UVa Class Schedules (Unofficial, Lou's List v2.10)   New Features
Schedule of Classes with Additional Descriptions - Fall 2023
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African-American and African Studies
 AAS 4070Distinguished Major Thesis I
Website  11071 001Lecture (3 Units)Permission 0 / 10Sabrina PendergrassTBATBA
  AAS 4070 is a course for students who would like to conduct their own research on a topic of their choice through the Distinguished Majors Program in African American and African Studies. In the past, students have carried out such projects as analyzing memes about Black women on social media; studying narratives from Black women essential workers about their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic; engaging in close readings of young adult novels and their representations of Black girlhood; interviewing high school teachers about race and student speech in the classroom; analyzing representations of race and social mobility in a select group of films; and more. Each week, students will spend most of their time for the course carrying out their research projects, and they will submit short excerpts from their research or writing each week to further their progress. Over the course of the semester, students will attend one-on-one meetings with the course instructor to receive guidance on their projects. They also will participate in group meetings with other students where they will share research experiences and learn more about the research process. For more information about the Distinguished Majors Program in African American and African Studies please contact the course instructor or visit the link here: https://woodson.as.virginia.edu/dmp
History of Art
 ARTH 4591Undergraduate Seminar in the History of Art
 Fralin Collection: Other Networks in Postwar Art
18556 005SEM (3 Units)Open 0 / 12David GetsyTh 3:30pm - 6:00pmFayerweather Hall 208
 This seminar will investigate the role of galleries and professional networks in the history of American art of the 1950s to the 1970s. A key question will be to ask how certain curators and gallerists made room for differences of sexuality, race, and gender during an era known for privileging a narrow set of social norms. We will take as a central case study the Groh-Miller Collection in the Fralin Museum of Art, which was donated by a long-time director of Stable Gallery. While we will investigate other key figures in postwar art such as Betty Parsons, Frank O’Hara, and Andy Warhol, the seminar’s main focus will be on the direct engagement with art objects, with much of the its work devoted to original research and writing about the collection.
Astronomy
 ASTR 3480Introduction to Cosmology
12855 001Lecture (3 Units)Open 0 / 40Mark WhittleTuTh 11:00am - 12:15pmShannon House 107
 Cosmology explores the origin and evolution of the entire Universe. Topics include: the nature of cosmic expansion; mapping the nearby Universe; dark matter and dark energy; the birth and evolution of galaxies; conditions in the first million years and the first hour; and the mechanism that created everything from nothing – the Big Bang. Students will also take color images of nearby galaxies using our local robotic telescope. This 3000-level course strikes a balance between richly illustrated description and a simplified quantitative exploration of the Topics. Intended for STEM and prospective STEM majors, including astronomy majors; also suitable for non-STEM majors who are comfortable with some non-calc math.
Biology
 BIOL 4810Distinguished Major Seminar in Biological Research I
11289 001Lecture (2 Units)Permission 0 / 20Mike WormingtonTh 3:00pm - 5:00pmContact Department
 BIOL 4810 will meet in Gilmer 400
English-Literature
 ENGL 2599Special Topics
 Comedy and Character
 Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jonson, Austen, Dickens
19201 002SEM (3 Units)Open 0 / 10Rebecca RushTuTh 9:30am - 10:45amAstronomy Bldg 265
 Click blue numbers at left for a full description
 In this course, we will meditate on the craft of comic character-making from Chaucer to Dickens. Readings will include selected Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Twelfth Night, Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humor and Bartholomew Fair, Jane Austen’s Emma, and Dickens’s David Copperfield. We will consider how each writer approaches character from a distinctive angle and how each has a different vision of what kinds of details are needed to build a character piece by verbal piece. Which aspects of characters does each author consider worth representing or describing? How can an author use a small thing like a name (Malvolio), a piece of clothing (fine scarlet red hose), or a repeated phrase (“Barkis is willin’”) to hint at something so inward and complex as character? How do comic writers use exaggeration and caricature not only to entertain us but to reveal something about human habits we might otherwise be unable to see? How do they use ensemble casts of major and minor characters to depict an array of humors and habits? When and why do they withhold insights into character or cast doubt on our ability to understand the inner lives of others? No prior knowledge of literature is required; the only prerequisite is a willingness to read slowly, attentively, and with a dictionary at hand.
 ENGL 3520Studies in Renaissance Literature
 Metaphysical Poets
 John Donne and his Poetic Heirs
20099 002Lecture (3 Units)Open 0 / 30Rebecca RushTuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pmBryan Hall 328
 Click blue numbers at left for a full course description
 In this course we will dig deep into the verse of the “metaphysical poets” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including John Donne, George Herbert, Abraham Cowley, and Andrew Marvell. We will also consider poets who occasionally dabbled in the metaphysical style, including William Shakespeare, John Milton, Richard Lovelace, and Katherine Philips, among others. As we work through this peculiar, startling body of poetry, we will debate about the distinctive markers of metaphysical style—love of witty and intellectual play, intense concentration on a single idea, far-flung and ingenious metaphors, and a distinctively chatty and bossy voice—and ponder about how they fit the poetic and philosophical needs of these poets. Why and how did Donne develop such an idiosyncratic way of inspecting desire and love by putting them under the pressure of metaphor, analogy, and wit? What happens to Donne’s style when later poets turn away from human love and apply his poetic tools to meditations on divinity and nature? No prior knowledge of Renaissance poetry is required, only a willingness to unravel complex verse with the utmost care—and a dictionary.
Writing and Rhetoric
 ENWR 2640Writing as Technology
18903 001WKS (3 Units)Open 0 / 16Patricia SullivanTuTh 11:00am - 12:15pmFayerweather Hall 215
 Click left for description.
 This course explores historical, theoretical, and practical conceptions of writing as technology. We will study various writing systems, the relation of writing to speaking and visual media, and the development of writing technologies (manuscript, printing presses, typewriters, hypertext, text messaging, and artificial intelligence). Students will produce written academic and personal essays, but will also experiment with multimedia electronic texts, such as web sites, digital essays/stories, and AI generated texts.
French
 FREN 3031Finding Your Voice in French
 ON AIR! Finding Your Voice in French: Podcast Edition
10190 003SEM (3 Units)Open 0 / 18Rachel GeerTuTh 11:00am - 12:15pmNew Cabell Hall 407
 Are you looking for a class that is focused on making things and doing creative projects in French?? Ready to put on your headphones and discover the thrilling new voices and perspectives within the French-speaking world of podcasts?? This course will offer you the opportunity to explore the world of French podcasts while also developing your voice in written and spoken French through the creation of your own podcast episode. Over the course of the semester, you’ll tell stories, conduct field recordings an interviews, and find your way through important questions about language, identity, power, and politics. Come for the podcasts, and stay for the ways you’ll cultivate your own sense of style, tone, creativity, and expressiveness in French! Whether it means starting to feel more like yourself when you write and speak in French, or enjoying sounding wonderfully different from yourself, this course will encourage you to deepen your appreciation for the profound and transformative process of starting to think in French and to think of yourself as a Francophone person. 
10192 004SEM (3 Units)Open 0 / 18Cheryl KruegerMoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pmNew Cabell Hall 207
 Finding your voice doesn't happen overnight. Not in the language(s) we have been speaking since we were children, and not in a foreign language. The main goals of this course are to guide you on a life-long journey of self-expression, and to help you become aware of your own best practices for learning French. You will be encouraged to take reflective notes in class on your reactions and thoughts about the materials with which you interact. Who are you when you read, speak, listen, and write in French? What are your strengths? How can you convey your ideas in French without translating your words directly from English or other languages you already know? How does improving your writing in French help you to better understand how you write in English? How does engagement with French influence your connections in other courses and in the world around you? Students in this course co-construct the syllabus, based on their own interests, by assigning and leading discussion of articles in French. They hone listening skills with songs, podcasts, and other audio sources, and explore visual culture via works of art and advertising images. Students practice both creative writing and more formal genres ( a film review, a persuasive essay) during in-class writing workshops and individual assignments. Integrated in all activities, a semester-long grammar review guides students to better understand how form and meaning work together.
 FREN 3032Text, Image, Culture
 Sharing Human Experience
10195 002SEM (3 Units)Open 0 / 15Claire LyuMoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pmFrench House 100
 In this course, we will examine various cultural and artistic productions of the French and Francophone worlds to gain insights into how they attest to the depth of human experience, both joyful and painful, fleeting and enduring. We will query, and appreciate, the inventiveness, thoughtfulness, courage, and craft that shape a broad selection of works in poetry, theater, prose, and film from the medieval to the modern and contemporary periods. Our aim, in doing so, is to learn how to make the qualities that inform these works become part also of our own practice of the French language in both written and oral forms.
 FREN 3041The French-Speaking World I: Origins
18923 001Lecture (3 Units)Open 0 / 18Amy OgdenMoWeFr 11:00am - 11:50amNau Hall 142
 Reimagining history through a virtual visit to the Louvre Museum
 Globalization. Love and friendship. Encounters with other cultures and peoples. Separation of Church and State. Bourgeois values. Law and justice. Where did these features of modern life come from and—more importantly—what other forms might they have taken or might they still evolve into? And how might the way we tell the histoire of the Francophone world limit or expand our options now and in the future? Virtually visiting the Louvre Museum (our case study of one famous way of presenting Francophone history) and exploring a variety of readings that nuance and even challenge that history outright, we will seek to understand the prevailing story of the Francophone world’s origins, the reasons that story developed, and the alternative histories that have been set aside. With evidence from historical readings—tales of quests for adventure and powerful women, bawdy ballads and soulful sonnets—we will then imagine new exhibits to tell a fuller picture of the Francophone past and its importance to the present. Assignments will be appropriate both for students coming directly from FREN 3032 and for more advanced students who want to hone their analytical/persuasive skills in French. Readings in the course will be in modern French translation.
 FREN 3585Topics in Cultural Studies
 Beasts and Beauties
13297 001Lecture (1 - 4 Units)Open 0 / 18Cheryl KruegerMoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pmNew Cabell Hall 287
 Werewolves, vampires, phantoms, and fairies: these are some the creatures who inhabit the eerie space of French fiction. In fables, legends, fairy tales, short stories, novels, and film, outer beauty is associated sometimes with virtue, often with inner monstrosity. We will study the presence of menacing fictional creatures in relation to physical and moral beauty, animality, and evocations of good, evil, comfort, fear, kindness, familiarity and the uncanny. For their final project, students in this course write their own supernatural short stories.
 TBD
 France-Asie
20266 002Lecture (1 - 4 Units)Open0 / 18Jennifer TsienTuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pmNew Cabell Hall 209
 Japanese macarons, Kpop flashmobs in Paris, chinoiserie: nowadays, we see the influence of French culture in Asia as much as we see Asian culture become part of France. This course explores how this relationship manifests itself in multiple forms, from novels, theater, graphic novels, cuisine, fashion, to politics and institutions. We will look at early French attempts to colonize Asian countries and trade in silks, porcelains, and tea. We will then explore French interventions in Southeast Asia and how, despite political hostilities, both parts of the world still exert a mutual fascination over each other that defies the usual power dynamics of post-colonialism.
 FREN 4585Advanced Topics in Cultural Studies
 TBD
 The Good Life?
19023 002Lecture (3 Units)Open0 / 18Amy OgdenMoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pmNew Cabell Hall 283
 What is the good life, and what is a good life? How should a person balance ethical responsibilities with comforts and pleasures? Is sacrifice required for someone who wants to be good, and if so, how much and of what kind? How do social expectations help and harm efforts to do the right thing? We might think of saints as people who live perfectly good lives, but stories about them often grapple with all of these questions and don’t always provide clear answers, instead encouraging audiences to think deeply about their own lives in ways that go beyond any one religious or ethical system. Above all, such stories can lay bare both how difficult it is to solve moral dilemmas (even for saints) and how closely extreme virtue can resemble appalling vice. Looking at old and new stories of parent-child struggles, spectacular sinning and redemption, gender transformation, and daily moral predicaments, we will explore a variety of ways to understand what it means to live well.
 FREN 4744The Occupation and After
18924 001SEM (3 Units)Open 0 / 18Ari BlattTuTh 11:00am - 12:15pmNau Hall 142
 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 2015 the nation marked another important anniversary: namely, seventy years since the Liberation of Paris during World War II. The German occupation of France, which lasted from 1940 until 1945, 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 documentary and artistic sources—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, Claudel, Sartre, Clouzot, Melville, Resnais, Ophüls, Berri, Malle, Chabrol, and Audiard. Course conducted in French. Prerequisite: At least one 3000-level FREN course above 3032.
 FREN 7500Topics in Theory and Criticism
 All You Always Wanted to Know about Theory
 Literary Theory: Classic Thoughts, Modern Texts, Contemporary Debates
18927 001Lecture (3 Units)Open0 / 8Claire LyuMo 3:30pm - 6:00pmTBA
 This course serves as an introduction to theoretical texts we encounter most frequently in the discourses of literary criticism. Our aim is to gain a deeper understanding of how literature has been thought and debated as well as how literary criticism has been practiced over time. In the first part of the course, we will read key texts of the critical tradition from antiquity to the early twentieth century. In the second part of the course, we will survey the major theoretical movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries such as formalism/ structuralism/ deconstruction, reader response theory, psychoanalysis, feminism/ gender studies/ queer theory, eco-criticism/ animal studies. (Due to time constraints, we will not cover post-colonial theory and its variations in the francophone context, given that several seminars in the department treat the subject.)

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