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| African-American and African Studies |
 AAS 2500 | Topics Course in Africana Studies |
| |
| | Racial Passing in Lit&Culture |
| 12479 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (0 / 199)  | 18 / 18 | Alisha Gaines | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | This interdisciplinary course serves as an introduction to African American literature and culture that refuses to take its own Blackness for granted. What does it mean to pass? What does racial passing reveal about freedom, and belonging in the United States? We’ll examine how race is performed, policed, and reinvented through acts of crossing the color line in slave narratives, fiction, music, and film from the 19th century to the present. |
| | Black Hope, Black Despair |
| 12467 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 5 / 18 | Nasrin Olla | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | |
| | Email Professor Olla if you have questions about the course (nasrinolla@virginia.edu) |
| | Do we live in hopeful times, or are we stuck in a cycle of broken promises? This course explores how Black writers, thinkers, and filmmakers wrestle with that question. Some imagine a future shaped by progress, multiculturalism, and creative possibility — like Barack Obama or the poet Fred Moten. Others, like Frank Wilderson, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman, confront the deep roots of anti-Blackness in American life, asking whether freedom has ever really existed for Black people. We’ll read fiction by Toni Morrison, watch films like Get Out and Arthur Jafa’s Dreams Are Colder Than Death, and explore essays, interviews, and speeches that offer powerful, sometimes conflicting, visions of Black life. |
| | Race&Place in Af-American Life |
| | Race and Place in African American Life |
| 13186 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 3 / 15 | Sabrina Pendergrass | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| |
How did Harlem become the location of a 1920s Black cultural renaissance, and how did Atlanta now become viewed as a "mecca" for Black people? How have government policies shaped the ways Black people experience housing? How has residential segregation mattered for Black children's educational opportunities? How has place shaped the production of African American music? We will address these and other questions in this introductory course that examines African Americans’ experiences of race and place in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will consider the ways African Americans experience place in relation to work, housing, education, politics, food, health, technology, music, travel, mapping and more. We will discuss historical and present-day processes that produced Black people’s inequitable experiences of places as well as discuss the pleasures Black people find and the contributions they make in places they inhabit. We will ground our discussions in social science research and engage with documentary film, music, poetry, and other cultural forms that illuminate this impactful dimension of African Americans’ lives.
|
| | The Souls of Black Folk |
| 19281 | 004 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 9 / 15 | Sabrina Pendergrass | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| |
In this introductory course, we will examine the social organization of African American communities. The intellectual context for the issues we will study come from the foundational work of sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, and others. We will discuss African Americans’ social status and experiences at the intersections of class, color, gender, and sexuality. We also will study institutions within the community and consider social issues African Americans face today and will face in the future.
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| | AfricanAmericans in PopCulture |
| 19282 | 005 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 15 (26 / 30) | Robin Means Coleman | We 4:00pm - 6:30pm | |
| | Which mediated performances of Blackness do we find acceptable, and which do we scorn? How have Black Americans worked to assert their value in a culture marked by respectability politics? We will examine how media has worked to inform "respectable," exceptional Black self-presentation versus the deficient. Topics include: Donald Glover, the NAACP, Serena Williams, situation comedy, Tyler Perry, Bill Cosby, Sesame Street, horror, Lena Waithe. |
| AAS 3500 | Intermediate Seminar in African-American & African Studies |
| |
| | Black South in Pop Imagination |
| 13606 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 5 / 18 | Alisha Gaines | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | Inspired by the critical and popular success of Ryan Coogler’s film, Sinners, this interdisciplinary course explores representations of the Black South in 20th and 21st century literature, film, music, and television. Through close readings of various kinds of texts, we will investigate how the Black South has been imagined, mythologized, contested, and redefined in the American popular imagination. |
| | Africulture: Roots of US Ag |
| | Taught by Michael Carter, Jr., supported by Lisa Shutt |
| 13033 | 006 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 19 / 25 (19 / 25) | Michael Carter Jr.+1 | Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm | |
| | ETP 3500/AAS 3500 – Africulture, taught by Michael Carter, Jr. & supported by Lisa Shutt
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. https://learnafriculture.com/ |
| | Black Power & Environ Movement |
| | Discover the confluences of Blackness and environment through art, theory, and organizing history |
| 19558 | 008 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 6 / 20 | Joanna Evans | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | |
| | The 1960s in the US saw the popular rise of both Black Power and the modern environmental movement. Despite conceptual and tactical resonances, and Black communities’ disproportionate experience of environmental harm, these movements became seen as almost antithetical to each other. However, by studying them together we illuminate exciting dimensions of both movements and their visions of survival. This course combines interdisciplinary study of the art, personal writings, and organizing theories of the Black Power movement with critical readings in the environmental humanities. We will uncover how colonial conceptions of “nature” came to racially underpin modern environmentalism and explore how Black communities in the US and around the world have imaginatively and practically forged alternatives. Along the way, we may question and transform what we think of as “the environment” and Blackness. |
| | Black&TransOthersGothicLitFilm |
| 19559 | 009 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 1 / 20 | Jovon Moses | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | Known primarily for its hauntings, uncanny aesthetics, and psychological horrors, the Gothic regularly employs these themes through the horror of the Other, or individual bodies designated as Other. Whether a being resembling the cobbled together mass of Victor Frankenstein’s creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, or the terror of Heathcliff’s racial stain in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, the Other designates an abhorrent, wretched body to be feared, outcast, and, at worst, terrorized and destroyed. An unsuspecting genre emerges from such metaphorization of the Other within Frankenstein itself— the genre of science fiction, staging and restaging an encounter with the Other (or the alien planet, life-form, or technology) that has the potential to radically transform what it means to be human. This course will explore the figure of the Other as it emerges within gothic and science fiction literature, film, and art, augmenting our readings with critical texts from Black Studies, Trans Studies, Disability Studies, and decolonial theory. We will read authors such as Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, H.G. Wells, Phenderson Djèlí Clark alongside films, art, and compelling new media objects and experiences. Through sustained engagement with a consortium of objects, we will consider how bodies are imagined, constructed, and deconstructed at the site of the Other in the Sci-fi Gothic, building out a robust theory of the genre(s), its themes, conceits, and the ways in which racialized, gendered, and differently abled bodies are produced. In pursuing this path, we ask ourselves: What does the Sci-fi Gothic conceal and/or reveal about the bodies of the Other and the standards by which the Other is evaluated? How does it restage conflicts among the sciences, the sacred, and the secular at the level of the Other(ed) body or world? How do discursive histories of transsexualism and transgenderism converge at the site of the Sci-fi Gothic, particularly in consideration of a catalog of speculative media concerned with surgical modifications and the creation of chimeric bodies? How do histories of coloniality emerge within the Sci-fi Gothic, and how do they bear on the construction of the Other itself? What might decolonial thought, Black Studies, Trans Studies, and Disability Studies illuminate within these genres? What might these theories reveal about the unexamined “truths” held about bodies— black, trans*, or otherwise? |
| | Black Women, Slavery & Freedom |
| 19292 | 010 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 5 / 20 | Adam McNeil | MoWe 5:00pm - 6:15pm | |
| | This course has several objectives, the most important of which is to introduce students to the growing field of Black women’s history. Beginning in the early 1980s, a small cohort of mostly Black women scholars dug the trenches for the historiography of Black women’s lives, labors, and loves. Since then, scholarship has expanded each generation, and we will explore these contributions over space, place, and time. This is a syllabus that focuses on slavery and freedom, the North and the South (including the Caribbean), and the city, farm, and docks. You will read canonical texts from the 1980s and award-winning monographs (single-author books) published within the last decade. In this course, we will read Black women’s history written by Black women historians. |
| AAS 4570 | Advanced Research Seminar in African-American & African Studies |
| |
| | RacePowerProductionofKnowledge |
| 12697 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 4 / 16 | Liana Richardson | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | Who has the power to decide what counts as “knowledge” about racial inequalities? How is this power deployed and who benefits from it? How does the way researchers typically study racial inequalities reflect and reinforce these power-knowledge relations and can it be challenged or changed? In this seminar, we will discuss the social production of knowledge about racial inequalities by examining the conceptual, methodological, and discursive practices commonly found in health and social science research on Black people, especially research that frames them in comparison to others. We will evaluate how these practices reflect and reinforce the relationship between power and knowledge. We will also consider the role these practices have played in the commodification of Black suffering by examining, for example, how (i.e., to whom and for what purposes) funding for research on racial inequalities has been allocated and leveraged. Finally, we will discuss potential opportunities for re-imagining knowledge production about racial inequalities, including whether recent shifts in the research funding climate could open up more scholarly space for other(ed) ways of knowing. |
| | Black Feminist Theory |
| 19287 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 16 / 16 (16 / 16) | Alexandria Smith | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | |
| | This Black Feminist Theory class, positioned in an African American and African studies department, provides a high-level introduction to the core thinkers, texts, and tenets of a U.S.-based Black feminist intellectual tradition. This class is intended to provide a substantial orientation to Black feminist scholarship and to prepare students for further engagement with Black feminist concepts and principles in academic, social, and cultural settings. This course pursues what I understand to be Black feminism’s existential questions: What is Black feminism? What and who are Black women? Who are Black feminism’s proper subjects or objects? What are the challenges to Black feminism? What kinds of imagination and creativity are fostered from within a Black feminist framework? To engage these questions, we will explore theoretical, literary, visual, and sonic art from the 1960s to the present day, focusing primarily on the United States while incorporating other diasporic contexts. |
| American Studies |
| AMST 3750 | Placed and Displaced in America |
| |
| 20924 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed  | 25 / 25 (25 / 25) | Lisa Goff | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | 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 for insights into race, ethnicity, gender, class, and generation in America.
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| AMST 3790 | Moving On: Migration in/to the US |
| |
| 19275 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 25 / 25 (25 / 25) | Lisa Goff | TuTh 5:00pm - 6:15pm | |
| | “Moving On: Migration In/To the U.S.” examines the history of voluntary, coerced, and forced migration in the U.S. Students will trace changing attitudes about migration over time using a variety of cultural products, including videos, books, documentaries, poems, paintings, graphic novels, photographs, fashion, digital humanities, and academic scholarship. Class participation/contribution is the core of this class. Students will be required to volunteer 5-10 hours with a migration-related project during the course of the semester. |
| AMST 4559 | New Course in American Studies |
| |
| | The Politics of US Citizenship |
| 20138 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (13 / 199) | 18 / 18 | Lisa Cacho | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | |
| | Is U.S. citizenship an ethical institution? Citizenship is inherently exclusionary. It differentiates insiders from outsiders and grants different privileges and immunities based on a people’s status to their nation of residence. But what if avenues for legal immigration are all but impossible due to decades of a preference system premised on heterosexual marriage? What if immigration laws suddenly and severely restrict the number of immigrants who can enter, but the demands for labor and the migration patterns those demands have established continue to increase? Shouldn't nations, such as the Chamorro Nation (Guam) or the Cherokee Nation, also have the right to regulate their borders? This class examines U.S. citizenship comparatively and relationally to explore the many historical and contemporary controversies of US citizenship and national sovereignty. Rather than offering one argument or one solution, this class encourages students to look beyond the liberal vs. conservative binary. |
| Anthropology |
| ANTH 3559 | New Course in Anthropology |
| |
| | Neurodiversity Medicine & Soc. |
| 20390 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (1 / 199) | 30 / 30 | Aron Marie | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | The neurodiversity movement reframes existing medical diagnostic categories (i.e. Autism, ADHD, intellectual disability, mental health) as natural variation in cognitive abilities and brain function. In this course we examine how this has impacted the social and medical lives of neurodiverse individuals, their families and allies. We also explore how cognitive variation and mental health are understood in different cultural contexts. |
| | Capitalism and the Body |
| 20391 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (2 / 199) | 20 / 20 | Erin Moriarty | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | |
| | This course investigates the political economy of the body. We examine disability beyond the traditional "medical model," and rather as a social and political category shaped by capitalism. We explore key theoretical frameworks and delve into how industries and institutions profit from the commodification of bodies and care. The course uses an intersectional lens to understand how race, gender, disability, and class compound the experiences of people under capitalism. We will examine case studies in medical tourism, plastic surgery, cochlear implants, signing gloves, and so on. |
| ANTH 5440 | Ghost in the Machine: Language, AI, and Society |
| |
| 20886 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Permission | 20 / 20 | Nathan Wendte | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | |
| | When requesting professor permission to enroll, please include an answer to the questions: "What aspects of AI are of greatest interest to you? What is your experience engaging with those questions?" There are no right/wrong answers! |
| History of Art and Architecture |
| ARAH 9510 | Seminar in Medieval Architecture |
| |
| | Everyday Medieval Life |
| | The Material Culture of Lay Piety: Religion in Everyday Medieval Life |
| 19251 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 12 | Lisa Reilly | Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm | |
| | This course will cover all forms of visual culture - painting, sculpture, architecture etc.It can also be used to count towards the Digital Humanities certificate if students choose to do a digital project rather than a paper. |
| | How did ordinary men and women experience the sacred in their daily lives? This seminar investigates the vibrant world of lay religious practice in later medieval England, where the parish church served as the beating heart of community life. Through close examination of material culture—from rood screens and wall paintings to liturgical vessels and funeral monuments—we will reconstruct how pre-Reformation Christians encountered the divine through their senses, shaped their spiritual identities, and negotiated their relationships with the supernatural.
Moving beyond elite ecclesiastical history, we will ask: What did it mean to be a parishioner? How did architecture guide devotional experience? What can churchwardens' accounts, wills, and surviving objects reveal about the religious imagination of the laity?
Classes will be discussion-based, engaging with recent scholarship in material religion, sensory history, and the social history of the church. Each student will develop a substantial research project in consultation with the instructor, culminating in either a traditional research paper or a digital humanities project.
|
| History of Art |
| ARTH 1153 | Space Out! Cosmic Art from Prehistory to the Present |
| |
| 20812 | 100 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (16 / 199) | 60 / 60 | Eric Ramirez-Weaver | MoWe 9:00am - 9:50am | |
| | Looking outward and upward at the starry sky, artists, philosophers, and scientists have throughout history consistently sought to situate themselves within the cosmos and to comprehend its heavenly machinery. Creative efforts at understanding or harnessing the significance of the planets and the stars have resulted in architectural wonders such as Stonehenge, zodiacal floor mosaics in late antique synagogues, star pictures in medieval manuscripts, Islamic celestial globes and astrolabes, illustrations for medical treatment, alchemical interventions, observation or imagination of the heavens, and more modern treatments ranging from Joseph Cornell to Star Wars. This course traces the development of scientific, political, spiritual, magical, and intellectual technologies of power that have tied individuals to their views and uses for astronomy. Topics include: stars and rule, astronomy, astrology, Ptolemy’s universe, Christian reinterpretation, Arabic or Islamic contributions, alchemy, magic, medicine, Galileo, science fiction, Chesley Bonestell, Remedios Varo, Kambui Olujimi, androids, Star Trek, and Star Wars. |
| ARTH 2151 | Early Christian and Byzantine Art |
| |
| 19243 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (6 / 199) | 50 / 50 | Foteini Kondyli | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | Discover the spectacular world of Byzantine art and architecture, from glittering mosaics and soaring domes to sacred icons and jeweled masterpieces. This course explores eleven centuries of artistic brilliance, revealing how visionary Byzantine artists and builders fused faith, innovation, and power to create one of history’s most extraordinary cultural legacies. |
| ARTH 3591 | Art History Colloquium |
| |
| | Medieval Mayhem |
| 13476 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (2 / 199) | 20 / 20 | Eric Ramirez-Weaver | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | |
| | In this course, we will explore the historical and ideological frameworks in which medieval mystical practices joined the human body with nature, transcended the cosmic harmonies of divine proportion, and attempted to fashion the world according to desire and belief. We examine purifying practices such as the Eucharist or baptism as well as the manipulation of cosmic forces for personal or political reasons, using techniques ranging from horoscopic astrology to necromancy. Lastly, we will investigate the role of medievalism in the ideological presentation of histories about the medieval period, with a focus upon the “wizarding world” of Harry Potter. Topics covered include: celestial modeling, eschatology, apocalypses, astrological prediction, horoscopes, talismans and crystals, spells and incantations, medieval gynecology, Hildegard of Bingen, monstrous races, military machinations, relics and reliquaries, medieval mysticism, Margery Kempe, phenomena such as "holy
anorexia," alchemical theory, Hieronymus Bosch, and the medievalism of Harry Potter. |
| ARTH 3595 | Art History Practicum |
| |
| | Archive Archaeology |
| 19235 | 001 | PRA (3 Units) | Open | 13 / 15 | Foteini Kondyli | MoWe 5:00pm - 6:15pm | |
| | Archive Archaeology takes you behind the scenes of discovery, where forgotten excavation notebooks, maps, and photos become keys to the past. Working with the original Athenian Agora Excavation archives, you’ll reconstruct parts of medieval Athens through 3D and VR projects, transforming legacy data into vivid, interactive insights into how people once lived, built, and defended their city. |
| Studio Art |
| ARTS 2559 | New Course in Studio Art |
| |
| | Art, AI and Creativity |
| | Art, AI and the Future of Creativity |
| 20957 | 001 | STO (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 12 (11 / 12) | Mona Kasra | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | How do artists, designers, and performers integrate AI into their work? What new creative possibilities emerge from human-machine collaboration? What social, cultural, and ethical implications arise when algorithms shape art? This course investigates how AI transforms creativity, authorship, and perception, engaging students in both historical and contemporary contexts. Activities include critical reflection, discussion, and hands-on projects. No technical background required—just a willingness to question and explore the future of art in a digital age. |
| American Sign Language |
| ASL 3559 | New Course in American Sign Language |
| |
| | Politics of Interpreting |
| 19935 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 15 / 25 | Aron Marie+1 | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | Sign language interpreting is situated at the intersection of deaf and hearing communities. As such, it is permeated by ethical tensions, power dynamics, and interpersonal politics. Students will examine ethics at multiple layers and scales: economies of access, normative expectations for the interpreter’s role(s), professional standards, and everyday ethics. Students will explore multiple perspectives with regard to the tensions and power dynamics that animate ethical debates in interpreting. |
| ASL 4750 | Contemporary Deaf Studies |
| |
| 19934 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 24 / 25 | Christopher Krentz | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | Examines such topics as ASL linguistics; deaf education; cultural versus pathological views of deaf people; controversies over efforts to eliminate sign language and cure deafness; ASL poetry and storytelling; deafness and other minority identities; and the international deaf community.
No prior knowledge of Deaf culture or ASL is required for this course.
Required for the Minor in ASL and Deaf Culture |
| Astronomy |
| ASTR 8500 | Current Astronomical Topics |
| |
| | Professional Development |
| Website 11629 | 001 | Lecture (1 Units) | Open | 8 / 24 | Robert O'Connell | Tu 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | A topical seminar on professional development
for graduate students in astronomy to prepare them for
research careers in academia, government, and
industry. Topics discussed include navigating the post-PhD
job market, writing proposals and curriculum vitae, giving
presentations, and ethics in research.
|
| Biology |
| BIOL 4260 | Cellular Mechanisms |
| |
| | Advances in Precision Drug Discovery & Repurposing |
| 11465 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Permission | 49 / 60 | Mike Wormington | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | |
| | What are precision drugs? Aren't all drugs precise? In simplest terms, a precision drug can be defined as "a drug that is most effective in a defined subset of patients and for which pre-treatment 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. Progress continues to made in precision oncology with the development of next gen drugs such as antibody drug conjugates, 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.
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%. Therefore drug repurposing is an increasingly alternative with a significantly shorter time frame, lower costs 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. Repositioning (also referred to as recycling) most commonly refers to drugs that 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).
Course Objectives
This course will use a case study approach to examine several paradigms of precision drug discovery and repurposing. 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 and interpret research papers in a collaborative, discussion-based format. Students will work in groups to present their findings in both informal "whiteboard talks" and formal presentations. |
| Classics |
| CLAS 2040 | Greek Mythology |
| |
| 10428 | 100 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open, WL (1 / 199) | 146 / 240 | Ivana Petrovic | MoWe 10:00am - 10:50am | |
| | Why was Achilles so angry? How did Medea handle her husband’s request for divorce? What trick did Aphrodite use to win a beauty contest? What is the real story behind ‘Kaos’ and how many children did Zeus really have? In this course, we’ll dive into the wild and wonderful world of Greek and Roman mythology, exploring epic, tragic, comic and sometimes downright silly tales of gods, heroes, and mortals. Along the way, we’ll see how these myths were told in antiquity, reimagined in art, and reshaped through the centuries up to today. From Chaos at the beginning of the universe to the Netflix series Kaos, Percy Jackson, The Song of Achilles, and Circe, we’ll trace the timeless stories that continue to fascinate and delight us.
Quizzes, short writing and creative assignments, midterm, final examination.
|
| Commerce |
| COMM 4522 | Topics in Business Analytics |
| |
| | ML/AI w/ Low-Code |
| 14687 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 21 / 35 | Brent Kitchens | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | Machine learning and artificial intelligence form the foundation of a large variety of analytics applications that offer significant value in today’s business environment and beyond. In this accessible, hands-on course, students will be introduced to the basic concepts of how ML and AI models are developed, evaluated, and deployed to create value, and learn how to how to practically apply these concepts to support real-world decisions and actions. Through a series of labs, assignments, and a capstone project, students will use these concepts to build, evaluate, and deploy predictive ML/AI models using a variety of low-code technologies. The course will also cover managerial considerations employing analytics initiatives to create business and societal value in an effective, efficient, and ethical way. Note: no prior technical knowledge is required to succeed in this course. All concepts are taught from a baseline that does not assume prior experience with coding, machine learning, or AI. |
| COMM 5500 | Topics in Commerce |
| |
| | Multicultural Commerce |
| | The class meets for the first 7 weeks of the semester. |
| Syllabus 21060 | 001 | Lecture (1.5 Units) | Wait List (2 / 199) | 25 / 25 | Steven Johnson | We 3:30pm - 6:15pm | |
| | Today, organizations around the world face a challenging landscape for navigating employee, supplier, customer, regulatory, and societal expectations around culture, race, and ethnicity. We live in an era where you can communicate instantaneously with nearly anyone, anywhere in the World. Yet, misunderstandings, culture clashes, and conflict persist within and across organizations. Through reading, discussion, research, and reflection, students will learn and apply tools and frameworks to better navigate diverse multicultural contexts in global commerce. |
| Computer Science |
| CS 2501 | Special Topics in Computer Science |
| |
| | Back to the HCI Future |
| 20599 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 7 / 10 (7 / 24) | Panagiotis Apostolellis | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | This introductory course to Human-Computer Interaction covers fundamental HCI concepts and how they apply to the evolving AI software around us, before moving into a project-based design of some futuristic software using a UX Lean methodology (commonly used in Agile Dev teams). It is recommended for any student who wants to explore this exciting multidisciplinary field. |
| | Back to the HCI future is an introductory course to the field of Human-Computer Interaction, extended to examine how established practices of HCI can be used to design future technologies. Students will learn fundamentals about User Experience design (UX)—an extension of HCI—and apply techniques used by UX designers in an Agile software development setting. This CS special topics course is open to anyone with a sincere interest to learn how to move beyond translating a requirements document into a successful software. |
| CS 3501 | Special Topics in Computer Science |
| |
| | Back to the HCI Future |
| 21681 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 0 / 14 (7 / 24) | Panagiotis Apostolellis | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | This introductory course to Human-Computer Interaction covers fundamental HCI concepts and how they apply to the evolving AI software around us, before moving into a project-based design of some futuristic software using a UX Lean methodology (commonly used in Agile Dev teams). It is recommended for any student who wants to explore this exciting multidisciplinary field. CS3501 students will have an elevated role in their teams, closer to a front-end developer. |
| | Back to the HCI future is an introductory course in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, extended to examine how established HCI practices can be used to design future technologies. Students will learn fundamentals about User Experience design (UX)—an extension of HCI—and apply techniques used by UX designers in an Agile software development setting. This CS special topics course is open to anyone with a sincere interest in learning how to move beyond translating a requirements document into a successful software product. |
| CS 4501 | Special Topics in Computer Science |
| |
| | Carbon Efficient Computing |
| | Carbon Efficient Computing |
| Website 20990 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (4 / 199) | 40 / 40 | Derrick Stone | MoWeFr 10:00am - 10:50am | |
| | This is a pilot version of the course; enrollment is limited and will rely heavily on reading and discussion. Mathematics will be at a high school level, but some understanding of processing and algorithms is required. |
| | This course provides a review of computing resources and carbon release on the environment, facility with evaluating corporate computing impact in terms of carbon release, and how to propose improvements to a carbon release profile. |
| | Cryptographic Protocols |
| | Cryptographic Protocols from the Ground Up, or: How to Work Together without Trusting One Another |
| 19577 | 006 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 43 / 70 | John Doerner | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | Suppose that Alice, Bob, and Carol each know a secret, and they want to perform a computation together using their secrets, but they do not trust one another. In this class, we will start from the basic question of how they can communicate securely, and build our way up to a protocol that allows them to jointly compute any function on their secrets without revealing those secrets to one another. Along the way, we will explore how to define 'security' not just for data, but for computations, we will determine when secure computation is possible and when it is impossible, and we will learn all of the cryptographic tools that we need to achieve our goal, including digital signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, and consensus protocols.
This course will be taught at an advanced undergraduate level, and it requires some mathematical maturity: students should be comfortable using mathematical notation, and with reading and writing proofs. The intent of this course is that students will learn how to think about security of computations involving multiple participants and understand a swathe of techniques and results crypographic protocol design and the theory of distributed computing. This course complements a course in the foundations of cryptography, but it does not require any background in cryptography, distributed computing, or networking. |
| | AI & Humanity |
| Website 20989 | 007 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (10 / 199) | 83 / 80 | David Evans | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | |
| | This course explores impacts of AI on humanity, with a focus on understanding and mitigating unintended harms from AI and intended abuses of AI systems. Expected topics include fairness, privacy, copyright infringement, robustness, safety, economic disruption, and cultural diminishment.
|
| CS 6501 | Special Topics in Computer Science |
| |
| | Workshop on Building AI Agents |
| Website 19581 | 007 | Lecture (3 Units) | Closed | 30 / 30 | Henry Kautz | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | In this hands-on workshop, we will learn how to build AI agents: systems powered by large-language models that autonomously interact with services, tools, and other agents. |
| | Security of AI Systems |
| Website 17481 | 008 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 5 / 38 | Wajih Ul Hassan | TuTh 5:00pm - 6:15pm | |
| | This graduate-level course explores the security of large language models (LLMs), covering common attack vectors and defense strategies. Emphasis is on practical applications: students will analyze recent research from top venues and industry labs, understanding how adversaries exploit LLMs and how to mitigate these threats. The syllabus is organized into weekly modules with key readings from academic papers. |
| | Advanced Embedded Systems |
| | Real-Time Embedded Systems |
| Website 17139 | 013 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 2 / 12 (35 / 48) | Homa Alemzadeh | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | This course provides the foundational knowledge and hands-on experience in design and validation of embedded computing systems, with a focus on embedded C programming and real-time operating systems for ARM® Cortex-M Microcontrollers. Topics include: embedded system architectures, hardware software interfacing, memory management, multitasking, interrupt handling, and real-time scheduling. |
| | This course provides the foundational knowledge and hands-on experience in design and validation of embedded computing systems, with a focus on embedded C programming and real-time operating systems for ARM® Cortex-M Microcontrollers. Topics include: embedded system architectures, hardware software interfacing, memory management, multitasking, interrupt handling, and real-time scheduling. |
| Drama |
| DRAM 2559 | New Course in Drama |
| |
| | Art, AI and Creativity |
| | Art, AI and the Future of Creativity |
| 20287 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 12 (11 / 12) | Mona Kasra | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | How do artists, designers, and performers integrate AI into theirwork? What new creative possibilities emerge from human-machine collaboration? What social, cultural, and ethicalimplications arise when algorithms shape art? This courseinvestigates how AI transforms creativity, authorship, andperception, engaging students in both historical andcontemporary contexts. Activities include critical reflection,discussion, and hands-on projects. No technical backgroundrequired—just a willingness to question and explore the future ofart in a digital age. |
| DRAM 3410 | Acting II |
| |
| 12147 | 001 | STO (3 Units) | Wait List (10 / 199) | 12 / 12 | Marianne Kubik | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | |
| | * SPRING 2026 This course DOES NOT REQUIRE Instructor Permission this semester. |
| Electrical and Computer Engineering |
| ECE 3502 | Special Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering |
| |
| | Third-Year Design Experience |
| | PCB Design |
| 17487 | 003 | Lecture (3 Units) | Closed | 30 / 30 | Adam Barnes | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | This course is intended for 3rd year students prior to taking their Capstone design course. |
| | The world runs on electronics, and those electronics are assembled on printed circuit boards (PCBs). Although much of the electronics is fully integrated on a chip, there are still many needs for interfaces between chips and other elements of the circuit. Engineering design is a critical skill, and the design of PCB circuits is a trenchant introduction to the design process. This course will help you learn engineering design and prepare you for your Capstone senior design project. This course will cover best practice PCB layout techniques, setting and prioritizing design specifications for a project, learning how to read data sheets, and designing and implementing testing plans for a project to measure system performance.
|
| ECE 4430 | Real-time Embedded Systems |
| |
| Website 21431 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Closed | 24 / 24 (35 / 48) | Homa Alemzadeh | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | This course provides the foundational knowledge and hands-on experience in design and validation of embedded computing systems, with a focus on embedded C programming and real-time operating systems for ARM® Cortex-M Microcontrollers. Topics include: embedded system architectures, hardware software interfacing, memory management, multitasking, interrupt handling, and real-time scheduling. |
| | This course provides the foundational knowledge and hands-on experience in design and validation of embedded computing systems, with a focus on embedded C programming and real-time operating systems for ARM® Cortex-M Microcontrollers. Topics include: embedded system architectures, hardware software interfacing, memory management, multitasking, interrupt handling, and real-time scheduling. |
| ECE 4502 | Special Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering |
| |
| | Adaptive Estimation & Control |
| 17592 | 004 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 6 / 15 (12 / 35) | Gang Tao | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | We will give an introduction to model-based adaptive parameter estimation and adaptive control techniques which can effectively deal with systems whose parameters are uncertain. We will study the popular gradient, least-squares and Lyapunov algorithms for adaptive parameter estimation of parametric system models and dynamic system models. We will also design, analyze and evaluate some typical model reference adaptive control, adaptive pole placement control and adaptive robot control systems using such adaptive algorithms. We will show how such adaptive schemes can achieve the desired estimation and control system performance, through learning and adaptation to deal with system uncertainties.
For information about "Applications of adaptive estimation", see
https://www.google.com/search?q=applications+of+adaptive+estimation
For information about "Applications of adaptive control", see
https://www.google.com/search?q=applications+of+adaptive+control
For information about "Applications of adaptive estimation and control in machine learning", see
https://www.google.com/search?q=applications+of+adaptive+estimation+and+control+in+machine+learning
For more information, you may also ask the following questions in ChatGPT:
what are the applications of adaptive estimation and adaptive control
in machine learning?
what are the applications of adaptive estimation and adaptive control?
*** ***
Prerequisite: Knowledge of Differential equations and Signals & Systems
|
| ECE 6501 | Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering |
| |
| | Advanced Embedded Systems |
| | Real-Time Embedded Systems |
| Website 17138 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 9 / 10 (35 / 48) | Homa Alemzadeh | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | This course provides the foundational knowledge and hands-on experience in design and validation of embedded computing systems, with a focus on embedded C programming and real-time operating systems for ARM® Cortex-M Microcontrollers. Topics include: embedded system architectures, hardware software interfacing, memory management, multitasking, interrupt handling, and real-time scheduling. |
| | This course provides the foundational knowledge and hands-on experience in design and validation of embedded computing systems, with a focus on embedded C programming and real-time operating systems for ARM® Cortex-M Microcontrollers. Topics include: embedded system architectures, hardware software interfacing, memory management, multitasking, interrupt handling, and real-time scheduling. |
| ECE 6502 | Special Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering |
| |
| | Adaptive Estimation & Control |
| 17593 | 007 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 6 / 20 (12 / 35) | Gang Tao | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | We will give an introduction to model-based adaptive parameter estimation and adaptive control techniques which can effectively deal with systems whose parameters are uncertain. We will study the popular gradient, least-squares and Lyapunov algorithms for adaptive parameter estimation of parametric system models and dynamic system models. We will also design, analyze and evaluate some typical model reference adaptive control, adaptive pole placement control and adaptive robot control systems using such adaptive algorithms. We will show how such adaptive schemes can achieve the desired estimation and control system performance, through learning and adaptation to deal with system uncertainties.
For information about "Applications of adaptive estimation", see
https://www.google.com/search?q=applications+of+adaptive+estimation
For information about "Applications of adaptive control", see
https://www.google.com/search?q=applications+of+adaptive+control
For information about "Applications of adaptive estimation and control in machine learning", see
https://www.google.com/search?q=applications+of+adaptive+estimation+and+control+in+machine+learning
For more information, you may also ask the following questions in ChatGPT:
what are the applications of adaptive estimation and adaptive control
in machine learning?
what are the applications of adaptive estimation and adaptive control?
*** ***
Prerequisite: Knowledge of Differential equations and Signals & Systems
|
| Engagement |
| EGMT 1510 | Engaging Aesthetics |
| |
| | Latiné Love and Aesthetics |
| 13078 | 111 | SEM (2 Units) | Closed | 35 / 35 | Carmen Lamas |  TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | |
| | Seduction, betrayal, broken hearts, happy endings. Will they or won't they end up together? Through Latiné rom-coms and sit-coms, chica-lit, musicals, and poetry, we will explore Latiné Love, a concept that defines love and romance as artistic expressions we experience every day. In this course, we will examine these manifestations of Latiné love as aesthetic encounters integral to our private and social lives and shaped by the world around us and our experience in it. |
| | Latiné Love and Aesthetics |
| 13079 | 112 | SEM (2 Units) | Open | 23 / 35 | Carmen Lamas | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | Seduction, betrayal, broken hearts, happy endings. Will they or won't they end up together? Through Latiné rom-coms and sit-coms, chica-lit, musicals, and poetry, we will explore Latiné Love, a concept that defines love and romance as artistic expressions we experience every day. In this course, we will examine these manifestations of Latiné love as aesthetic encounters integral to our private and social lives and shaped by the world around us and our experience in it. |
| Creative Writing |
| ENCW 2559 | New Course in Creative Writing |
| |
| | Experiments in Knowing |
| 21156 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Wait List (0 / 99) | 15 / 15 | Charles Clateman | TuTh 5:00pm - 6:15pm | |
| | We will read the works of authors very old and very new who have endeavored to understand the world through writing, often not bothering too much about expertise or objectivity. Borrowing their methods, we will attempt to do the same. We will be writing and reading fiction and poetry and things that are not quite either. |
| ENCW 3310 | Intermediate Poetry Writing I |
| |
| | Energy & Play |
| 13195 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 9 / 12 | Kiki Petrosino | We 10:00am - 12:30pm | |
| | Address any questions to Professor Petrosino, cmp2k@virginia.edu. |
| | In this intermediate poetry workshop, we’ll connect with playfulness as way of tapping into our creative energy as poets. We’ll read published works of poetry by writers for whom formal experimentation is key. We’ll also think about & explore the physical space of Grounds as a site for reading, writing, and sharing poems. Students in this course will engage in a regular writing practice and will take seriously the processes of composition, critique, and revision. We’ll spend a significant portion of the semester “workshopping” student poems, but we also will discuss assigned reading and perform independent & in-class writing challenges. These activities, plus attendance, participation, and a final portfolio, will inform the grading policy.
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. Petrosino (cmp2k@virginia.edu). Applications will be considered on a rolling basis once registration opens. For full consideration, email your application as soon as possible. |
| ENCW 3500 | Topics in Creative Writing |
| |
| | Playwriting |
| | PLAYWRITING: topic change forthcoming in SIS |
| 20786 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 5 / 15 | Anna Martin-Beecher | Mo 11:00am - 1:30pm | |
| | Uncover elements of playwriting craft, read and watch great plays, and learn by doing. Students can expect to write a lot, both inside and outside of class, share their work, and build tangible skills over the semester. Together we will examine plays for one performer and for thirty, settings from the mundane to the absurd, the fundamentals of dramatic action and the constraints and opportunities inherent to live performance. |
| ENCW 3610 | Intermediate Fiction Writing |
| |
| 20754 | 002 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 12 / 12 | Corinna Vallianatos | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | Admission by Instructor Permission. Please send a prose sample and a brief statement of interest to clv3r@virginia.edu. Writing sample not required for students in the area programs. |
| ENCW 4350 | Advanced Nonfiction Writing |
| |
| | Inventive Memoir |
| 20767 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 9 / 12 | Jane Alison | We 2:00pm - 4:30pm | |
| | How do memoirists look back upon vaporous life and find shapes in it that matter? How do they choose moments and images that reveal those patterns? How do they create the “I” that will see and translate what’s seen? How do they decide what’s “true”? How, above all, do they transform the private to public, transmute life to art? In this class we’ll explore some of the arts of memoir, especially inventive memoir, where voice and formal experimentation might create both truthfulness and wildly original art. A writer might distill personal experience through a color, for instance, or a long-dead poet, or a fish . . . We’ll read long and short texts, among them some classic explorations of a (strand of) life, but also works that call themselves “dreamoir,” “autoportrait,” “memory criticism,” “a life among ghosts,” or “possible lives.” Alongside reading, you’ll prepare first a series of studies and then a longer project, which might be several essays, a series of linked fragments, a single extended work, or an entirely new literary invention.
Instructor permission required. Unless you’re in the Literary Prose Concentration, please send me (jas2ad) a five-page sample of your inventive writing and a note saying what draws you to this class.
|
| ENCW 4550 | Topics in Literary Prose |
| |
| | Novels of the Hour |
| | Novels of the Hour |
| 14222 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 13 / 12 | Jesse Ball | Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm | |
| | We will read the verymost contemporary books--many that are even being published during the semester. We will tear some apart. Others we'll adore. |
| ENCW 4820 | Poetry Program Poetics |
| |
| | Inspiration & The Lyric |
| 12838 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 9 / 12 | Kiki Petrosino | We 2:00pm - 4:30pm | |
| | Address any questions to Professor Petrosino, cmp2k@virginia.edu. |
| | Where does your poetry come from? How do we, as poets, create new works of art from the many sources of inspiration all around us?
This seminar examines the special nature of inspiration--that electric, generative "spark" that draws us to the page. Readings and discussion will invite students to explore the varied ways that poets transform personal emotions, lived experiences, observations of the natural world, and artistic traditions into powerful and resonant poems. The semester will begin with an overview of lyric poetry--its textures, concerns, and qualities--before delving into a range of books by contemporary poets whose writing demonstrates the tension between the speaker's inner emotional landscape and the external world that shapes it. This seminar is for students seeking to deepen their understanding of lyric poetry and find new possibilities for their own creative work.
At semester’s end, you’ll compose a Final Chapbook (8-10 poems + a 2-3 pp introduction) on a theme of your choice. The final grade will calculate Attendance, Participation, Written Assignments, and the Final Chapbook. This course fulfills a requirement for the Poetry Writing Concentration (formerly known as the Area Program in Poetry Writing) & may fulfill other requirements for the English Major, English Minor, Creative Writing Minor, & other academic programs.
**You may enroll in this course if you have completed at least one ENCW course at the 2000-, 3000-, or 4000-level** |
| ENCW 4830 | Advanced Poetry Writing I |
| |
| | ENCW 4830. Advanced Poetry Writing “Flood Subjects”: Poetry’s Infinite Possibilities |
| 13199 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Open | 7 / 12 | Lisa Spaar | We 12:30pm - 3:00pm | |
| | “Flood Subjects”: Poetry’s Infinite Possibilities
Emily Dickinson called immortality her “Flood subject”—an obsession with death and its resonances in life and beyond that she would explore in countless poems throughout her writing life. What feeds you, literally and metaphorically, as a person, a reader, a maker of poems? Is it slow cinema? Record shopping? Forest raves? Biodynamic farming or butter sculptures? Cold plunges in the ocean, runs on mountain trails, personalized Crocs? Long novels, writing by hand, a strawberry matcha by an open window? This question will be at the heart of our workshop as we explore in poems our personal and shared sources of literal and metaphorical sustenance.
Please request permission to enroll in SIS and email Professor Lisa Russ Spaar at LRS9E@virginia.edu
|
| ENCW 4920 | Poetry Program Capstone |
| |
| 12797 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 7 / 15 | Brian Teare | Mo 6:00pm - 8:30pm | |
| | The Capstone offers graduating Poetry Writing Concentration 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 Concentration Director, a graduate student mentor, and most importantly from our Poetry Concentration 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 Poetry Writing Concentration graduation reading. |
| ENCW 5310 | Advanced Poetry Writing II |
| |
| | Research for Poets |
| 20779 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 14 / 12 | Sumita Chakraborty | Th 2:00pm - 4:30pm | |
| | The muses aren’t coming to save us, so we have to inspire ourselves. This course is a cross between a workshop and a craft or methodology class, and it is designed to help each participant cultivate a research practice to aid their creative work. Research can be an indispensable poetic skill for any subject matter from the deeply personal to the most conceptual; it’s often one of the surest-fire ways to encounter something that is unexpected or unlock a new avenue of imagination. It can help with something as small as enriching a metaphor or something as big as sparking an entire project. In addition to offering an opportunity to develop practical skills in ways that are organic to your writing practice, to learn how to use library and archival resources to your advantage, and to acquire habits around inquiry that stimulate your work, this course will serve as an opportunity to develop a substantial sequence of work, with the help of guided prompts, that enriches and complicates your existing poetry and your ongoing artistic or intellectual obsessions. Undergraduates and graduate students alike can expect to generate work that would well serve a capstone, thesis, or book manuscript, or to encounter a new area of interest heretofore unknown to you. Undergraduates, please do not be wary of “advanced”: the prerequisite is any 2000-level course. Graduate students, please do not fear redundancy: this course is designed to meet each participant where they are at in terms of what they yet need or wish to learn or discover. |
| ENCW 5610 | Advanced Fiction Writing II |
| |
| | GRIMM VARIATIONS |
| 20755 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 7 / 12 | Jesse Ball | Fr 2:00pm - 4:30pm | |
| | The class is divided into two groups. Each week one group of students will compose variations on a particular folk tale chosen from BROTHERS GRIMM. The variations may be in any genre. It is a kind of literary game.
You need not have taken a previous class in order to take this one. |
| ENCW 7310 | MFA Poetry Workshop |
| |
| | ENCW 7310. MFA Poetry Workshop poetrees & treasons: genealogies | generation |
| 13200 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Open | 8 / 10 | Lisa Spaar | Mo 2:00pm - 4:30pm | |
| | poetrees & treasons: genealogies | generation
This is an advanced poetry workshop open to first- and second-year poetry students in the Master of Fine Arts Program of the Department of English. In the first half of the semester, students will each present to the class a suite of their poems in constellation (new work, old work, problematic work), two poets per class, allowing time for deep questions and discussion. The poets presenting in a given week will also preface discussion of their constellations by offering a context for their constellation: three aesthetic, formal, or flood subject “ancestors” or antecedents for the poems under consideration: exemplary poems/poets or excerpts from other texts, but also non-literary influences: clips from film, details/images/texts from science or technology, music, cuisine, family history, particular geographies, manga, dance, hagiography, Buddhism, etc. The second half of the semester will be intensely generative, with poets turning in work every other week, and peers introducing and leading discussion of the week’s poems. The idea is to think beyond the beads-on-a-string, linear structure of some typical workshops and to invite writers to think “across & beyond the poem” about the formal, thematic, and other obsessions, ticks, gestures, ruses, and preoccupations of their work in constellation. What happens when your poems cluster? Is a given poem domesticated? Made wilder? Brought into prismatic stereoscopy? Perhaps most important, in addition to illuminating their own work, poets will illuminate and learn from other poets about their own work, poetics, praxis, and intention.
Enrollment restricted to first- and second-year MFA students. |
| English-Literature |
| ENGL 1590 | Literature and the Professions |
| |
| | Literature and Medicine |
| 20220 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 60 | Taylor Schey | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | Satisfies both the AIP and SES Disciplines requirements.
|
| | This course introduces students to the intersection of literature and medicine, with a focus on how the skills and competencies developed in literary studies are also essential to the medical professions. Topics include illness and illness narratives; the doctor-patient relation; the language of pain; the histories of medical misogyny and medical racism; epidemics and pandemics; and popular representations of medical practice. Through engaging with a variety of textual forms—including poetry, fiction, drama, essay, film, and television—students will come to understand why, as the physician-scholar Rita Charon puts it, “good readers make good doctors.” |
| ENGL 2502 | Masterpieces of English Literature |
| |
| | 4 Books, 4 Centuries, 4 Forms |
| 20228 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (27 / 99) | 20 / 20 | John O'Brien | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | We will read devote our time together to studying four great masterpieces, four works produced over the last four centuries, each in a different genre: a play (William Shakespeare’s King Lear, first staged in 1606); a novel (Jane Austen’s Emma, published in 1816); a poem (T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922); and a film (Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, issued in 1954). We will consider each of these works slowly and carefully. We will also use them as case studies for exploring the strategies that scholars in the disciplines of literature and film criticism have developed to achieve rich understandings of their objects of study. These will include (among other strategies) close reading, source study, comparison of variant editions, and historical contextualization. Our objective is to emerge at the end of the semester with expertise in these four works, and with experience in using different critical strategies to analyze other works in these genres. This course serves as a prerequisite for students who wish to major in English. This course also fulfills the College’s second writing requirement. And of course anyone with an interest in these works or in literature in general is welcome to join us. |
| ENGL 2506 | Studies in Poetry |
| |
| | Poems, Poets, Poetry |
| 20231 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (10 / 99) | 18 / 18 | Emily Ogden | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | |
| | What is poetry for and how do we approach it? What counts as a poem, and what is poetry’s place in the human experience? We’ll read poems in English written in a wide range of times and places by a variety of people: William Shakespeare, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many others. We’ll read intensively and write carefully about these poems. In this course, we’ll work on paper, not on screens, in order to improve our attention to the poems. This course is appropriate for students with no prior knowledge of poetry, and also for those with significant prior interest in the form. This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement. |
| | Poetic Forms |
| 21053 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (17 / 99) | 18 / 18 | Jeddie Sophronius | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | From the haiku to the sonnet crown, contemporary poets—writing in the age of free verse—have often returned to, entered into dialogue with, or reinvented established poetic forms. How are poetic forms carried through time and into the contemporary sphere? How can restrictions be generative? In this course, we will center these questions as we explore the purpose of tradition, writing, and invention.
This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement. |
| ENGL 2508 | Studies in Fiction |
| |
| | Contemporary Novel |
| 20199 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (3 / 99) | 18 / 18 | Christopher Krentz | MoWeFr 12:00pm - 12:50pm | |
| | This course will provide an introduction to the contemporary American novel. We will read some celebrated fiction published since 1970, probably including Morrison’s Sula; Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Bechdel's graphic novel Fun Home; Roth's Nemesis; Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead, and Amna's American Fever. Focusing on whatever themes the novels raise, we’ll talk about narrative style, ethnicity and identity in America, and much more. Moreover, we’ll concentrate on developing analytical and writing skills, which should help students to succeed in other English and humanities classes.
This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement. |
| | Gender and the Gothic |
| 20208 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (15 / 99) | 18 / 18 | Cristina Griffin | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | In this class, we will read (and watch) stories that engage with the long tradition of the gothic: stories that are pleasurably thrilling, that structure themselves around suspense, secrecy, romance, intrigue, and even sometimes fear. We will begin the term by focusing on some of the eighteenth-century texts that established and popularized the gothic conventions that novelists, filmmakers, and television writers still use today. We will then turn to more contemporary reactions to the gothic, investigating how twentieth- and twenty-first-century forms respond to the gothic genre. Our focus as we make our way across the centuries will be on how these stories open up questions about gender. How do gothic texts represent women’s bodies? What is the relationship between gender and violence? How do gendered portrayals of the gothic change over time or embody different political and cultural crises? How do popular contemporary forms—the television show, dystopian fiction—reimagine the gothic?
UVA is the ideal place to study gothic literature, since it houses the world’s largest collection of gothic fiction. We will immerse ourselves in this vast treasure trove with an archival project in which you will become an expert on a gothic novel, and contribute your findings to a digital companion to the archive. No library or research experience necessary: we will be working from the ground up as you learn to give these important gothic texts new lives in the twenty-first century.
This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, FWR+ Requirement, Second Writing Requirement, and AIP Disciplines Requirement.
|
| | The Historical Novel |
| | The Historical Novel |
| 20216 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (6 / 99) | 18 / 18 | Debjani Ganguly | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | |
| |
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 essays and weekly reflections on Canvas. This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
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| | Contemporary American Fiction |
| | Narrative Experiment in Contemporary Fiction: Graphic Novels, Eccentric Narrators, Magical Histories |
| 20218 | 004 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (10 / 99) | 20 / 20 | Caroline Rody | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | Narrative Experiment in Contemporary American Fiction:
Graphic Novels, Eccentric Narrators, Alternative Histories, Magical Realities
Contemporary American fiction brims with surprises. It’s not just that an unprecedent diversity of voices is generating a global literature centered upon U.S. territory, but also that this influx of the world’s energies has accelerated the modern and postmodern experimentation with new ways to tell a story.
In this course we will explore the possibilities generated by narrative innovation of several kinds. We’ll take up from the booming genre of the graphic novel, in which the visual dimension bursts open the conventional boundaries of narrative fiction (in texts like Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, Thuy Bui’s The Best We Can Do, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home). We’ll read novels narrated by outrageous, elusive, sometimes magical voices (in texts like Junot Diaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest). And we’ll consider novels that re-imagine ethnic American histories by means of inventive strategies: magical, multi-vocal, counterfactual, or speculative (in texts like Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, Louise Erdrich’s Tracks and The Night Watchman, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s “My Monticello”).
Requirements: devoted reading and active participation, multiple in-class writing sessions, leading of class discussion (in pairs), a short paper, a paper revision, and a longer paper.
This course satisfies the English major prerequisite, the second writing requirement, and the AIP disciplines requirement.
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| | The Novel of Upbringing |
| 20765 | 006 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (2 / 99) | 18 / 18 | James Kinney | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | |
| | 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. |
| ENGL 2527 | Shakespeare |
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| | Shakespeare on Film |
| | Visualizing poetry and passion: cinematic adaptations and reinterpretations of 4 major plays. |
| 20223 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (5 / 99) | 18 / 18 | Clare Kinney | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | Click blue number to the left for detailed course description! |
| | This course will explore in detail four major works by Shakespeare across several genres and look at some of their cinematic adaptations. How does one translate a Shakespearean work from a highly verbal medium into a highly visual medium? How can the resources of film offer us new insights into the plays—and how do different film adaptations of the same play allow us to rethink the interpretive challenges and pleasures provoked by their original texts?
Tentative list of plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Henry V; Macbeth; The Tempest.
Requirements: Regular attendance and active participation in discussion; shorter and longer writing assignments together totaling 20 pages; a final exam.
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| ENGL 2599 | Special Topics |
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| | Comedy and Character |
| | Read Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens |
| 20206 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (2 / 99) | 18 / 18 | Rebecca Rush | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | |
| | Meet some of the most charming and memorable characters of all time, from the Wife of Bath to Mr. Micawber. |
| | In this course, we will meditate on the art of character-reading by spending time with four great observers of human nature. We will read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (the General Prologue, the Miller’s Tale, and the Merchant’s Tale), Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Twelfth Night, Austen’s Emma, and Dickens’s David Copperfield. All four of these authors agree that it is worthwhile to look closely at the subtle details that make up a character, but they disagree about what kinds of details are worth observing and representing, about what is needed to build a character piece by verbal piece. Do we come to know a character by taking note of her red face and fine scarlet hose, by observing how he responds familial betrayal, by attending to her treatment of garrulous neighbors, or by hearing what happened on the day he was born? How do character writers use exaggeration and caricature not only to entertain us but to reveal something about human foibles and habits we might otherwise be unable to see? How do they use ensemble casts of major and minor characters to depict a full array of humors and habits? How do these authors stage scenes that show the difficult art of sizing up and judging character? No prior knowledge of literature is required; the only prerequisite is a willingness to read slowly, attentively, and with a dictionary at hand. Note that Emma is 453 pages and David Copperfield is 882. The syllabus is designed to spread out your reading of David Copperfield over the course of the semester, but please only take this course if you are prepared to dedicate considerable time to reading on the weekends. I am quite confident the books will reward your efforts.
This course satisfies the English major prerequisite, the second writing requirement, and the AIP disciplines requirement
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| | Monstrous Forms |
| 20240 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 18 / 18 | Kelly Fleming | MoWeFr 12:00pm - 12:50pm | |
| | This course will introduce students to the practices of academic writing and critical reading by inviting you to explore texts about monsters. From the twelfth century to today, we will examine how literature, television, and film frequently uses monsters—witches, fairies, changelings, ghosts, vampires, zombies, and creatures—to speak to and provide rational explanations for things that are very human but that humans have trouble confronting outright: loss; death; political events; sexual, racial, and physical difference. As we engage with different media from different periods, we will pay particular attention to what forms (literary, visual, and physical) monsters take and consider how these forms shape our understanding of the societies that produced these narratives.
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| | Aesthetics of Doubt in Am. Lit |
| | Two Truths and a Lie: Uncertainty in American Literature |
| 20781 | 005 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 15 / 20 | Lauren Parker | TuTh 5:00pm - 6:15pm | |
| | Doubt and uncertainty provoke a variety of emotions—-fear, anxiety, anger, frustration—-but are also the productive force that sustains the mood and feel of some of the most prototypically ‘American’ genres, including noir, Southern Gothic, and American modernism. Together we'll engage with a selection of of novels, plays, films, poetry, and short stories in order to explorehow nineteenth and twentieth century texts have taken up and/or destabilized the very ideas of truth, knowledge, and certainty. We will also consider how those same questions have been continually taken up in other disciplines (science, journalism, and more).
Potential Texts: poems and short stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor; Herman Melville (Benito Cereno), Nella Larsen (Passing), Ann Petry (Country Place) William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying), Toni Morrison, (Beloved), Gillian Flynn (Sharp Objects)
Potential Films: [The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice Jacques Tourneur [I Walked with a Zombie], Carl Franklin [Devil in a Blue Dress], and Dan Gilroy [Nightcrawler]
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| | Dreaming in Literature |
| 20783 | 007 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (1 / 99) | 18 / 18 | Molly Nichols | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | Have you ever wondered about the connection between dreams and reality? Is it possible to interpret dreams using real-world understanding? And what do our dreams have to say about our hopes and fears about reality? This class explores how English writers have presented both the creative potential and futility of dreams in literature, from medieval poems to modern novels. We will begin with medieval dream visions (in modern translations), including the Old English poem “The Dream of the Rood,” Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess, the Gawain-poet’s Pearl, and excerpts from William Langland’s Piers Plowman. We will then turn to novels like C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven and wonder: How do these stories look back on the rich literary history of dream visions while also looking forward to the future humanity has been dreaming about for millennia? Throughout the semester, we will investigate these questions in light of the history – and present, and future – of dream interpretation, paying special attention to the connection between such interpretation and the analysis of literature as a whole.
Regular attendance and active participation in discussion are required for this course, and shorter and longer writing assignments together will total 20+ pages. This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the Artistic, Interpretive and Philosophical Disciplines Requirement. |
| | The Witch in Literature |
| | Witches from the Ancient Mediterranean, Renaissance London, and Film/TV! |
| 20785 | 008 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (0 / 99) | 17 / 17 | Jared Willden | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | |
| | People have been writing about witches for thousands of years. Some of these writers have believed in the existence of witches; others haven’t. Although belief in witches is now nearly extinct in Western culture, the witch has remained a prominent cultural touchstone. Why has the witch proved so resilient to millennia of attempts to burn, ban, defame, or disbelieve her? We will read (and watch) works from the ancient Mediterranean, the Renaissance London stage, and twentieth-century American film and television to consider the witch’s place in Western literature, her cultural significance, and what she reveals about our modern society that rejects the belief in witchcraft without being able to reject the witch.
This is a skills-focused class that prioritizes high-quality critical reading and writing. Tentative course requirements include consistent attendance, regular reading quizzes, active participation in class discussions, four essays totaling 21 pages, and a final exam.
This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement (Artistic, Interpretive and Philosophical). |
| ENGL 3162 | Chaucer II |
| |
| | Fate and Chance |
| 20200 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 14 / 25 | Courtney Watts | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | |
| | Why do things happen the way they do? Are our fates controlled by the stars, by nature, by fickle Lady Fortune, by divine providence, by our own efforts and merits? This course will explore fate and chance in Chaucer, examining human agency and the forces that curtail it as we read beyond The Canterbury Tales. We will consider "grace" in "The Man of Law's Tale," "kinde" in Parliament of Fowles, "werke" in House of Fame, and the whole glut of fortunes in excerpts of Troilus and Criseyde. This class assumes no prior knowledge of Chaucer, Middle English, or the Middle Ages, although it will offer plenty of new material to students of these. As we read Chaucer in his original Middle English, we will learn about the history of the English language and about the intellectual inheritances of Chaucer and the Middle Ages. At the same time, we will consider the power of literary genres, modes, and sources to make things happen and to limit what can happen.
This course satisfies the pre-1700 requirement for the English major.
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| ENGL 3260 | Milton |
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| | At the crossroads of antiquity and modernity |
| 20207 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (6 / 99) | 30 / 30 | Rebecca Rush | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | |
| | Is Milton modern or ancient, classical or Christian, on Eve's side or God's? |
| | Our ultimate aim in this course is to linger over Paradise Lost and its distinctive intellectual and poetic beauties. In order to understand the questions that animate Milton’s epic poem, we will first survey Milton’s youthful poems and controversial prose. Milton dedicated his life as a writer to debating about the nature of liberty. Convinced that it is impossible to be good without choosing goodness rationally and deliberately, Milton argued repeatedly for new and radical ideas that he thought freed the mind from the irrational tyranny of custom and passion; he defended beheading the king, loosening divorce laws, and abandoning pre-publication censorship. But Milton saw himself as a radical in the root sense of the word (radix=root in Latin): he wanted to return to the classical past and what he called the “known rules of ancient liberty.” He wrote in forms 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. Milton’s peculiar brand of radicalism leaves readers wondering whether he is more modern or ancient, more dedicated in classical reason or Christian piety, more sympathetic with Adam and God or with Eve and Satan. As we unravel the 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.
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| ENGL 3370 | Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama |
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| 20209 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (2 / 99) | 25 / 25 | Cynthia Wall | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | This course will range over the vast goodly fields of Restoration and eighteenth-century drama: tragedies, she-tragedies, heroic, gothic, and colonialist, along with samples of other popular stage entertainments such as operas, adaptations, pantomimes, farces. We’ll poke into contemporary biographies of the principal actors and managers, acting manuals, descriptions of theatres, sets, and costumes, accounts of the audiences, and the rise of Shakespeare as a national icon. Core playwrights will include William Wycherley, Aphra Behn, William Congreve, Susanna Centlivre, George Lillo, John Gay, Richard Cumberland, Oliver Goldsmith, Frances Burney, and Matthew Lewis. Added fun will be found in Nahum Tate’s happy version of King Lear (1688), Henry Fielding’s truly wonderful The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1731), and Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows (1798) (yes, the one in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park). Requirements: participation; weekly commentaries and in-class activities (“The Contemporary Stage”); one short paper; midterm; final exam. |
| ENGL 3500 | Studies in English Literature |
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| | Conversations with Dead People |
| 20239 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (7 / 99) | 20 / 20 | Sumita Chakraborty | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | |
| | Death is often imagined as one of the main topics of interest to poets across literary periods and traditions. But some poems, and some poets, take this interest one step further, positioning themselves as capable of speaking to the dead. In this course, we’ll read poems in which poets reimagine the relationship between the living and the dead—and study the wild history of poets (including W. B. Yeats, Sylvia Plath, James Merrill, and Lucille Clifton) who used material means, such as Ouija boards, mediums, and automatic writing, to communicate with spirits. Our main texts will be poems—largely poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—but we will also explore academic scholarship, popular writing, and other media about the history of and various ways of imagining “the occult.” Along the way, we’ll also learn strategies of reading and interpreting poems as well as some fundamental literary and poetic devices. Main assignments will include explications, an analytical essay, and a creative project, along with in-class discussions and activities. |
| ENGL 3540 | Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature |
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| | Romantic Poetry |
| 20193 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (16 / 99) | 25 / 25 | Mark Edmundson | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | We’ll read and interpret the six major English Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Byron. We’ll reflect on the pleasures of their work, and on what they might have to teach us about love, politics, nature, art, the self, society, and the imagination. We may end with a Jane Austen novel for contrast, probably Pride and Prejudice. Two fact-based exams, one paper at the close. |
| | Global Nineteenth Century |
| 20196 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 18 / 25 | Stephen Arata | TuTh 5:00pm - 6:15pm | |
| | This course can be used to fulfill the 1700-1900 period requirement for the English major.
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
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| ENGL 3560 | Studies in Modern and Contemporary Literature |
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| | Fiction and Modernism |
| 20197 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (2 / 99) | 25 / 25 | Stephen Arata | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | 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, Jean Rhys, James Joyce, Jean Toomer, Samuel Beckett, Haldor Laxness, Franz Kafka, Fernando Pessoa, G. V. Desani, Knut Hamsen, Vladimir Nabokov, Clarice Lispector, 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. |
| | Global Speculative Fiction |
| | Global Speculative Fiction |
| 20217 | 003 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 5 / 25 | Debjani Ganguly | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | The course will explore the emergence of speculative fiction as a global literary form in our contemporary age. Broadly encompassing the genres of fantasy, science fiction, horror and alternative history, speculative fiction is any kind of fiction that creates a narrative world which may or may not resemble the world we live in. This kind of fiction embodies alternative ideas of reality including magic, space or time travel, alternative realities, or alternative histories. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of speculative fiction from Africa, Latin America, and the Asia Pacific that figure alternative futures for peoples oppressed by centuries-long colonialism. The rapid proliferation of digital technology and the accelerating effects of anthropogenic climate change have given a new edge to this body of fiction. We will study the emergence of counter-factual utopian and dystopian narratives, Afrofuturism and animism, the specter of fossil futures, and apocalyptic fiction on environmental collapse through a range of exciting works. The goal of this course is to understand the rise of speculative fiction as a literary form and a mode of world-making that captures cataclysmic shifts in human and non-human worlds that can no longer be comprehended by social, political, and moral frameworks of our recent past and present.
Primary Texts
Namwalli Serpell, The Old Drift (ISBN: 978-1-101-90714-6)
Nnedi Okorafor Lagoon (ISBN: 978-1-4814-4088-2)
Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being (ISBN: 978-0-14-312487-0)
Omar Elakkad, American War (ISBN: 978-1-101-97313-4)
Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry For The Future (ISBN: 978-0-316-30013-1)
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| ENGL 3611 | The Art and Science of Time Travel |
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| 21445 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 16 / 25 | Njelle Hamilton | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | |
| | What is time? Why is it so weird? Why are we trapped in this forward moving present, inching to the future one second at a time, unable to speed to next week or make a U-turn to yesterday?
These puzzles and paradoxes have intrigued scientists and sci-fi writers alike, and we will ponder them in our turn by analyzing delightfully mind-bending time-travel novels, music and film from across the globe (The Time Machine, Kindred, Galileo's Dream, Back to the Future, Interstellar, etc). Armed with key genre vocabulary and physics concepts (time dilation, wormholes, quantum entanglement and more), you’ll untangle science fiction from science fact and track how creative works can illustrate counterintuitive truths about time. Humanities and STEM students will work across disciplines to imaginatively resolve real-world ethical conundrums of time travel raised by our texts. For instance, would you use your time machine to save a loved one if it meant civilizational catastrophe and mass death? Should time travel be a public good or a for-profit enterprise? Is everywhen in the past safe for a female, queer or Black time traveler?
Your assignments (thought experiments) will therefore include devising time policies, time machines, and time travel protocols, and a capstone Time Travel Convention during which you’ll share insights from your pod’s planning and execution of a trip through time.
Instructor permission required: please request enrollment through SIS and email Prof Hamilton (nwh9f@virginia.edu) a note including your name, year, major, and a few sentences on what intrigues you about time/time travel and what draws you to this class. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis once registration opens. For full consideration, email your application as soon as possible. |
| ENGL 3750 | Placed and Displaced in America |
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| 20923 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 25 / 25 (25 / 25) | Lisa Goff | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | 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 for insights into race, ethnicity, gender, class, and generation in America. |
| ENGL 3790 | Moving On: Migration in/to US |
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| 20774 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Closed | 25 / 25 (25 / 25) | Lisa Goff | TuTh 5:00pm - 6:15pm | |
| | “Moving On: Migration In/To the U.S.” examines the history of voluntary, coerced, and forced migration in the U.S. Students will trace changing attitudes about migration over time using a variety of cultural products, including videos, books, documentaries, poems, paintings, graphic novels, photographs, fashion, digital humanities, and academic scholarship. Class participation/contribution is the core of this class. Students will be required to volunteer 5-10 hours with a migration-related project during the course of the semester. |
| ENGL 3910 | Satire |
| |
| 20229 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (3 / 99) | 25 / 25 | John O'Brien | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | What is satire? Most of us think that we can more or less identify a satire when we see it, but beyond that, defining satire and talking it about meaningfully have often proven elusive. In this course, we will work to figure out not only what satire is, but what it does, socially and politically. We will read satires from the ancient world to the present, from authors like the Roman poet Juvenal, the Irish cleric Jonathan Swift, the Norwegian novelist Gerd Brandenberg, and the American writer Paul Beatty. We will read about theories of humor and satire: where it comes from, and what problems it raises and attempts to address. We will also consider film and video satires, as well as what crops up in the media in the course of the semester—because we know that something will. Midterm and final exams; two writing exercises; participation. |
| ENGL 4500 | Seminar in English Literature |
| |
| | The Frankenstein Circle |
| 20210 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 18 | Cynthia Wall | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | “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 wrote young 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 ultimate 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, Edmund Burke, M. G. Lewis, Sir Humphry Davy, Captain James Cook). Requirements: active participation, weekly commentaries, presentation, 5-7pp. close reading paper, 10-12pp. research paper. |
| ENGL 4510 | Seminar in Medieval Literature |
| |
| | Medieval Women |
| | Medieval Women |
| 20201 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 17 / 18 | Courtney Watts | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | The Middle Ages left behind written discourses about women, by women, and for women that are surprisingly rich and varied. In exploring that record, we will consider not only misogyny, but also women as protagonists of their own adventures and women as authors and authorities in both secular and religious texts. We will read the words of the visionaries St. Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich, tales of the crossdressing St. Euphrosyne and a fictional knight named Silence, and the writing of prominent female authors Marie de France and Christine de Pizan. Along the way, we will consider the meanings of gender, sexuality, and authority in Medieval Europe and the many roles of women as subjects of and participants in literary discourse. This course assumes no prior knowledge of Middle English or the Middle Ages, but it will require you to (learn to) read a few of these texts in their original Middle English. It will also invite you to think about gender, sexuality, and the medieval world in new and nuanced ways and to consider the inheritences, literary and intellectual, left to our own time.
This course satisfies the pre-1700 requirement for the English major.
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| ENGL 4520 | Seminar in Renaissance Literature |
| |
| | Afterlives of the Epic |
| 20766 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 5 / 18 | James Kinney | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | What becomes of the epic, especially (but not only) in Renaissance England? Where has it been, and where does it still have to go? Why does the most elevated of literary modes in traditional reckonings end up seeming passe or impossible to so many moderns? Works to be read include Homer's epics, The Aeneid, The Inferno, Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe, The Dunciad, and The Waste Land. Class requirements: lively participation including brief email responses, two shorter or one more substantial term paper, and a final exam. |
| ENGL 4540 | Seminar in Nineteenth-Century Literature |
| |
| | Creative Collaborations |
| | Literary Lives, Creative Collaborations |
| 20221 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 3 / 18 | Taylor Schey | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | This course offers an in-depth study of the lives and works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William and Dorothy Wordsworth, with a focus on their joint creative projects. Although British Romanticism is often associated with the myth of the solitary genius, its watershed text of literary “experiments,” *Lyrical Ballads* (1798), was produced through collaboration and a whole lot of walking and talking. Reading that text in both its first and second editions, we’ll reflect on the social uses of the ballad form at the turn of the nineteenth century as well as explore its affordances in our own historical moment. We’ll follow in Dorothy Wordsworth’s footsteps, too, not only considering the channels of influence between her *Grasmere Journals* and her brother’s poetry but also finding inspiration in our own observations of natural and quotidian phenomena. And we’ll immerse ourselves in William Wordsworth’s epic, autobiographical blank-verse poem *The Prelude*, peruse selections from Coleridge’s *Biographia Literaria*, and listen to the conversations between the rest of these authors’ greatest hits. Through activities that are both creative and analytical, collaborative as well as individual, students will cultivate their own literary lives and come to appreciate why, more than two hundred years later, Coleridge and the Wordsworths remain such great authors with whom to think. Assignments include a ballad project, a reading journal, a short review essay, and an in-class presentation.
This course satisfies the 1700-1900 literature requirement for the English major. |
| ENGL 4559 | New Course in English Literature |
| |
| | Aesthetic Theory |
| | Aesthetic Theory: AI, Literature, and Human Judgement |
| 20242 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 18 | Michael Wellmon | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | ENGL 4559 - 001: Aesthetic Theory: AI, Literature, and Human Judgement
Chad Wellmon
As ChatGPT and other artificial intelligences have saturated our lives, their critics and defenders alike have insisted that human judgement, however fallible and flawed, is not only imperiled but necessary. But what is so human about judgment? How did the capacity to judge come to be heralded as marking a line between humans and machines? What is the relationship between judgement and other capacities (e.g. rationality, imagination, sociability)? This seminar will trace competing conceptions of a distinctly human judgment as they emerged between 1700 and 1900. We will consider, in particular, the relationship of aesthetic judgement and the emergence of Literature as a distinct form of writing. Our readings will include philosophical and literary texts ranging from Locke, Kant, Hegel, and Schiller to Addison, Coleridge, Goethe, Wordsworth, Schiller, and G. Eliot. The seminar will conclude with more recent discussions of literature, computation, and artificial intelligence in the work of Turing, Calvino, and others. |
| ENGL 4560 | Seminar in Modern and Contemporary Literature |
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| | Contemporary Women's Texts |
| 20198 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (5 / 99) | 18 / 18 | Susan Fraiman | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | |
| | ENGL 4560
Contemporary Women’s Texts
Susan Fraiman
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. Possible works (final list still to be determined) include fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri, Carmen Machado, Alice Munro, Doris Lessing, Danzy Senna, Ryu Murakami, and Chimamanda Adichie; memoirs by Suad Amiry, Maggie Nelson, Michelle Zauner, and Sarah Smarsh; a graphic narrative by Roz Chast; a play by Annie Baker; 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, sexuality, 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.
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| | The Modern Memoir |
| 20204 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (4 / 99) | 16 / 16 | James Seitz | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | Students will read books rather than online texts - see course description for more info. |
| | In this course, we’ll read several memoirs published over the past thirty years, and we’ll consider some memoirish films as well. Coming-of-age stories and narratives of loss will figure prominently, as will experimental memoirs that challenge the genre’s formal conventions. Students should plan to engage with actual books (rather than access content on computers or phones) and to write in class each week about what they’ve read. They’ll also have the option of writing about their own lives for at least one assignment to learn about the creation as well as the interpretation of memoir. |
| | Contemporary American Fiction |
| | Narrative Experiment in Contemporary Fiction: Graphic Novels, Eccentric Narrators, Magical Histories |
| 20219 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 14 / 18 | Caroline Rody | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | Narrative Experiment in Contemporary American Fiction:
Graphic Novels, Eccentric Narrators, Alternative Histories, Magical Realities
Contemporary American fiction brims with surprises. It’s not just that an unprecedent diversity of voices is generating a global literature centered upon U.S. territory, but also that this influx of the world’s energies has accelerated the modern and postmodern experimentation with new ways to tell a story.
In this course we will explore the possibilities generated by narrative innovation of several kinds. We’ll take up from the booming genre of the graphic novel, in which the visual dimension bursts open the conventional boundaries of narrative fiction (in texts like Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, Thuy Bui’s The Best We Can Do, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home). We’ll read novels narrated by outrageous, elusive, sometimes magical voices (in texts like Junot Diaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest). And we’ll consider novels that re-imagine ethnic American histories by means of inventive strategies: magical, multi-vocal, counterfactual, or speculative (in texts like Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, Louise Erdrich’s Tracks and The Night Watchman, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s “My Monticello”).
Requirements: devoted reading and active participation, multiple in-class writing sessions, leading of class discussion (in pairs), a short and a long paper.
This course satisfies the second writing requirement and the AIP disciplines requirement.
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| ENGL 4570 | Seminar in American Literature since 1900 |
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| | W.E.B. Du Bois |
| 20762 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 5 / 18 | Marlon Ross | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | |
| | This course examines the work, career, and life of leading American and international intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois by placing him historically in relation to the movements he led, the figures he allied himself with and fought against, and the transformations in thought, social activism, and literature he helped to bring about. Because Du Bois’s intellectual and activist contributions range across the fields of history, sociology, education, fiction, philosophy, political theory, literary theory, biography, and autobiography, we’ll sample works by him in each of these fields. In addition to examining his major texts — including The Souls of Black Folk (philosophy), Philadelphia Negro (sociology), Black Reconstruction in America (history), John Brown (biography), Dark Princess (novel), Dusk of Dawn (autobiography), The World and Africa (African studies) — we’ll sample his influential essays from the journal he edited, The Crisis. Du Bois’s phenomenal impact will be further understood by examining the work of his interlocutors, those with whom he had an intense public dialogue on major issues of the day, including Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Oswald Garrison Villard, and Kwame Nkrumah. We’ll contextualize influential theories like the color-line, double consciousness, the Talented Tenth, art as propaganda, liberal education as uplift, Pan-Africanism, etc. in light of the movements he championed, including the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, the Pan-African Congresses, the anti- lynching campaign, the Harlem Renaissance, anti-World War II activism, the United Nations movement, anti-colonialism, and democratic socialism. How did a man whose fierce idealism over decades end in a decision to renounce his U.S. citizenship and retreat to Ghana in the final years of his life?
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| ENGL 5101 | Beowulf |
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| | Read Beowulf and translate together from the original Old English! |
| 20202 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 15 | Stephen Hopkins | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | Note: ***requires reading proficiency in the Old English language*** |
| | In this course (which requires reading proficiency in Old English), we will read about half of Beowulf in Old English, alongside samples from the other texts found in the same manuscript, Cotton Vitellius A XV. These other texts include Judith, the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, Wonders of the East, and the Life of St. Christopher (a dog-headed saint!). Alongside extensive translation work, we will also study the manuscript itself and the various arguments about its date and other critical approaches to the texts it contains. |
| ENGL 5500 | Special Topics in English Literature |
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| | Blake and Yeats |
| 20192 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (6 / 99) | 15 / 15 | Mark Edmundson | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | |
| | Blake and Yeats: We’ll read these two visionary poets for pleasure and profit. Both believed that authentic poetry could transform an entire culture. Blake said that he was compelled to create a system of his own or be enslaved by another man’s. Yeats put forward a striking (sometimes shocking) view of what Western culture required to survive and flourish. Both are challenging, but a little application to them works wonders. This is a class for everyone who is, or could be, interested in poetry. No prior knowledge required, just a willingness to engage in some very pleasurable work. |
| | Transforming Desire |
| | Desire, gender, genre, metamorphosis--Medieval and Renaissance erotic poetics. |
| 20222 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (2 / 99) | 18 / 18 | Clare Kinney | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | |
| | Click on the blue number to the left to get full course description. |
| | This seminar will focus upon lyric, narrative and dramatic works from the medieval and Renaissance periods which explore the striking metamorphoses and the various (and on occasion very queer) trajectories of earthly—and not so earthly--love. We'll be examining the ways in which desire is represented as transforming the identity and consciousness and language of the lover; we will also be examining (and attempting to historicize) strategies employed by our authors to variously transform, redefine, enlarge and contain the erotic impulse. We'll start with some selections from the Metamorphoses of Ovid; we will finish with two of Shakespeare’s most striking reinventions of love. Along the way we’ll be looking at the gendering of erotic representation and erotic speech, the intermittent entanglement of secular and sacred love, the role of genre in refiguring eros, and some intersections between the discourses of sexuality and the discourses of power.
Tentative reading list: selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses; the Lais (short romances) of Marie de France; Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde; lyrics by Petrarch, Philip Sidney and Lady Mary Wroth; Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia; Shakespeare's As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale. (All non-English works will be read in translation.) And occasional critical/theoretical readings. Requirements: regular attendance, lively participation in discussion, a series of reflective discussion board postings, a short paper (6-7 pages); a long term paper (14 pages).
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| ENGL 5530 | Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Literature |
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| | Lit of British Abolition |
| 20230 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 2 / 15 | Michael Suarez | Tu 3:30pm - 6:00pm | |
| | The Literature of British Abolition, c.1750–1810, ENGL 5330, Tuesdays 3:30–6:00PM
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 and help us reflect on how a literature of abolition might function in our own time.
This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement.
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| ENGL 5559 | New Course in English Literature |
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| | American Wild |
| 20194 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (9 / 99) | 15 / 15 | Stephen Cushman | We 10:00am - 12:30pm | |
| | With biblical images of wilderness in mind, seventeenth-century English colonizers of Massachusetts described what they found as another wilderness, howling, savage, terrible. For them it was to be feared, avoided, and, where possible, tamed. Four centuries later, with eighty percent of U.S. citizens living in cities, many of them exposed to wilderness only through calendar pictures or screensaver photos, what meaning or value does American wildness have? Is it only a fantasy image, part of an American brand, as in the phrase “the wild West.” Are wildness and wilderness the same thing? Has the howling, terrible, untamed wildness of the seventeenth-century forest relocated to another sphere, in the wildness of wildfires in California and elsewhere? Is weather the new frontier, the new wilderness, where Americans encounter untamed wildness in droughts, floods, and violent storms? Have we come full circle to more biblical imagery, with apocalypse replacing wilderness as the rubric under which we encounter the wild?
This course will begin with a look at biblical antecedents and their influence on European colonists encountering landscapes inhabited by native people. From there we will move to the literature of westward exploration, and further encounters with indigenous populations and their lands, in selections from the journals of Jefferson-commissioned Lewis and Clark. Then it’s on to the mid-nineteenth pivot toward wildness in the eyes of Romantic beholders, among them Susan Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, patron saint of the environmental movement. Next comes John Muir, whose vision of wilderness preservation begat the U.S. National Park System. Proceeding to the twentieth century, we’ll add important voices with literary moderns Willa Cather and Ernest Hemingway, before turning to Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, as the preservation impulse merges with concern about public health and social justice. Later twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers probably will include Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Robert Bullard, Alice Walker, Linda Hogan, Jeanne Wakutsaki Houston, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Carol Finney, Lauret Savoy, J. Drew Lanham, and Garnette Cadogan. |
| ENGL 8540 | Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature |
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| | 19C Fiction and Novel Theory |
| 20213 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 14 / 15 | Victoria Baena | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | |
| | This course is an introduction to classic and contemporary theories of the novel through the lens of nineteenth-century fiction. As we make our way through five novels that have prompted a vast range of critical responses - Vanity Fair, Great Expectations, The Moonstone, Nana, and Middlemarch - we pair these with notable twentieth- and twentieth-century critics who have sought to understand how narrative fiction works. What if anything, defines “the” novel as a genre? What kinds of worlds can it construct or imagine? To what extent can these worlds generate (or, conversely, prove resistant to) critiques of our own? Throughout, the course will focus on the novel as a mode of thinking in its own right. We’ll analyze each literary text on its own terms while also opening up a dialogue between prose fiction and its theories. Critics may include Lukács, Bakhtin, Auerbach, Schor, Armstrong, Gilbert and Gubar, Said, Jameson, Mazzoni, Bourdieu, Wynter, Barthes, Moretti, Brooks. |
| ENGL 8559 | New Course in English Literature |
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| | Reading AI |
| 20211 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 15 | Matthew Kirschenbaum | We 2:00pm - 4:30pm | |
| | This course starts from the premise that whatever it may mean technologically, “artificial intelligence” is also a discursive formulation, which is to say an active signifier in the cultural imagination. To begin working towards some understandings of that signifier we will undertake readings of "AI" in multiple registers: current critical writing that allows us to consider not only how today’s generative AI technology works but *what work*--political, social, aesthetic--we are calling upon it to do; representations of AI in literary fiction, from the 18th century to the present; and writing actually written by AI in the form of creative and experimental texts whose provenance and agency is indeterminate. While the focus of the course will be critical and theoretical (with no technical background required or assumed) we will also engage in some hands-on experimentation of our own. And while pedagogy will not be our focus, the course will offer important conceptual grounding for those who plan to teach in a world where AI is prevalent. Requirements will include leading discussion, a short reflective paper, and a longer semester project which could be either critical or creative. |
| | Fashioning the Nation |
| 20241 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 4 / 15 | Kelly Fleming | MoWe 5:00pm - 6:15pm | |
| | From its talking coins, tortuous chocolate pots, and trials of hoopskirts to its accounts of “the Calico Craze,” the boycott of sugar, and insurrections in the name of cockades, British and Irish literature between 1660 and 1832 records not only the invention of the modern fashion system and the rise of shopping as we know it but also the institutionalization of mercantile capitalism, colonialism, and liberalism through its attention to material culture. As the “consumer revolution” resulted in tariffs, technological developments, and debates about the positive and negative effects of luxurious commodities, property transformed from a simple legal concept to a complex political and philosophical ideology that justified, on the one hand, imperial expansion and slavery, and on the other, riots and revolution.
With this history in mind, this course will explore how material culture fashioned the British nation. It will offer an interdisciplinary overview of the different methodological approaches to analyzing material culture, including learning to identify the basic components of men’s and women’s dress. As we examine the things themselves and their significance in works of art, economics, literature, law, and philosophy over the course of the semester, we will think through the following questions. How did people understand their things as things? How did things inform their understanding of persons? How did things engineer our ideas of gender, race, class, and ability? How did things influence literature’s form and content? How did small things result in big political change? And finally, have you ever felt personally victimized by a fabric? |
| ENGL 8560 | Studies in Modern and Contemporary Literature |
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| | Narrating the Caribbean |
| 20279 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 8 / 16 | Njelle Hamilton | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | For Édouard Glissant, Caribbeanness or “antillanité” is “‘A method and not a state of being,’ [and is] grounded concretely in affirmation of a place, the Antilles [the wider Caribbean], and … link[s] cultures across language barriers’” (Poetics of Relation xxi). What then is this “method,” and what kinds of literary and narrative concerns link writers and artists throughout the Caribbean region?
Reading important and innovative literary works from Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone Caribbean authors alongside visual art and key Caribbean and postcolonial literary theory, we will consider a wide range of concerns and problematics that have shaped and defined Caribbean narratology: revisioning and resisting colonialist texts; narrating an often traumatic history; the politics of language; the quest for an indigenous narrative form; the place of postcolonial, anti-colonial, and postmodern narration; the place of music, orality, and folk cultures; the question of subaltern citizenships; and the impact of globalization on language, form, and identity.
Beyond this introduction to the region’s key issues, critics, writers, artists and texts, the ultimate goal of this seminar is to begin or continue your formation as future (Caribbean) scholars, teachers, and creative practitioners through a variety of assignments and exercises including creative scholarship, a critical review of an issue of a Caribbean literary journal, and a tentative syllabus for an undergraduate Caribbean literature survey. |
| ENGL 8580 | Studies in Critical Theory |
| |
| | Intro to Critical Theory |
| 20225 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 8 / 18 | Nasrin Olla | TuTh 8:00am - 9:15am | |
| | Email Professor Olla (nasrinolla@virginia.edu) if you have questions. |
| | This course introduces students to a broad range of 20th- and 21st-century theoretical paradigms that have reshaped the ways we think about culture, power, and identity. Topics include structuralism, poststructuralism, postcolonial thought, African diasporic thought, feminist thought, and gender and queer theory. Readings will feature works by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, and others. This course will appeal to students interested in continental philosophy, traditions of critique, feminist thought, and postcolonial worlds. |
| ENGL 8596 | Form and Theory of Poetry |
| |
| | Ecofeminist Poetry & Poetics |
| 13952 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 15 / 18 | Brian Teare | We 2:00pm - 4:30pm | |
| | “How can we listen across species,” asks Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “across extinction, across harm?” How can the practice of poetry extend our attention, aid us in listening and speaking to, touching, and moving in ethical relation to an imperiled world? Much contemporary ecofeminist poetry focuses on fostering ethical relations to the more-than-human, and it often does so by situating these relationships in the Anthropocene, a geological epoch sometimes reframed by ecocritics as the Plantationocene or the Colonialocene. Ecofeminist poets often makes visible how chattel slavery, imperialism, industrialization, and settler colonialism take advantage of and thrive off of the intrinsic interconnectedness between species, ecosystems, humans, and human systems. Thus this interdisciplinary course will interweave brief readings from ecofeminist theory, ecopoetics, and Black and indigenous environmental theories with books of contemporary ecofeminist poetry. This curriculum will encourage each of us to see what happens when we “rethink and re-feel,” writes Gumbs, our own “relations, possibilities, and practices” in conversation with the more-than-human world. Assignments will range from the creative to the critical, with an emphasis on process-led ecofeminist research that culminates in a final project.
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| ENGL 8598 | Form and Theory of Fiction |
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| | Potential Literature |
| 13958 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 6 / 15 | Micheline Marcom | Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm | |
| | In 1960, several French writers founded OuLiPo: Workshop for Potential Literature, considering literature in the conditional mood: not what it is, but what it could be. Through readings of works of literature and various philosophical and "thinking" texts, this readings course will explore potentiality and constraint in literature, including, but not limited to, writers of the OuLiPo. We will likely read: Rabelais, Cervantes, Perec, Calvino, Lispector, Nabokov, Nietzsche, Roberto Calasso, Simone Weil, Plato (Symposium), and others. |
| ENGL 9530 | Advanced Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature I, II |
| |
| | The Prepostmodern Novel |
| 20205 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 9 / 15 | Brad Pasanek | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | |
| | In this course we move back and forth between eighteenth-century and more contemporary literatures in order to gauge how texts are written and rewritten, one against another. Fiction and meta-fiction are two red threads; our reading, a braid or knot. We'll start by sampling theoretical accounts of modernity, pre and post: say, Lyotard, Foucault, Horkheimer and Adorno, Latour, and Jameson. Cervantes’ rewritings (by means of Tobias Smollett’s translation) and later quixotisms follow on. Complications ensue as we layer on readings and consider reenactment: Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Michael Winterbottom’s Shandean adaptation of the aforementioned, and the Letters of Ignatius Sancho. A unit on Roland Barthes’ lectures on the novel, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and Kate Briggs’ The Long Form rounds out the semester. We’ll ask, was ist Aufklärung? And whither parody? We’ll ask also, as recent critics have, why literary periods mattered and if now is the time for reperiodization. |
| Writing and Rhetoric |
| ENWR 1510 | Writing and Critical Inquiry |
| |
| | Writing about Culture/Society |
| | Writing About Family |
| 11178 | 019 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (0 / 6) | 18 / 18 | Holly Zhou | MoWe 5:00pm - 6:15pm | |
| | Family is where we begin and where we often return. Where are the spaces and who are the people with which we find belonging? In this course, we will think about the way we construct notions of family via language, food, diaspora, and a cast of characters (siblings, pets, chosen family, etc.). We will read and consume a wide range of contemporary media, including comics, poems, essays, novel excerpts, short films, and music videos, with the intention of reframing traditional modes of thinking about family and helping you develop your own ideas around belonging. You will experiment with a variety of genres involving a mix of ungraded and/or private writing and two revised and polished full-length pieces, which will be workshopped by your peers. |
| | Writing about Culture/Society |
| | Writing About Family |
| 11308 | 029 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (2 / 6) | 18 / 18 | Holly Zhou | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | Family is where we begin and where we often return. Where are the spaces and who are the people with which we find belonging? In this course, we will think about the way we construct notions of family via language, food, diaspora, and a cast of characters (siblings, pets, chosen family, etc.). We will read and consume a wide range of contemporary media, including comics, poems, essays, novel excerpts, short films, and music videos, with the intention of reframing traditional modes of thinking about family and helping you develop your own ideas around belonging. You will experiment with a variety of genres involving a mix of ungraded and/or private writing and two revised and polished full-length pieces, which will be workshopped by your peers. |
| | Writing about Digital Media |
| | Did the Camera Ever Tell the Truth? |
| 11378 | 030 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 18 / 18 | Jodie Childers | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | |
| | In this class, we will build upon this provocative question posed by documentary filmmakers Maximilien Van Aertryck and Axel Danielson to explore what it means to be a discerning content consumer in the age of digital media. As we become active readers, viewers, and listeners, we will analyze the ways in which content creators attempt to shape our perception, from the Kuleshov effect in a video to the pathos of the sound design in a podcast. We will also apply the tricks of the trade as we make our own digital projects. With the rise of AI-generated media, it’s more important now than ever to grapple with the ethics of digital content creation and consumption. |
| | Writing about Digital Media |
| | Did the Camera Ever Tell the Truth? |
| 11713 | 043 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 18 / 18 | Jodie Childers | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | |
| | In this class, we will build upon this provocative question posed by documentary filmmakers Maximilien Van Aertryck and Axel Danielson to explore what it means to be a discerning content consumer in the age of digital media. As we become active readers, viewers, and listeners, we will analyze the ways in which content creators attempt to shape our perception, from the Kuleshov effect in a video to the pathos of the sound design in a podcast. We will also apply the tricks of the trade as we make our own digital projects. With the rise of AI-generated media, it’s more important now than ever to grapple with the ethics of digital content creation and consumption. |
| | Writing about the Arts |
| | Writing about Television |
| 11715 | 045 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 18 / 18 | Cristina Griffin | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | |
| | 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 twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the television show. As we read, watch, 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—their genres, storytelling capacities, narrative features, and serial formats—build compelling worlds? How can we approach these tv worlds analytically while also valuing the emotional impact of television? How do television shows critique and generate culture? Over the course of the semester, we will read scripts that turned into episodes, read critical writing about television, and of course we will also watch a variety of tv episodes. But more than anything, we will write about television: we will build up our capacity to analyze television and then turn that inquiring perspective onto our own writing. If television shows build worlds out of words – and if those worlds can and do have a giant impact, for better or worse, on the world we live in – then 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 the Arts |
| | Writing about Visual Narratives |
| 12689 | 062 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 15 / 18 | Rory Sullivan | MoWeFr 10:00am - 10:50am | |
| | In this course, we will examine what it means to read, experience, write about, and create visual narratives. By looking at a variety of media objects, including comics, graphic novels, archival materials, and video games, we will explore what makes these narratives unique as a genre. |
| | Writing about Culture/Society |
| | Writing about Sports |
| 12694 | 067 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (0 / 6) | 18 / 18 | Rory Sullivan | MoWeFr 11:00am - 11:50am | |
| | In this course, we will discover the various ways that sports reflect and shape culture. Writing projects will include game summaries, audio and visual podcasts, and research projects. |
| ENWR 1520 | Writing and Critical Inquiry: Community Engagement |
| |
| | You and A.I. |
| 19538 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (1 / 6) | 18 / 18 | Piers Gelly | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | |
| | In this first-year writing course, 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? Together, we will take a hands-on approach to exploring the capabilities (and limits) of generative A.I. |
| ENWR 2510 | Advanced Writing Seminar |
| |
| | Writing about Identities |
| | The Cultural Work of Life Writing |
| 12696 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 16 / 16 | Tamika Carey | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | |
| | From posting on social media to writing memoirs, people are constantly documenting their lives for the public. This class will explore these acts of disclosure to understand what they reveal about how members from different cultural groups use writing to form, reform, and share their identities. In addition to reading theoretical works, popular critiques, and primary texts by a variety of memoirists, scholars, and journalists, students will collect, analyze, and compose brief life writings, and complete a final critical or creative project. |
| ENWR 2520 | Special Topics in Writing |
| |
| | Listening to Horror |
| 12688 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (3 / 10) | 16 / 16 | Kate Natishan | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | |
| | Are there aspects of fear and horror that are cross-cultural? What is it about horror that audiences are drawn to, and how do creators of horror content use larger sociological anxieties to scare or unnerve their audiences? What is the difference between horror stories that are rooted in a place and those that offer a glimpse of something vast and unknowable? Do you ever wonder how it is that mediums as limited as text and audio can create such a creepy experience? If so, you are in the right place... I hope you’re ready to Listen to Horror.
In this class we explore the genre of cosmic horror: fiction that emphasizes the fear of the unknowable and incomprehensible. We will be reading and listening to examples of cosmic horror - the macabre, the unnerving, and the eerie - while grappling with the existence of entities beyond human comprehension. We begin with a brief overview of the history of cosmic horror concepts and its place in society before moving on to take deep dives into two horror podcasts: The Magnus Archives and Old Gods of Appalachia. Throughout the semester, we will examine how sound design enhances written scripts. The content in this course (and sometimes its creators) can be challenging: we’ll explore ways to think critically about the things we enjoy and we’ll work together to continue enjoying imperfect creations.
CONTENT WARNING: Students should be aware that some of the texts and podcast episodes we will be discussing might contain graphic or frightening content. The Magnus Archives and Old Gods of Appalachia provide clear content warnings for each episode on their websites and in episode transcripts. Because some of these content warnings are sound-design related, please consider these carefully before listening. If you have any concerns regarding a specific episode, please reach out to me and we'll talk. |
| | Writing AI, You, and Me |
| 20905 | 008 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (2 / 10) | 16 / 16 | Piers Gelly | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | |
| | In this writing-intensive seminar, we will practice the craft of college-level writing by asking a provocative question about the course itself: in the age of ChatGPT, do we still need writing courses like this one? We will conduct this inquiry by considering a wide range of human and machine voices addressing technology, culture, literature and politics, including such texts as Donald Trump’s June 2025 executive order “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government,” Ruha Benjamin’s Race and Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, James Cameron’s 1984 film The Terminator, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s controversial AI-generated poetry, and Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” We will explore together how new technology raises very old questions: What is writing for? What is college for? What does it mean to be human? And what ethical rules, if any, should apply to the development and use of powerful new technologies like AI? |
| ENWR 3550 | Advanced Topics in Digital Writing and Rhetoric |
| |
| | Digital Maker Studio |
| 19546 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (5 / 10) | 16 / 16 | Jodie Childers | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | In this hands-on maker workshop, students will explore the craft of writing through digital making as they compose with words, images, and sound. Experimentation, invention, and design will be emphasized as students learn to use digital tools and create multimodal content. |
| ENWR 3640 | Writing with Sound |
| |
| 13233 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Closed | 15 / 15 | Piers Gelly | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | In this course, you’ll learn basic audio production skills: recording, editing, sound design, and writing for the ear — which is very different from writing for the eye! — as well as the associated craft of conducting respectful, responsible, and useful interviews.
You’ll also learn some skills that aren’t unique to audio production, but which audio production tends to exercise very well: coming up with ideas for projects, executing those projects on a deadline, self-editing, giving and receiving feedback in a group setting, collaborating on small and large projects, and thinking creatively about every aspect of a multi-phase undertaking.
No audio production experience is required! |
| ENWR 3760 | Studies in Cultural Rhetoric |
| |
| | The Cultural Work of Stories |
| 19550 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (2 / 6) | 16 / 16 | Tamika Carey | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | This course will explore how cultural groups develop, use, and remix stories to build and reshape their worlds. With special attention to the social concepts and communication techniques involved in this work – concepts that include master narratives, rhetorical listening, identification, testimony, and counterstory – we will deepen our understanding of how rhetoric influences the worlds in which we live. Projects will include a story collection project, an analysis presentation, and a final creative or critical project. |
| Enviromental Thought and Practice |
| ETP 3500 | Topics in Environmental Thought and Practice |
| |
| | Africulture: Roots of US Ag |
| 13285 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 14 / 20 (19 / 25) | Michael Carter Jr.+1 | Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm | |
| | Taught by Michael Carter, Jr., supported by Lisa Shutt |
| | ETP 3500/AAS 3500 – Africulture, taught by Michael Carter, Jr. & supported by Lisa Shutt
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. https://learnafriculture.com/ |
| | Nature Connection Leadership |
| | Nature Connection Leadership: Offering Nature-Based Interventions for Community Mental Wellness |
| 21284 | 002 | SEM (1 Units) | Open | 6 / 30 | Carolyn Schuyler is a UVA Visiting Scholar+4 | 03/13 Fr 1:00pm - 5:00pm | |
| | Carolyn Schuyler+1 | 04/17 Fr 1:00pm - 3:00pm |
| | Carolyn Schuyler+1 | 03/27 Fr 1:00pm - 3:00pm |
| | Carolyn Schuyler+1 | 03/20 Fr 1:00pm - 3:00pm |
| | Carolyn Schuyler+1 | 04/24 Fr 1:00pm - 4:00pm |
| | Course Description
Are you interested in helping to create a more nature-connected culture to advance pro-environmental behavior and community mental health? More and more communities and organizations are recognizing the role of strong emotional bonds with the natural world as foundational for environmentally responsible behavior and employee and community mental wellness. To address the symptoms of environmental degradation and climate change, we must address the root causes - pervasive disconnection from nature, amnesia for our interconnectivity with all of life, and mindsets valuing profits over the planet.
In this short course, students will experience nature -based interventions for mental wellness at Morven during the opening retreat and have opportunities to develop leadership skills with classmates and community organizations for the remainder of the class.
Pathways to nature connection may be shared, but where we arrive is deeply personal and for many, a source of meaning, purpose, and belonging. At the completion of the course, not only will you expand your sense of kinship with nature, you will be able to design and lead nature connection initiatives to help others do the same. These skills help us to collectively move beyond coping with existing harmful systems to create new ways to take care of the Earth and each other.
We welcome diverse perspectives and people from all backgrounds and courses of study to join us in restoring our relationship with nature and promoting immersive access to nature for community health and environmental stewardship where we live, learn, work, and play.
Course Goals:
During this 6 week course, you will
Build skills in program development, community engagement practices, planning and implementation, and group facilitation
Increase your sense of purpose, belonging, and meaning in working to address both the environmental and mental health crises through nature connection experiences
Network with like-minded peers, professors, and clubs who are intentional about strengthening the human - nature relationship and promoting access nature equity
Format
Six week short course meets for two hours each week and will be kicked-off with an immersive four hour retreat and end with a three hour student-led capstone retreat in week 6.
Friday, March 13, 1-5PM,
Fridays March 20, 1-3PM
Friday, March 27, 1-3PM
April 17, 1-3PM
April 24, 1-4PM
|
| Environmental Sciences-Hydrology |
| EVHY 7559 | New Course in Hydrology |
| |
| | Comp Methods in Hydrology |
| 19117 | 100 | Lecture (4 Units) | Open | 6 / 20 (33 / 35) | Frederick Cheng | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | Introduction to computational methods in hydrology by integrating data-driven analysis and process-based modeling. Topics include large-sample hydrology, hydrologic signatures, and numerical modeling for water quantity and quality. Emphasis is placed on combining top-down and bottom-up modeling approaches to enhance hydrologic understanding. No prior programming experience is required.
NOTE: The T/Th meetings will be held with EVSC 4080/7080 and will involve learning the same underlying computational methods in R. EVHY 7559 will have its own set of assignments and a Friday meeting to focus on hydrologic concepts and discussion. |
| | Introduction to computational methods in hydrology by integrating data-driven analysis and process-based modeling. Topics include large-sample hydrology, hydrologic signatures, and numerical modeling for water quantity and quality. Emphasis is placed on combining top-down and bottom-up modeling approaches to enhance hydrologic understanding. No prior programming experience is required. Recommended: A previous course in hydrology. |
| French |
| FREN 3030 | Phonetics |
| |
| 13855 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 12 / 18 | Cecile Rey | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | |
| | This course is designed for beginners in French phonetics: you will dive into the world of French sounds, mastering everything from vowels to the famously tricky "r." You will also get hands-on experience with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), helping you perfect your pronunciation. Through engaging exercises and interactive practice, you will gain confidence and speak French more clearly and naturally. Prerequisite: FREN 2020. |
| FREN 3031 | Finding Your Voice in French |
| |
| 11509 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 7 / 15 | Karen James | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | |
| |
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.
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. |
| 12682 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 15 | Karen James | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | |
| | 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.
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.
|
| FREN 3043 | The French-Speaking World III: Modernities |
| |
| | What's New? |
| 13797 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open, WL (5 / 99) | 19 / 20 | Claire Lyu | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | |
| | How do we make something new out of what already exists? How do we nurture originality in amidst mounting 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 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 in the 21stcentury, the aria of Bizet’s 19th-century opera Carmen, which, in turn, was inspired by a short story published earlier by Mérimée.
|
| FREN 3882 | Loving Words: A Poem a Day in French |
| |
| 19399 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (13 / 99) | 19 / 18 | Cheryl Krueger | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | FREN 3882 Loving Words: A Poem a Day in French
In this course we will read poems in French from a variety of writers and time periods, taking into account their stylistic features, emotional impact, and cultural resonance. Each day will be structured around the close reading of one key poem. Through in-class readings of related poems, collaborative writing workshops and secondary readings, we will explore how poetry brings us closer to words, language, knowledge, sensations, emotion, ourselves, and others.
Prerequisite: FREN 3031 or equivalent
This course counts toward the French major and minor
This course fulfills the post-1800 requirement for the French major and minor
|
| FREN 4123 | Medieval Love |
| |
| 19195 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (1 / 99) | 18 / 18 | Amy Ogden | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | Fulfills pre-Revolutionary period requirement for French major and minor |
| | Affection for family members, deep and casual friendships, maybe even passionate romance—everyone exists within a network of loving relationships. We probably don’t often think about where our expectations for these relationships come from, and most people would be surprised that a lot of our ideas about love come from twelfth- and thirteenth-century France. Marrying for love? Soul mates? Top Ten Tips for Attracting a Mate? BFFs? Parental devotion? All have foundations in medieval French culture.
Reading surprisingly modern stories of adventure and thoughtful (and sometimes funny) essays about emotions—all in modern French translation—and listening to soulful songs of the past, as well as to their modern counterparts, we will explore medieval ideas about love that continue to shape our modern understandings and assumptions about emotions and relationships.
This course fulfills the French Department pre-Revolutionary period requirement. |
| FREN 4744 | The Occupation and After |
| |
| 19298 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (3 / 99) | 20 / 18 | Ari Blatt | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | |
| | While in 2014 the French spent a year commemorating the centenary of the start of the “Great War” (“la Der des Ders,” the so called “war to end all wars”), in the summer of 2014 the nation marked another important anniversary: namely, seventy years since the Liberation of Paris during World War II (for some reason, there was a bit less fanfare in 2024, for the 80th anniversary of the Liberation). The German occupation of France, which lasted from June 1940 until the summer of 1944, was one of the most consequential periods in the nation’s history, one that left an indelible mark on the French national psyche that continues to rouse the country’s collective memory to this day. After an initial examination of the political and social conditions in France under the Nazi regime, this seminar proposes to explore the enduring legacy of those “Dark Years” by investigating how the complex (and traumatic) history of the Occupation has impacted French culture during the last half of the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty first. Discussions will focus on a variety of documents, events, historical essays, and artistic sources—short stories, novels, and films, mostly, though we will also explore photography and the graphic novel—that attest to what historians refer to as contemporary France’s collective “obsession” with the past.
Readings and films may include (but are not limited to) work by Némirovsky, Vercors, Perec, Duras, Modiano, Salvayre, Daeninckx, Sartre, Clouzot, Melville, Resnais, Ophüls, Berri, Malle, Chabrol, and Audiard. Course conducted in French.
Students in this seminar are required to have taken FREN 3031. We strongly recommend that, for all 4000-level courses, students have also taken at least one course (preferably a lit/culture course) "above" FREN 3040.
|
| FREN 5510 | Topics in Medieval Literature |
| |
| | East in Premodern Lit/Culture |
| | Inventing the East |
| 19196 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 3 / 10 (6 / 15) | Deborah McGrady | We 3:30pm - 6:00pm | |
| | Edward Said's work on orientalism imposed a radical premodern/modern divide on the study of East-West relations that suppressed earlier intellectual, literary, and cultural traditions crucial to understanding the western invention of the East. This seminar recovers part of this lost history by turning to a medieval francophone corpus in which the East assumed a prominent role in the literary imagination. This corpus encompasses French works from the 12th through the 15th centuries produced in and outside of the French kingdom, including the Chanson de Roland, East-West romances, travel adventures, and late-medieval "alternate histories." Reports of merchants and spies who journeyed east, crusading propaganda, and diplomatic dealings will anchor our reading of these texts as creative responses to an ever-growing interconnected world. While echoes of modern takes on the Orient will emerge, we will discover a world in which western superiority was not a certainty and where contact with the Other often triggered discussion of received values. Western debates about conquest, empire, conversion, collective memory, human nature, gender and ethnicity will deeply inform our reading. This approach will lead to larger questions regarding the complex relationship between creative expression and critical thinking, how fiction constructs time and space, how reading and listening shape understanding, and the unique ways the imaginary processes lived experience (especially concerning collective trauma and cultural shifts). How might this recovered past alter our understanding of Orientalism, disrupt presentist thinking, provide new insights into the role of creative expression in society, and contribute to Global Medieval Studies? Student-led discussion, a mid-semester critical reflection, class presentations, and a final research paper will allow ample opportunity for participants to engage with and contribute to this active field of research. |
| FREN 5560 | Topics in Nineteenth-Century Literature |
| |
| | Reading with Emma Bovary |
| 13060 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 2 / 10 (5 / 15) | Cheryl Krueger | Tu 3:30pm - 6:00pm | |
| | During the 1857 obscenity trial against Flaubert and his publisher, prosecutor Ernest Pinard argued that the novel Madame Bovary would corrupt the hearts and minds of its readers, particularly young women and wives. Dangerous fiction is a dominant theme in the work itself. When Emma Bovary shows symptoms of “vaporous airs,” her husband and mother-in-law decide she must stop reading novels. This course focuses on reading habits in Madame Bovary, and on what they say about Flaubert’s aesthetic project, the social and medical discourses that Madame Bovary reflects and reinforces, and the education of women. What did Emma Bovary read, how did she read it? And how have critics in the 19th-21st centuries read her reading?
Inspired by the scholarly practice of close reading and the cultural philosophy embraced by the Slow Movement, this course will build from the un-rushed reading of Madame Bovary, in conjunction with a selection of film adaptations, and transcripts from Flaubert’s obscenity trial. Social class, gender roles, psychology, medicine, hygiene, consumer culture, the environment, and aesthetic innovation are among the topics the novel will lead us to explore. Students will steer the selection of secondary readings and materials for the class based on questions raised by the novel and discussion, using recommended digital resources (Gallica, Project Gutenberg, the MLA Database) and UVA Library print collections. The syllabus will be developed by course participants and is unique to the group of students who co-construct it.
• Open to graduate students with reading knowledge of French
• Course conducted in French and English (depending on students’ background)
• Written work in French (for most French MA and Ph.D. students), or English
• Open to advanced undergraduates with permission of instructor
• Most readings in French
• I ask that everyone use the same edition of the primary text, Madame Bovary
T/TH 3:30-6:00 PM
|
| FREN 8510 | Seminar in Medieval Literature |
| |
| | East in Premodern Lit/Culture |
| | Inventing the East |
| 19302 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 3 / 5 (6 / 15) | Deborah McGrady | We 3:30pm - 6:00pm | |
| | Edward Said's work on orientalism imposed a radical premodern/modern divide on the study of East-West relations that suppressed entire intellectual, literary, and cultural traditions crucial to understanding the western invention of the East. This seminar recovers part of this lost history by turning to a medieval francophone corpus in which the East assumed a prominent role in the literary imagination. This corpus encompasses French works from the 12th through the 15th centuries produced in and outside of the French kingdom, including the Chanson de Roland, East-West romances, travel adventures, and late-medieval "alternate histories." Reports of merchants and spies who journeyed east, crusading propaganda, and diplomatic dealings will anchor our reading of these texts as creative responses to an ever-growing interconnected world. While echoes of modern takes on the Orient will emerge, we will discover a world in which western superiority was not a certainty and where contact with the Other often triggered discussion of received values. Western debates about conquest, empire, conversion, collective memory, human nature, gender and ethnicity will deeply inform our reading. This approach will lead to larger questions regarding the complex relationship between creative expression and critical thinking, how fiction constructs time and space, how reading and listening shape understanding, and the unique ways the imaginary processes lived experience (especially concerning collective trauma and cultural shifts). How might this recovered past alter our understanding of Orientalism, disrupt presentist thinking, provide new insights into the role of creative expression in society, and contribute to Global Medieval Studies? Student-led discussion, a mid-semester critical reflection, class presentations, and a final research paper will allow ample opportunity for participants to engage with and contribute to this active field of research. |
| FREN 8560 | Seminar in Nineteenth-Century Literature |
| |
| | Reading with Emma Bovary |
| 19398 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 3 / 5 (5 / 15) | Cheryl Krueger | Tu 3:30pm - 6:00pm | |
| | During the 1857 obscenity trial against Flaubert and his publisher, prosecutor Ernest Pinard argued that the novel Madame Bovary would corrupt the hearts and minds of its readers, particularly young women and wives. Dangerous fiction is a dominant theme in the work itself. When Emma Bovary shows symptoms of “vaporous airs,” her husband and mother-in-law decide she must stop reading novels. This course focuses on reading habits in Madame Bovary, and on what they say about Flaubert’s aesthetic project, the social and medical discourses that Madame Bovary reflects and reinforces, and the education of women. What did Emma Bovary read, how did she read it? And how have critics in the 19th-21st centuries read her reading?
Inspired by the scholarly practice of close reading and the cultural philosophy embraced by the Slow Movement, this course will build from the un-rushed reading of Madame Bovary, in conjunction with a selection of film adaptations, and transcripts from Flaubert’s obscenity trial. Social class, gender roles, psychology, medicine, hygiene, consumer culture, the environment, and aesthetic innovation are among the topics the novel will lead us to explore. Students will steer the selection of secondary readings and materials for the class based on questions raised by the novel and discussion, using recommended digital resources (Gallica, Project Gutenberg, the MLA Database) and UVA Library print collections. The syllabus will be developed by course participants and is unique to the group of students who co-construct it.
• Open to graduate students with reading knowledge of French
• Course conducted in French and English (depending on students’ background)
• Written work in French (for most French MA and Ph.D. students), or English
• Open to advanced undergraduates with permission of instructor
• Most readings in French
• I will ask that everyone use the same edition of the primary text, Madame Bovary
T/TH 3:30-6:00 PM
|
| Graduate Commerce |
| GCOM 7240 | Advanced Quantitative Analysis |
| |
| 14714 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 7 / 40 | Richard Netemeyer | TuTh 12:30pm - 3:15pm | |
| | SIS Description: Multivariate statistics training to analyze customer and organizational behavior data. The course covers advanced predictive and classification techniques including logistic regression, cluster analyses, factor analysis, and path analysis structural equation modeling. The course applies these techniques to a current data set of Hilton Hotel employee perceptions of their work environment and how these perceptions affect customer satisfaction at Hilton Hotels. The statistics packages used in the class are IBM-SPSS and R-Studio. No prior training on R-Studio is needed or expected. |
| German in Translation |
| GETR 3372 | German Jewish Culture and Literature |
| |
| 20093 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (0 / 199) | 18 / 18 | Julia Gutterman | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | |
| | This course explores German Jewish culture and literature from 1750 to 1945 and beyond. Through a wide range of philosophical, autobiographical, and literary works, we will examine how Jewish thinkers and writers responded to modernity in Central Europe and how their ideas helped shape modern European thought. We’ll trace the emergence of new forms of Jewish identity and experience, following stories of transformation, tension, and creativity across history. Readings will include texts by Moses Mendelssohn, Rahel Varhagen, Henriette Herz, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Gertrud Kolmar, Else Lasker-Schüler, Franz Rosenzweig, and contemporary authors such as Katja Petrowskaja and Olga Grjasnowa.
No prior knowledge of German or Jewish studies is required. The course fulfills the Second Writing Requirement.
|
| GETR 3559 | New Course in German in Translation |
| |
| | Illness and Disability |
| | Illness and Disability in Fiction |
| 20820 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 4 / 30 | Julia Gutterman | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | Open to students of all levels and disciplines! |
| | This course explores the dynamic relationships between illness, disability, and the literary imagination. We will engage with a wide range of shorter texts to ask: how do narratives convey the lived experiences of health, illness, and disability? What cultural understandings of the body and mind, of health, and of dis/ability do these texts reflect? And what ethical challenges arise in listening to, reading, or writing stories about illness and disability?
This course is open to students of all levels and disciplines—whether in the medical and health fields, critical disability and literary studies, or simply with an interest in reading stories. Texts include works from English-speaking contexts and, in translation, from German traditions. |
| History-European History |
| HIEU 2072 | Modern Europe and the World |
| |
| 18955 | 100 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (16 / 199) | 58 / 50 | Jennifer Sessions | MoWe 10:00am - 10:50am | |
| | NOTE: This description is from Spring 2022, so details will be updated.
This course offers an introduction to European history since the French Revolution, with an emphasis on the ways that social, cultural, and political change in Europe has been shaped by the continent’s connections with the wider world. Our goal is to develop a framework for understanding the processes that changed a society of peasants, artisans, nobles, and monarchs into a class-based, industrialized world of liberal democracies (at least in theory), how these changes took place, and where Europe is now. We’ll talk about the political and social legacies of the French Revolution, industrialization, European imperial expansion, the rise of mass culture, the two world wars and the Holocaust, European unification, decolonization, the Cold War, and contemporary crises of liberal democracy and nationalism. Throughout the semester, we’ll focus on how ideas about state power and citizenship, social and class relations, religious and cultural life, racial and gender identities, and the very meanings of “Europe” itself have changed, and consider how people, both ordinary and notable, experienced these dramatic changes.
Our two weekly lectures and discussion sections will work together to allow you to develop your knowledge and deepen your understanding of the course material. Both lectures and sections will be participatory, and you should come to each class prepared to discuss the associated readings or other homework. Readings, in-class activities, and formal assignments are designed to help you develop the skills to identify and analyze historical problems, to evaluate evidence and construct historical arguments, and to move beyond memorizing facts into a larger conversation about how studying history can help us to understand the dynamics of our world today and our own place within it.
The required books below are available for purchase at the UVA Bookstore, on reserve at Clemons Library, or as ebooks through the Virgo library catalog. All other readings and streaming films are posted on Collab.
Edward Berenson, Europe in the Modern World: A New Narrative History since 1500, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2020, ISBN 9780190078850).
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (Penguin Classics, ISBN 9780140439076)
Susan Kingsley Kent, Queen Victoria: Gender and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2015, ISBN 9780190250003)
Heda Margolius Kovály, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968 (Granta, ISBN 9781847084767).
Amara Lakhous, Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vitorio, trans. Ann Goldstein (2006; Europa Editions, 2008, ISBN 9781609452353)
We’ll be assessing your learning in several ways this semester. If you have any concerns about any of the below or need any accommodations in order to participate fully in the course, please come see us early in the semester. The Student Disability Access Center will help to facilitate academic accommodations and support services (https://www.studenthealth.virginia.edu/sdac).
Section Discussions: Ongoing discussions of the course material will be the foundation of our collective inquiry in this course. We should all remember that different norms about how best to engage in conversation differ and open ourselves to different modes of expression and thinking, while also keeping in mind that listening is as important as talking to the exchange of ideas. If you have any concerns about participation, come and see us early in the semester so we can figure out the best way for you to participate. Each discussion section will develop its own set of guidelines for class participation together at the beginning of the semester.
Weekly Writing: Each week, we will do some short, reflective writing about our readings, either at home or in class. The goal here is to consider major themes or questions, draw connections across time and space, and assess the significance of what we have been studying. Some days we will offer a guiding question, other times you can reflect freely on the material. Whether you choose to write by hand or type, please keep weekly writings in one place as a “course journal” that you can turn in periodically. These will be graded for ongoing, informed engagement with the course material and readings.
Annotated Timeline: An ongoing annotated timeline will help you organize your thinking about the history we are studying and situate key events and processes chronologically. Like the weekly writing, you can create and keep your timeline by hand or digitally, in whatever form makes sense to you. Whatever you choose, dates or date ranges should be added to your timeline as our lectures and readings move forward, with an annotation for each “entry” explaining what it is and why it’s important in the history of modern Europe. There is no set number of entries, but each class meeting is likely to include at least 5 dates/periods important for understanding the historical developments under discussion. Timelines will be turned in with the installments of weekly writings and graded similarly for evidence of thoughtful consideration of the material.
Short Essays: Two short essays of 3-4 and 5-6 pages will allow you to explore major historical questions and to practice your analytical reading and writing skills. Because improving your writing is one of the most important things you can do with your college education, we will be using an online tool called Peerceptiv for peer review of drafts of both essays. Deadlines for the steps in the Peerceptiv process are marked in the semester schedule, and we’ll go over how to use it in class.
Final Project
Because we each come to this course with different interests, purposes, and goals, there are two options for a final assignment that will allow you to demonstrate what you have learned over the course of the semester. We’ll hand out more detailed instructions for each option and do signups after Spring Break, so you have some time to think about which you’d like to choose.
a) Creative Unessay: You can propose a project that uses skills you have developed in and out of class to demonstrate what you’ve learned this semester. This can take any form you wish: you can sew a quilt, build a digital map or timeline, cook a meal, make a short graphic novel or a film, write a play or piece of music, create a fake primary source…. All ideas are welcome, and the only limit is your imagination. Along with the completed project, you’ll turn in a 3-page written reflection on what you learned from your project and a bibliography of at least 3 primary sources and 3 secondary sources (from our syllabus or other peer-reviewed, academic sources) that you used.
OR
b) Take-Home Essay: You can write a 7-8 page essay that uses the materials we have read, viewed, and discussed over the semester to explain how the history we have studied helps you to understand one of the central themes raised in Amara Lakhous’s Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio. The specific genre is up to you—you can write a letter to a friend or family member, a book review, an op-ed, a policy brief, etc., or a traditional essay. The only requirement is that it must include 7-8 pages of writing and reference at least 5 primary and/or secondary sources that cover all the main units of the semester. If you choose this option, you’ll turn in your final essay along with a bibliography and a 1-page cover letter reflecting on why you chose the theme you did and what you learned from writing the essay. |
| History-Middle Eastern History |
| HIME 1501 | Introductory Seminar in Middle East History |
| |
| | Zionism and its Opponents |
| 21570 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 12 / 15 | Glenn Dynner | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | Zionism- an ideology of Jewish national self-determination- has assumed several forms and ignited much controversy. In this course we draw on historical, literary, film, and religious sources to explore the origins, development, and realization of Zionism, as well as cogent criticisms from both within and outside the Jewish community by Palestinians, Jewish Socialists (Bundists), Communists, and Hasidic Jews, in particular. Competing religious and nationalist claims, competing definitions of antisemitism, and competing historical narratives will underpin our exploration of Zionism, Anti-Zionism, and the history of the current conflict. |
| History-General History |
| HIST 3910 | History Internship |
| |
| 20878 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 15 | Jennifer Sessions | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | |
| | Students must apply for internships through the Career Center's Internship Placement Program. |
| | This course is intended for History majors and minors pursuing a History-designated internship through the Career Center's Internship Placement Program (IPP). Students must apply for internships separately through IPP: https://career.virginia.edu/ipp-spring-2026-application. |
| HIST 5559 | New Course in General History |
| |
| | Legal History Research Methods |
| | Legal History Research: Manuscripts, Early Print, and Digital Media |
| 20442 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 9 / 8 | Paul Halliday+1 | Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm | |
| | This course will be taught in the Law School library. Course admission is by instructor permission. |
| | Using the holdings of the Law School’s Special Collections, this hands-on seminar explores research methods in the legal history of the Anglophone Atlantic world. It emphasizes the identification and interpretation of original manuscripts; the making and use of early printed books; the analysis of the many genres of printed law books, from the 15th to the 19th centuries; and the search for and analysis of such materials in their digitized forms. Will interest Law students wanting to learn historical methods as they might apply to modern jurisprudence and to History students with a broad interest in using legal sources. |
| HIST 9993 | Tutorials in General History |
| |
| | Hist of Sci, Tech, Med |
| 20644 | 001 | IND (3 Units) | Open | 2 / 5 | David Singerman | Mo 3:30pm - 6:00pm | |
| | This graduate tutorial is open to students from any field of study in the university. It's designed to introduce students to a range of approaches in the global history of science, technology, and medicine.
For the first half of the semester, we’ll focus on interdisciplinary methods and approaches, covering the intersection of the history of S/T/M with anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. We’ll also talk about what a truly global history of these subjects would look like, and evaluate some recent works that try to carry out such a global approach.
In the second half, the tutorial will be designed around the students' own interests, covering whatever topics the students feel will be useful to their own research projects. Each student will get one class session to assign readings and lead the discussion. At the end of the semester, we will have a works-in-progress session (or sessions, depending on enrollment). |
| Leadership and Public Policy - Policy |
| LPPP 5559 | New Course in Public Policy and Leadership |
| |
| | Global Disaster and Conflict |
| 19135 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Permission | 13 / 13 | Kirsten Gelsdorf | Fr 12:00pm - 2:30pm | |
| | Kirsten Gelsdorf | ThFrSaSu 3:00pm - 7:00pm |
| | Open to all undergraduate and graduate students via application. Open now to apply by 28 Oct via https://tinyurl.com/LPPP5559application or email BattenAcademics@virginia.edu for a link.
|
| | Taught by a former United Nations official with two decades of experience working in humanitarian aid, this course introduces students to global humanitarian policy and operations and culminates with a required 3-day outdoor Humanitarian Field Training in Clarke County Virginia Thursday 3:00pm 16 April-Sunday 1:00pm 19 April. Students will complete a professional training run by the Global Emergency Group that has been given to State Department officials and global humanitarian responders. It includes modules on conducting complex field assessments, strategic communications, operating in ambiguous operations, stress management, negotiating security and access, leadership and teamwork.
All undergraduate and graduate students are able to apply for the course.
|
| Media Studies |
| MDST 3510 | Topics in Media Research |
| |
| | Business of Media |
| 12303 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (8 / 199) | 23 / 23 | Pallavi Rao | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | |
| | 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 conglomerations handling diverse media operations with commercial imperatives and navigating national and international economic and political arrangements. What are the economic agendas of film studios? Is all content only about ad revenue? How has streaming transformed film & TV distribution? Why has private equity invested heavily into legacy print news media? Throughout, we will study how media organizations produce and transform their unique media products, how their management and leadership influence media production & consumption, how these organizations generate profit, how considerations of power such as gender, race, class, and sexuality, all operate through industry structures—such as ownership, market dynamics, organizational hierarchies, revenue models. |
| MDST 4510 | Capstone Topics |
| |
| | Creative Labor Economy |
| 12756 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (1 / 199) | 20 / 20 | Pallavi Rao | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | |
| | This course explores new theories of what is known as monetizable "creative labor" in the digital economy as well as its non-monetized unpaid avatars. We try to understand how aspiration/hope nurtures new kinds of workers in the digital age (such as influencers), how such labor relates to inequality and precarity in the job market, the media industries' transformations linked to globalization & the spread of digital technologies, and the risky individualization of labor in the creator economy. Finally, we will study the sociopolitical stakes of such labor by discussing: 1) the tech industry’s impact on media work cultures; 2) the invisible laborers of the online ecology; 3) and emergent economies of platforms. |
| Music |
| MUSI 7526 | Topics in Ethnomusicology |
| |
| | Composing Ethnographic Stories |
| | Curating Sound |
| 13871 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 1 / 8 | Noel Lobley | Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm | |
| | This practical and discovery-driven design course explores the intersections of curatorial practice, sound studies, ethnography, composition, sound art, and community arts practice. Drawing from both the histories and potential affordances of sound curation we engage with real world examples ranging from sub-Saharan Africa to Australia, from Europe to New York, and right back here to the Charlottesville and UVA communities, asking what it means to curate local sound within globalized arts circuits. |
| Politics-Political Theory |
| PLPT 1010 | Introduction to Political Theory |
| |
| 20435 | 100 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (27 / 199) | 177 / 177 | Kevin Duong | MoWe 9:00am - 9:50am | |
| | What makes a people unfree? What should a just society look like? And how do we bring about social change? This class surveys how canonical political theorists, from Plato to Mao, have answered these questions in moments of revolutionary upheaval. Students will read major figures from the “Age of Revolutions” in the United States, France, and Haiti. Students will also study the industrial revolution, its nineteenth century critics, and challenges to liberalism by twentieth century revolutionaries. Surveying debates over “revolution” will allow us to trace how perennial themes of political theory, like freedom and equality, have been debated and deployed in modern life. |
| PLPT 3500 | Special Topics in Political Theory |
| |
| | The Word & the Spark |
| | Classics of Mass Persuasion |
| 13252 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (26 / 199) | 30 / 30 | Tom Donahue-Ochoa | MoWe 5:00pm - 6:15pm | |
| | Sometimes words move and inspire great masses of people; sometimes they leave them cold and bored. When do words spur publics to hope or to care? How? In answer, we study classic works of rhetoric and civic suasion: by masters like A. Lincoln, H. Tubman, W. Churchill, M. Gandhi, R. Carson, F. Douglass, J. Tolkien, L. Bernstein, and S. Anthony. We’ll discover and then try the means they used to spark their publics--such that many keep resorting to their words. Therefore, if you take this course and set yourself to the work we'll do in it, then you'll be able to show, John F. Kennedy-like, what a chiasmus can do for you, and what YOU can do with a chiasmus. You'll use metaphors to unlock the portals of our imaginations, so that we can then pass through to other worlds. And you'll even gain a sense of how language is like music and music like language: the "Indiana Jones" theme, for instance, starts by naming In-di-an-A, then comments on him: Dah-Dut-DAH!, then names and comments again, and maybe again, until we are off in a rush with its storytelling. Now do you see how high these seas of language run? Or these oceans of civic suasion? If not, you soon will! And if you are ready to work at sailing these unruly waters, then this course will equip you with a good and weatherly boat. |
| PLPT 5500 | Special Topics in Political Theory |
| |
| | Ideas of Power Great Ideology |
| | Ideas of Power: Great Ideologies and Their Myths! |
| 13564 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 9 / 15 | Tom Donahue-Ochoa | Th 4:30pm - 7:00pm | |
| | What are the key ideas of world-shaking ideologies--say, conservatism, or socialism, or fascism? Ordered liberty? Sharing? And action through group will? Or do these credos each treat other ideas as even more sacred? We study great debates over the core ideas of these and other such creeds. How have they been construed by people from many backgrounds worldwide? And how have they been given both flesh and purpose by certain myths and prophecies? For instance, does J. R. R. Tolkien's THE LORD OF THE RINGS recount such a myth for Green conservatism? Many readers are surprised to find that it spends so much time in its telling of love of the home, or in belauding the beauties of nature. In this, does it do much the same that the story of the revolutionary sequence does for Marxism? In that tale, the workers are roused by the crises of capitalism, then become self-conscious as a class, and then turn to the seizing of power. Or does it do something more like the Rainbow-ization of the Springboks did for Nelson Mandela's one-nation liberalism? There, Mandela took the very symbol of apartheid, which had divided the nation into distinct homelands and had segregated jobs and housing by race; and he rewrought its meaning, making it an emblem of the One Rainbow Nation. |
| Psychology |
| PSYC 4200 | Neural Mechanisms of Behavior |
| |
| Website 20966 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (15 / 199) | 25 / 25 | Adema Ribic | Mo 3:30pm - 6:00pm | |
| | This is a tech free (tech sabbatical) version of 4200 |
| PSYC 4500 | Special Topics in Psychology |
| |
| | Hum Gen: Concpt, Cases, & Cont |
| 19964 | 006 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 16 / 25 | Emma Whelan | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | |
| | This course will explore the world of human genetics and its ever-growing overlap into society. We will learn the basic foundations of genetics and how research is slowly integrating itself into the world, but is it for better or for worse? |
| University Seminar |
| USEM 1570 | University Seminar |
| |
| | Falling From Infinity |
| Website 19543 | 005 | SEM (2 Units) | Open | 3 / 18 | Michael Palmer | Th 2:00pm - 3:50pm | |
| | If you have questions about the course, email Michael Palmer at mpalmer@virginia.edu. |
| | This thing we call infinity fills our dreams and sparks our imaginations, yet it lies just beyond our reach, lurking in the shadows, evading our questions. Our curiosity compels us to ask: what is infinity? Whether it is something innumerable, vast, or eternal, infinity shapes our philosophies and religions, influences our arts and literatures, and drives our mathematics and sciences. Blake saw infinity in a grain of sand; van Gogh glimpsed it in starry nights; Cantor unlocked infinities within infinities; and Hawking found it in the dark corners of our universe. In this class, we will imagine the infinite and the infinitesimal by looking through the eyes of these and other great thinkers. |
| | All Bots Created Equal |
| | Building an A.I. Jefferson |
| 19544 | 006 | SEM (2 Units) | Open | 2 / 18 | Jason Nabi | Tu 2:00pm - 3:50pm | |
| | Step into the future of historical storytelling! In this seminar, you’ll join a multidisciplinary team in an ambitious ed-tech experiment: building an AI-powered, virtual reality avatar of Thomas Jefferson. Working alongside developers, designers, researchers, and content experts, you’ll explore how teams collaborate to bring sophisticated digital projects to life. As you gain a working understanding of generative AI and immersive media, you’ll also tackle deeper questions about ethical design, Jefferson’s legacy, and the challenges of representing the past in the digital age.
|
| USEM 2570 | University Seminar |
| |
| | Digital Freedom |
| | Will you use tech? or will tech use you? |
| 19852 | 001 | SEM (1 Units) | Open | 6 / 30 | Claudia Scholz | Mo 3:00pm - 3:50pm | |
| | Digital Freedom is a 1-credit university seminar (USEM) for first and second-year students at the University of Virginia. The course is designed as a low-stakes, high-engagement space where students develop community, hone their critical thinking skills, and grapple with pressing questions through active, interdisciplinary learning.
Digital freedom refers to the ability to maintain one’s individuality, autonomy, and safety in relation to technology. It encompasses the rights and skills needed to navigate digital spaces, make informed choices, control personal data, and participate fully in society in the face of manipulation, surveillance, and algorithmic discrimination. Digital freedom means using technology without being used by technology.
Students in this USEM will examine the attention economy, social media addiction, dark patterns, algorithmic decision systems, data justice, consent and privacy, digital mental health, surveillance, platform governance, misinformation, and the social impacts of artificial intelligence. The course content integrates
- applied digital literacy (Students will develop practical skills and actionable tools for safer, more intentional technology use.) and
- technology policy studies (Students will build awareness of legal regimes and business practices governing technology development and use.) with
- an examination of recent cognitive science discoveries (Students will examine recent research findings about human attention, brain development and social psychology in relation to technology).
The course assumes no prior knowledge but relies on students’ self-reflection about their experiences with and assumptions about technology. The course starts with the students’ own perceptions, and guides them to explore and discover research, laws, and practices that undergird the technology that they might see as a familiar infrastructure of their lives. While exploration of new technologies is encouraged in this class, students will quickly discover that no chatbot can produce their thoughts and essays for this class because they begin with lived experience and end with the student’s own commitments and philosophy. |
| Women and Gender Studies |
| WGS 2559 | New Course in Women, Gender & Sexuality |
| |
| | Feminist Science Studies |
| 19957 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (3 / 199) | 30 / 30 | Sarah Orsak | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | |
| | Science & Society |
| | Scientific claims are seen as objective and the pinnacle of real knowledge; this has given them incredible power to shape how we understand our identities and how we imagine social transformation. For these reasons, feminist and queer thinkers have spent many decades grappling with science and imagining new, feminist, sciences. In this course, we will explore the vibrant interdisciplinary field of Feminist Science Studies. Feminist Science Studies asks philosophical questions about how scientific knowledge is produced. To study “science” (to study how “we” study and make claims about the world around us) is to ask how scientific research and practices emerge from our social worlds.
This course introduces the varied ways feminist and queer thinkers have engaged science, which include conducting scientific research, critiquing science, and using science for social change. We will also address feminist and queer perspectives on scientific claims about race, gender, and sexuality (both modern and historical), contemporary scientific and ethical issues, and interdisciplinary research practices. |
| WGS 3500 | Research and Methods in Women, Gender & Sexuality |
| |
| | Feminist Methods |
| | What's the Use?: Feminist Methods/Queer Methods |
| 12798 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 1 / 15 | Sarah Orsak | We 6:30pm - 9:00pm | |
| | WGS is interdisciplinary; it encompasses a wide range of topics and draws on methods from a multitude of disciplines. What holds this work together? What makes this research “feminist” or “queer”? Feminist and queer scholars continue to debate these questions. So, if you’ve ever wondered “what even is gender studies?” you’re not alone!
This class focuses on these questions about what we know and how we know it (epistemology). We will move through the “who,” “what,” “why,” “how,” and “where” of feminist and queer research, exploring scholars’ varied answers to questions like--Who are feminist knowers?;How does personal experience matter (or not) for research?; What kinds of topics do WGS scholars study?; Why do we /they study these things?; Can knowledge be produced in genres or forms beyond academic writing?; and How does the context of the university shape feminist research?
Because these are such big questions, we will engage a multitude of fields including Black feminist theory, woman of color feminisms, affect theory, queer of color critique, disability studies, and critical university studies.
As a Second Writing course, the class also addresses more practical habits of mind for feminist scholars, building your skills in critical thinking, reading, and writing. You will learn to enter scholarly conversations and engage feminist scholarship in order to research a topic of interest to you. The course aims to increase your confidence in reading feminist, queer, and theoretical scholarship and in expressing your own unique contributions to these conversations. |
| WGS 4500 | Topics in Women, Gender & Sexuality |
| |
| | How To Do Drag |
| 11519 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (3 / 199) | 20 / 20 | Aaron Stone | We 6:30pm - 9:00pm | |
| | Living in the so-called “golden age of drag,” understanding of what drag is seems to be unprecedentedly widespread. But how do we know what we know about drag? How have the media through which drag is presented shaped our understanding of the art form and its practitioners? 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 (Paris Is Burning, To Wong Foo, Hedwig and the Angry Inch), television (RuPaul’s Drag Race, King of Drag), novels (Sirena Selena, Drag King Dreams), life writing (Hiding My Candy, The House of Hidden Meanings), social media, and academic theory (Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz) to consider how these diverse representational forms construct our ideas about what "doing drag" is and what it means.
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