Bois saw in these German social theorists and thinkers like Freud and Marx but also in Nietzsche, Weber, and others around 1900. No knowledge of German or of philosophy required. All are welcome.
GETR 3470	Writing and Screening the Holocaust

Spring 2025 21182	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	24 / 25	Chrisann Zuerner	Mo 3:30pm - 6:00pm	New Cabell Hall 303
	This course grapples with literary and filmic narratives that depict the Holocaust from various perspectives. Examining diverse works and perspectives, the class will ground students in understanding and questioning how this traumatic past has been and is presently captured in various mediums. Engaging with questions related to memory, as well as positionality during the traumatic events, we will explore how these issues impact the works themselves, our own perceptions of the works, and implications for broader viewer- and readerships. Paying attention to lesser-examined histories, we will shed light on narratives from minority groups and how their voices have been silenced due to various collective and national memories. Students will work with various texts - from autofictional, fictional, to documentary, to gain an understanding of impacted groups, events, etc related to the Holocaust. Some of the key texts that will be discussed are Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive, Primo Levi’s Survivial from Auschwitz, Katja Petrowskaja’s Maybe Esther, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus I. Films that will be examined span from right after the end of World War II to present and may include: The Murderers are Among Us, Schindler’s List, The Zone of Interest, The Wave, Europa Europa, and The Reader to name a few. No prior knowledge about the Holocaust is expected or required.
GETR 3559	New Course in German in Translation

	Diary Fiction
Spring 2025 19811	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	17 / 20 (17 / 20)	Lorna Martens	TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm	Pavilion VIII 102
	For description, click on schedule number to the left
	Diaries are for intimate secrets? Yes--but not just! People have kept journals for many reasons. There are travel journals and sea logs, records of everyday life, testimonials to alarming events, gossipy accounts of social interactions, notebooks for capturing one's momentary aperçus and ideas, and so forth. Fiction writers, however, have invented many more uses for the diary form than these! The diary's strict yet elastic form (first-person periodic narration) has offered creative writers many intriguing possibilities beyond imitating the styles of real diaries. An ideal outlet for sincere self-expression, for intimate confessions, the fictive diary is also as if made to order for creating an unreliable narrator, one whose views are undercut by the plot. If a second voice is introduced alongside the diarist's monologue, this can destabilize the diarist's account, whereas, conversely, a diarist's truthful account can overthrow a second narrator's misguided opinions. Writing from day to day, a diarist is ignorant of what the future holds. Such blindness toward the future has inspired many writers to use the diary form for suspense stories (e.g., Dracula). In this course we will focus on the ways in which writers have imaginatively exploited the diary's formal features. We will also consider how diary fiction evolved from the late eighteenth century, when the first fictive diaries were written, to the present. We will read several masterpieces of diary fiction--novels--including Sartre's Nausea and Frisch's I'm Not Stiller, and otherwise stories from a brand-new anthology of short diary fiction. Students will have an opportunity to try their hand at writing a diary (easy!) and/or diary fiction.
	Marx, Capital, and Freedom: Translating Capital
Spring 2025 19815	002	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	11 / 40 (11 / 40)	Michael Wellmon	MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm	New Cabell Hall 309
	Open to everyone regardless of knowledge of German. Students interested in receiving GERM credit can enroll in a related independent study with Prof. Wellmon.
	Princeton University Press recently published the first new translation of Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 in over fifty years. This course will consider, in particular, how the PUP translation deals with the mysteries Capital claims shape our world––social struggle, the power of things, money’s generative powers, the futility of some work, the possibility of changing the world––as well as some of the most pointed critiques of Capital. The course will be taught in English. Students interested in receiving GERM credit can enroll in a related independent study with Prof. Wellmon.
GETR 3780	Memory Speaks

Spring 2025 19812	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	10 / 20 (10 / 20)	Lorna Martens	TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm	Pavilion VIII 102
	For description, click on schedule number to the left
	Memory Speaks Memory is a crucial human faculty. Our ability to remember our own past is one of the things that make us human. Memory has long been thought to ground identity: without memory, one has no sense of self. Memory has been seen as fundamental to psychic health, and even as a remedy in times of trouble, as well as essential to our ability to imagine the future. Remembering has its delights. Certainly the idea of losing one’s memory, through shock or illness for example, is terrifying to contemplate. Yet having too many memories of the wrong kind is believed to endanger our equilibrium. Maddeningly, given its power to make us healthy or sick, memory often lies beyond our conscious control. It operates according to its own laws, giving us what we want only sometimes. Undeniably useful, it has also been seen as deceptive. It is demonstrably suggestible. It is not surprising, therefore, that memory is a subject of vital importance in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences alike. This course will focus on individual memory and in particular on autobiographical memory (our memories of our own lives). We will read autobiographies and works of fiction, written from the early twentieth century to the present, by Patrick Modiano, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, and Marguerite Duras. We will also study two films on the theme of memory: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Inside Out. Concurrently, we will read psychological, psychoanalytic, and neuroscientific work on memory. Some attention will be paid to the issues of false memory, external memory, and mediated memory, as well. Two short papers, presentations, midterm and final
Global Studies-Global Studies
GSGS 3030	Global Cultural Studies

Spring 2025 20687	100	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	116 / 120 (116 / 120)	Michael Levenson	MoWe 12:00pm - 12:50pm	Minor Hall 125
	Global Cultural Studies offers an interdisciplinary approach to our present-day world against the background of its recent past. Engaging a wide variety of media (film, popular song, avant-garde art, memoir, political philosophy, etc.), the course examines conditions and conflicts in China, India, North and South Africa, and the Middle East. Urgent social-cultural issues – such as the global plight of refugees, the place of Gandhi in present-day Indian politics, the campaign for international human rights, the resurgence of religious faith, the crisis of the environment, the rise of authoritarian nationalism, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza – will be nodal points of concern. At every stage we consider the making of the world since 1945, the pressing difficulties that now confront it, and the fragile state of hope.
History-European History
HIEU 5585	Advanced Topics in Modern European History

	Intimacies of French Empire
Spring 2025 19196	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	8 / 12 (8 / 12)	Jennifer Sessions+1	Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm	Pavilion VIII 102
	The central goal of this interdisciplinary seminar is to explore the intimate as an essential site for understanding the workings of colonial power and the experiences of those subjected to it in the French empire from the seventeenth century to the present. We will begin with foundational scholarship in postcolonial studies on the management of bodies and sentiments in imperial contexts and then explore a new wave of scholarship that challenges us to expand our conceptions of the intimate beyond the biopolitics of sexuality and reproduction. Three overlapping questions will orient our exploration: First, what are the relationships that constitute “domains of the intimate” in colonial and postcolonial contexts? Second, and related, what are the spaces of the intimate? Finally, what are the material forms through which intimacy is created, articulated, negotiated, and challenged? Readings will cover a broad chronological span from the early modern period to the postcolonial present. We will have the opportunity to discuss some of these texts with their authors, who will join our seminar in person or virtually.
HIEU 8585	Advanced Topics in Modern European History

	Intimacies of French Empire
Spring 2025 19197	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	8 / 12 (8 / 12)	Jennifer Sessions+1	Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm	Pavilion VIII 102
	The central goal of this interdisciplinary seminar is to explore the intimate as an essential site for understanding the workings of colonial power and the experiences of those subjected to it in the French empire from the seventeenth century to the present. We will begin with foundational scholarship in postcolonial studies on the management of bodies and sentiments in imperial contexts and then explore a new wave of scholarship that challenges us to expand our conceptions of the intimate beyond the biopolitics of sexuality and reproduction. Three overlapping questions will orient our exploration: First, what are the relationships that constitute “domains of the intimate” in colonial and postcolonial contexts? Second, and related, what are the spaces of the intimate? Finally, what are the material forms through which intimacy is created, articulated, negotiated, and challenged? Readings will cover a broad chronological span from the early modern period to the postcolonial present. We will have the opportunity to discuss some of these texts with their authors, who will join our seminar in person or virtually.
History-General History
HIST 3559	New Course in General History

	History Internship
Spring 2025 19173	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Permission	9 / 20	J Seder+1	TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am	The Rotunda Room 152
	This course provides a framework for students pursuing history-related internships to bridge their academic and professional experiences. It combines an exploration of “self” in relationship to the complexities and structures of the professional organizations in which students work as interns with exploration of the professional applications of the knowledge and skills developed by History students. The course combines organizational behavior concepts and topics to expand knowledge and skills related to selecting and working in effective, productive, equitable, and humane organizations. Through personal assessments, Design Thinking creative strategies, guest speakers, and field trips, students will develop mindsets and tools to conceptualize the breadth and diversity of careers that capitalize on their talents, experiences, and interests as historians and make valuable connections between their academic studies and potential career paths.
HIST 9559	New Course in General History

	History of Science, Technology and Medicine
Spring 2025 19749	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Permission	5 / 6	David Singerman	We 11:00am - 1:30pm	Nau Hall 441
	The first part of the course will introduce a range of the different methods and approaches to the histories of science, technology, and medicine, emphasizing how these fields have been influenced by other disciplines such as sociology and anthropology. After that, the particular interests of students who enroll will shape the content of the tutorial.
Leadership and Public Policy - Leadership
LPPL 2750	Teambuilding and Facilitation

Spring 2025 16642	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	14 / 30	Matthew Busch	We 2:00pm - 4:30pm	Contact Department
	A majority of this class takes place outside at the University challenge course. An emphasis is placed on facilitation and teambuilding practice, allowing students to gain experience and insight from collective feedback.
	Effective facilitators are architects of engagement. Take part in practical facilitation, bridging theory, & real-world scenarios. Develop facilitation skills, clear communication, & strategies for effective group development. Emphasis is placed on facilitation practice, allowing students to gain experience & insight from collective feedback.
LPPL 4225	Leadership and Practice

Spring 2025 16556	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	45 / 47	Timothy Davis	Mo 5:00pm - 7:30pm	Rouss Hall 403
	LPPL 4225 is designed to foster three critical skillsets: 1) The expansion of your self-awareness to enhance your competence as a leader, 2) Learning ways to support and inspire the development of strengths in others, and 3) Combining these skills to improve the effectiveness of your student organizations at UVA by reflecting on the organizational and interpersonal dynamics of those groups.
Leadership and Public Policy - Policy
LPPP 2050	Bridge to Batten

	Enrollment is via application only - consult class website
Website 16594	001	SEM (1 Units)	Permission	32 / 25	Paul Martin+1	Fr 12:30pm - 1:45pm	Rouss Hall 403
	Bridge to Batten is a 1-credit CR/NC course for economically underrepresented students considering Batten's programs and/or a career in public policy. Course provides opportunities for academic, personal & professional exploration; increases knowledge of public service & policy worlds; & strengthens connections to peers & resource networks at the University to support student success. Instructor permission required via application.
LPPP 4991	Capstone Seminar

	Climate Change and Global Development Solutions
	Design and propose a project aimed at lessening the impacts of climate change on the most vulnerable
Spring 2025 20361	007	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	14 / 14	Molly Lipscomb	Th 2:00pm - 4:30pm	Dell 2 101
	Join me in employing the skills you have developed at Batten to design and propose a project aimed at lessening the impacts of climate change on those who are most vulnerable. We will be consultants to 4D Climate Solutions, a company in Lesotho improving irrigation systems to manage water insecurity issues related to farming. We will develop solutions to water and food insecurity in Afghanistan that take seriously the dignity of women and the related challenges under the Taliban. We will design interventions to decrease the human health and community impacts of flooding in West Africa. We will innovate on the structure of payment for environmental services programs to adapt them to the particular challenges of deforestation in Brazil. At the end of the semester, the most successful projects, depending on the interest of students, may be packaged as actual grant applications and submitted for consideration for competitive grants through the Center for Social Innovation.
LPPP 5540	Applied Policy Clinics

	Gun Violence Clinic
Spring 2025 16639	001	WKS (2 Units)	Permission	9 / 15	Michele Claibourn	Fr 12:30pm - 3:00pm	Pavilion VIII 103
	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 spring’s focus will be researching interventions to different types of gun violence with a focus on how knowledge derived from research and experience in other communities or at the state or national level applies to our local context. We will develop a set of brief documents for each intervention; these will be part of a community resource hub to support broader engagement and local efforts to develop and adapt policy interventions.
LPPP 7559	New Course in Public Policy and Leadership

	Development Policy: Poverty Reduction
	Designing and evaluating effective aid policies
Spring 2025 20686	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	9 / 20	Molly Lipscomb	TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm	Fayerweather Hall 206
	Why are some countries poor and how can we increase growth? How do we guarantee basic government services for the poorest? We will cover the fundamental issues in development: capacity, demand, and influence. We will begin with an overview of key topics in poverty, inequality, and growth, and then focus on the microeconomic foundations for these issues; capacity problems from land and labor and credit markets; and demand issues such as human capital (health and education), environmental issues, urbanization and infrastructure development, and risk and insurance problems. Finally, we will investigate political influence issues including decentralization and corruption. A strong focus of the class will be in understanding how different theories of development effectiveness can be tested and harnessed to design well-functioning anti-poverty programs. Students will develop their skills in explaining their theory of change and empirical evidence in short, policy-focused memos. By the end of this class, students will have received an overview of the most important development problems, and the key tools used by development professionals in designing aid interventions.
Leadership and Public Policy - Substantive
LPPS 5720	Public Interest Data: Ethics and Practice

Spring 2025 16601	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	17 / 18	Michele Claibourn	Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm	Pavilion VIII 103
	This course is intended to provide students experience with data science within a framework of data ethics in service of equity-oriented public policy.
	Our primary goals are: * Make progress on projects that advance social justice and policy understanding in collaboration with community partners and create work you can point to as part of your portfolio. * Practice working with real data (that is, messy data resulting from policy administration) to answer pressing questions with attention to the equity and ethical implications of our work. This includes finding, cleaning, and understanding data; exploring, analyzing, modeling data; visualizing, contextualizing, and communicating data; with care and humility and respect for the affected partners and communities throughout. * Develop experience in data workflows that support ethical data science, including processes for working collaboratively, openly, inclusively, and reproducibly.
Mathematics
MATH 8380	Random Matrices

Website 19853	001	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	8 / 8	Leonid Petrov	MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm	Kerchof Hall 326
	This course will explore a rich zoo of probabilistic models, with a focus on random matrices, dimer models, and statistical mechanical models of algebraic origin. Geometric structures that naturally arise in these contexts will also be discussed. The course content will be flexible and tailored to the interests of participants, making it ideal for most graduate students in the math department, second year and up. A key feature of the course will be a "reading course" component, where weekly meetings provide focused, interactive learning sessions.
Media Studies
MDST 3510	Topics in Media Research

	Media & Power: Approaches from Political Economy
Spring 2025 12832	002	SEM (3 Units)	Open	28 / 30	Pallavi Rao	MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm	Wilson Hall 214
	This is a course about studying the business of media through what is known as a "political economy" framework. Taking a macro-approach, we understand "The Media" as media industries composed of many firms and conglomerations handling diverse media operations with commercial imperatives and navigating larger national and international economic and political arrangements. Throughout, we will study how media organizations produce and transform their unique media products, how their management and leadership influence products and consumption patterns, how these organizations generate profit, how considerations of power such as gender, race, class, and sexuality, all operate through industry structures—such as ownership, profit models, advertising and public relations—and the ideologies, discourses and government policies that sustain these arrangements.
MDST 3559	New Course in Media Studies

	This Class is a Scam
Spring 2025 20137	004	SEM (3 Units)	Open	25 / 30	Lana Swartz	Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm	Gibson Hall 242
	This course examines digital economy through the lens of “scams.” Topics to be explored include: How scams exploit and shape online economies and cultures? What is the global political economy of scam? When economic norms and practices are changing so rapidly, what constitutes a scam and who has the power to decide? What impact will AI have on scams and scam prevention?
Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures
MESA 2559	New Course in Middle Eastern & South Asian Studies

	Sadaqah and Seva: MESA Superheroes
	Sadaqah and Seva: Middle Eastern and South Asian Superheroes
Spring 2025 18898	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Closed	20 / 20	Adrienne Resha	MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm	New Cabell Hall 111
	This course offers a semester-long study of Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian representation and racialization in American popular culture via the superhero genre. Engaging with visual media (comics, television, film), creator talks and interviews, and academic writing, we will think critically about how people and ideas travel across borders.
Materials Science and Engineering
MSE 2500	Special Topics in Materials Science and Engineering

	Pinball Machines: Materials to Play
Spring 2025 21131	001	Lecture (2 Units)	Open	7 / 20	Lynn Mandeltort	MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm	Jesser Hall 171
	A pinball machine is a half cubic meter box filled with materials science. From the flippers to the cabinet to the iconic silver ball, pinball machines offer a perfect vehicle for exploring the properties and limits of common materials. This class combines basic materials perspectives with nontechnical observations and hands-on experiences to help us ask questions like: How do metals, plastics, ceramics, wood, glass, and semiconductors comprise a pinball machine? If the game doesn’t play correctly (or at all), what has gone wrong? and … Why pinball? What makes a pinball machine fun?
Medieval Studies
MSP 3501	Exploring the Middle Ages

	Medieval Identities, Cultures, and Conflicts
Spring 2025 20014	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	24 / 25	Deborah McGrady	TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm	Nau Hall 242
	This course will (re)introduce you to the Middles Ages by decentering the common Eurocentric approach and prioritizing instead cross-cultural encounters that profoundly marked over a thousand years of shared history. Four units are planned for the semester: (1) early Iberia as an international center of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian exchange; (2) crusading culture as portrayed in epic poetry, satire, the diary of a Byzantine princess and writings by Muslims living in occupied Jerusalem; (3) travel and discovery as recounted by the well-known Marco Polo as well as globetrotters from Africa and Asia; and (4) an early history of women, studied here through the Arabic epic tale of Princess Fatima, Warrior Woman, writings by the first professional female writer – Christine de Pizan (d. 1431), and the lives of female spiritual visionaries. Our discussions will be enhanced by visits from numerous UVA professors who will discuss their research in relation to our topics. Course assignments include response papers, collaborative class activities, and a final research project that may take the form of a traditional paper, a podcast, or a creative work. This course can satisfy the Second Writing Requirement; fulfills the Artistic, Interpretative, and Philosophical Inquiry; and is required for the Medieval Studies major. No previous knowledge of the Middle Ages is needed.
Music
MUSI 3040	Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Music

Spring 2025 20291	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	23 / 25	Jade Conlee	TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm	Old Cabell Hall 113
	Moving backward in time from the 2020s to 1900, we will listen together to pop music, jazz, classical and everything in between. Central questions for this course include: What can music teach us about race, colonialism, technology, and the environment in the 20th and 21st centuries? How did musicians respond to the major political events (American and global) of their eras? How does historical perspective change how we listen? An incomplete list of musicians we will study includes Charlie XCX, Beyoncé, Avril Lavigne, the Backstreet Boys, DJ Screw, Whitney Houston, NWA, Kenny G, Michael Jackson, Gerard Grisey, Alice Coltrane, Carlos Santana, Bob Marley, Pauline Oliveros, Harry Belafonte, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Art Blakey, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Kurt Weil, Jean Sibelius, Eric Satie.
MUSI 3510	Music and Community Engagement I

	Sound Justice as Community Engagement
Spring 2025 13072	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	12 / 15	Nomi Dave	TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am	Wilson Hall 117
	This class explores connections between sound, listening, and the law. How do legal proceedings play out in sound? What does the law hear – and what does it not? Course materials include court cases and transcripts, music, film, novels, and academic articles. The class has a civic engagement component that offers students opportunities to meet with lawyers, artists, and other community members in Charlottesville and beyond, to produce research and creative work. It also provides a space to respond to and engage current events. The class can be used to fulfill the music major requirements, but musical or other artistic experience is not necessary.
Physics
PHYS 1425	Introductory Physics 1 for Engineers

Website 10817	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	82 / 125	E Dukes	MoWeFr 9:00am - 9:50am	Physics Bldg 238
	This course provides an introduction to essential concepts in the physical world, with an emphasis on analytic thinking and problem solving. The lectures include demonstrations and examples intended to reinforce an understanding of physical concepts and problem-solving strategies. The first semester (1425) focuses on kinematics, Newton's laws of motion, work and energy, momentum, static and dynamic equilibrium, simple harmonic motion, fluids, heat, and temperature. The second semester (2415) addresses electricity and magnetism, optics, and selected topics from solid state, atomic, and subatomic physics.
PHYS 1660	Practical Computing for the Physical Sciences

Website 13036	001	Lecture (1 Units)	Open	9 / 25	Bryan Wright	Tu 2:00pm - 2:50pm	Physics Bldg 217
	This course, PHYS 1660, will give you a kit of skills and tools that will help you do great things even if you're not a mathematical prodigy. All you need is a little computing expertise. This course is designed for novice programmers: no programming experience is required! We'll teach you all the basic skills you need.
PHYS 3250	Applied Nuclear Physics

Spring 2025 19913	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	11 / 25	Dinko Pocanic	TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm	Physics Bldg 217
	This course will explore applications of nuclear physics encountered in everyday life, and in various facets of modern society. We will first focus on descriptions of nuclear phenomena and nuclear theory necessary to understand nuclear technologies. This may take up about a half of the course syllabus. The remaining half of the course will be devoted to specific tools or applications of nuclear techniques, including particle accelerators, detection of radiation, medical applications such as imaging and radiotherapy, and power generation through nuclear fission or fusion. For some topics, we will discuss not only their scientific foundations, but also their economic impact on the environment and society. Readings will be based on the textbook and other supplementary materials including popular and scientific journal articles. Grading will be based on two exams, several homework assignments, two reports or presentations to be made during the semester, and a term paper.
Urban and Environmental Planning
PLAN 5500	Special Topics in Planning

	Townscape Planning For Rural-Urban Partnerships
Spring 2025 20322	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	6 / 12	Tyler Hinkle	Mo 6:00pm - 8:30pm	Campbell Hall 220C
	The concept of ruralism is evolving. We will examine the symbiosis between rural and urban spaces, focusing on the opportunities in rural communities, particularly in Appalachia. The interplay of geography, culture, and history will serve as lenses to understand and plan for aspects such as land use, policy, conservation, financing, and regional connections. We will examine practical and applied methods through case studies and analysis.
PLAN 5710	Transportation and Environment

Spring 2025 19547	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	10 / 15	Caetano de Campos Lopes	We 6:00pm - 8:30pm	Campbell Hall 220C
	Learning Objectives: • Become familiar with the environmental impacts of transportation systems, including local air pollution, GHG emissions, and life-cycle effects, and how to assess these through qualitative and quantitative methods. • Gain an understanding of the normative and economic factors that influence transportation systems and their relationship to urban development, equity, and sustainability. • Develop the ability to critically evaluate transportation projects, considering their broader implications on climate, public health, and social disparities. • Engage with practical exercises and case studies to explore real-world challenges and solutions in sustainable and equitable transportation planning.
	Transportation systems are essential to modern life, but their environmental and social impacts raise serious concerns. This course investigates these impacts, focusing on local air pollutants, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and the life-cycle effects of different transportation options. Students will engage in hands-on exercises to assess and compare transportation projects, exploring how normative and economic factors shape transportation decisions and their connections to urban development and equity. We will examine the environmental and social consequences of transportation choices, delving into the complex considerations of implementing sustainable, equitable transportation solutions. Through practical assessments and real-world case studies, the course aims to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the environmental challenges posed by transportation systems and the tools to evaluate them.
Politics-Comparative Politics
PLCP 4500	Special Topics in Comparative Politics

	Nation-Building
Spring 2025 12127	001	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	19 / 15	David Waldner	We 4:30pm - 7:00pm	New Cabell Hall 407
	In this research seminar, we consider why American occupation-based, nation-building produced capitalist, liberal democracies in Germany and Japan, while in most other instances, including the post-civil war American South, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, American nation-building fell far short of its goals. Readings include theories of nation-building and historical case studies. Following approximately 8-10 class sessions, students will write research papers (approximately 20-25 pages) in close consultation with the instructor.
Psychology
PSYC 4500	Special Topics in Psychology

	Raising Inclusive Children
Spring 2025 20379	004	SEM (3 Units)	Closed	25 / 25	Zoe Robertson	TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm	Gilmer Hall Room 250
	This course examines the development of prejudice in children, focusing on racial/ethnic, gender, and disability biases. Students will explore research on how prejudice forms, its effects on child development, and evidence-based strategies for reducing prejudice, with an emphasis on applying psychological theories to real-world child development scenarios.
Religion-General Religion
RELG 2285	Religion, Politics, Society

	Missionaries, Humanitarians, and Imperial Agents: U.S. Religion in the World
Spring 2025 21298	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	17 / 18	Laurie Maffly-Kipp	TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am	Kerchof Hall 317
	This course is designed for students with some background in religious studies or U.S. history who wish to survey the ways religion has shaped U.S. national development and foreign interactions.
	This course explores the complex intersections among U.S. political power on a global stage, and religious institutions and identities. We will explore two very broad questions: First: How has this nation’s history been shaped by religious encounters with “others” both inside and outside its borders? Second, how have perceptions of those others in turn affected U.S. responses—through, for example, foreign policy and diplomacy, missionary activity, and economic practices? We begin by confronting the history of U.S. power reflected in recent discussions of imperialism. Is the U.S. an “empire,” and what does that mean for our understanding of history and the nation’s future prospects? What roles have religious institutions, beliefs, and practices played in making U.S. international power? We will then proceed chronologically, examining first the interrelations of religion and state power in the colonial contexts of New Spain, the British Empire, the Black Atlantic, and the indigenous American worlds of the pre-1800 period. Then we will explore the role of racial and religious identity in the shaping of a continental and national community in the 19th and 20th centuries. Finally, we will explore contemporary U.S. values and religious beliefs abroad and briefly examine their relation to the shaping of U.S. foreign policy.
RELG 3051	Religion and Society

	Religion and (Capitalism in American) Society
Spring 2025 20857	100	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	14 / 18	Kevin Rose	MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm	New Cabell Hall 056
	The Spring 2025 edition of RELG 3051 will focus on the relationship between religion and economics in American society. Topics include: the role of Christian thought in the rise of American capitalism; whether the 19th century market revolution made religion more limiting or more democratic; the application of religious freedom law to modern corporations like Hobby Lobby; and the role of religion in the rise of “woke capitalism.” We will also consider the long history of religious efforts to either reform or replace capitalism as the dominant economic system in America.
RELG 3559	New Course in Religious Studies

	Religion and the Body
Spring 2025 20516	003	SEM (3 Units)	Open	6 / 20	Julie Cassaniti	TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm	Gibson Hall 241
	This course examines a variety of perspectives on the complex relationship between religious practice and bodily experience.
	This course examines a variety of perspectives on the complex relationship between religious traditions and bodily experience. Examining a variety of cultural and religious practices around the world, it engages with theories and methods of disciplinary cultivation, phenomenology, embodiment, and more to understand how religion is felt in and through the body.
Spanish
SPAN 4700	Spanish Culture and Civilization

	Todo sobre Almodóvar
Spring 2025 12498	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Permission	20 / 22	Samuel Amago	TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm	New Cabell Hall 268
	It has been said that it is impossible to understand contemporary Spain without looking at Pedro Almodóvar’s films. This class will test this hypothesis by studying the multifaceted identity politics of that country as seen through his movies shot between 1978 and today. Each week we will view and analyze a film in terms of how it reflects contemporary Spanish culture, art, history and politics. Critical and historical readings in Spanish and English will complement viewings and provide additional themes for class discussion. Prerequisite: SPAN 3010, 3300, and 3 credits of 3400-3430, or departmental placement.
Spanish in Translation
SPTR 3559	New Course: Spanish in Translation

	Race, Gender & Environmental Justice-Latin America
Spring 2025 20821	001	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	15 / 16 (15 / 16)	Kache Claytor	MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm	New Cabell Hall 064
	This course offers an introduction to the concepts and perspectives in environmental justice movements by exploring the intersections of Black feminist activism in Latin America. This course explores the ways that Black women across borders, languages, as well as temporal and spatial markers have responded to injustices that have not only accelerated environmental degradation, but also disproportionately impacted their communities and shaped their experiences. Through a critical examination of case studies, we will analyze how Afro-descendant women have led movements to protect their communities, land, and natural resources. Using an interdisciplinary lens, students will engage with ideas of environmental justice, climate justice, Reproductive Justice, extractivism, colonialism, and sovereignty. This course is designed for students interested in activism, environmentalism, Blackness and Indigeneity, Black feminisms, Latin American politics, and Black consciousness throughout Latin America. Through a mix of readings, films, podcasts, discussions, and community engagement, students will gain a nuanced understanding of the role of Black women in shaping environmental and social justice across diverse contexts.
Swahili
SWAH 1020	Introductory Swahili II

Spring 2025 11931	002	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	11 / 16	Anne Rotich	MoWeFr 11:00am - 11:50am	New Cabell Hall 064
	Prerequisite: SWAH 1010 Hakuna Matata! Let's continue exploring the rich Swahili language and cultures. In this course you will expand your vocabulary, master grammar, and dive into more meaningful conversations. From talking about your work, studies, and interests to navigating social settings like markets and hospitals, you’ll be equipped to handle everyday interactions with ease. Get ready to speak Swahili with confidence and flair!
SWAH 2020	Intermediate Swahili II

	SWAH 2020 Intermediate Swahili
Spring 2025 12043	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	6 / 15	Anne Rotich	MoWeFr 12:00pm - 12:50pm	New Cabell Hall 042
	Prerequisite: SWAH 1020 Hujambo!Take your Swahili skills to the next level with this intermediate course! Through interactive conversations, real-world materials, and videos, you’ll refine your grammar, expand your vocabulary, and build confidence in real-life discussions. Whether it's daily life or current events, this course will help you increase your proficiency in Swahili while deepening your understanding of East African cultures.
Systems & Information Engineering
SYS 5581	Selected Topics in Systems Engineering

	Cyber Systems and Operations
Spring 2025 19891	003	Lecture (3 Units)	Open	8 / 30	Andrew Schoka	MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm	Rice Hall 032
	A case-based exploration of cybersecurity topics across a range of engineering and business disciplines through a systems lens. This course challenges students to think like an attacker through analysis of real-world cyber incidents, hacks, and breaches. Gain practical experience with frameworks and methodologies used to define cybersecurity strategies, build robust security programs, and defend against digital threats. Emphasis is placed on relating theory to practice via classroom discussion of case studies tied to real-world cyber incidents, attacks, and breaches.
Women and Gender Studies
WGS 4500	Topics in Women, Gender & Sexuality

	How To Do Drag
Spring 2025 11879	001	SEM (3 Units)	Open	13 / 15	Aaron Stone	Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm	The Rotunda Room 150
	This course examines drag performance as a cultural phenomenon with an emphasis on representation: how various forms of media "do" drag by shaping cultural narratives about it. We will analyze and compare representations of drag in film, television, novels, life writing, social media, and academic theory to consider how these diverse representational forms construct our ideas about what "doing drag" is and what it means.
	Voices from the Global South
Spring 2025 13581	002	SEM (3 Units)	Open	13 / 15 (13 / 15)	Daisy Guzman Nunez	We 2:00pm - 4:30pm	Pavilion VIII 108
	This seminar will explore moments of possibility, belonging, and being in works of literature by Black and Indigenous Women from Latin America and the Caribbean. Through various methods and mediums, these writers raise the question: what exactly constitutes one’s sense of self and a sense of place?