These data were not obtained from SIS in real time and may be slightly out of date. MouseOver the enrollment to see Last Update Time
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| African-American and African Studies |
 AAS 2500 | Topics Course in Africana Studies |
| |
| | Shopping While Black |
| | Race and Consumption in the 20th Cent United States |
| 14157 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open  | 4 / 18 | Micah Jones | Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm | New Cabell Hall 411 |
| | In 2019, Sephora employees in Calabasas, California accused SZA, the Grammy award winning musician, of theft in a racially motivated incident. When SZA’s tweet about the encounter went viral, Sephora implemented a mandatory day of diversity training for its workforce. Though wealth and fame secured SZA an apology, her status ultimately did protect her from the all too familiar indignities of “shopping while Black.” In a 2018 Gallup poll, two-thirds of Black respondents reported encountering racial discrimination while shopping. This course historicizes the experience of "shopping while Black." Together, we will explore the racial norms of Jim Crow era stores, the possibilities and limits of Black capitalism, the Civil Rights Movement as a consumer struggle, and the racial politics of looting. Ultimately, we will consider how “shopping while Black” came to be, and indeed remains, an essential measure of the power of racism to shape day to day life in the United States context.
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| | Black Love: Media Representations vs Realities |
| 13165 | 004 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 22 / 30 | Ashleigh Wade | We 5:00pm - 7:30pm | New Cabell Hall 132 |
| | How do media representations shape our perceptions and lived experiences of Black love?
In this course students will examine media portrayals of Black love alongside theoretical readings about the historical, social, and cultural elements that impact the development of Black relationships. In addition to exploring examples of Black romantic relationships, we will also explore Black love in the context of family, friendships, and community.
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| | Race, Class & Gender |
| 19588 | 009 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 1 / 20 | Liana Richardson | We 6:00pm - 8:30pm | New Cabell Hall 291 |
| | While many people in the United States embrace the rhetoric of equality, “the American Dream”, and “the land of opportunity”, social inequality by race, class, and gender is a persistent feature of our society. The overall goal of this course is to examine the social, political, and economic forces that cause and are produced by this inequality, paying particular attention to how race, class, gender, and other axes of difference intersect to shape lived experiences and life chances. First, we will discuss how race, class, and gender are socially constructed, and how power and privilege are patterned by these social constructs. Then, we will examine how social institutions, such as the labor market, housing, education, health care, and criminal justice systems, produce and maintain race, class, and gender inequality thereby reinforcing socially constructed notions of difference. Finally, we will consider potential strategies for disrupting these linkages, and the social justice politics associated with them.
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| AAS 3500 | Intermediate Seminar in African-American & African Studies |
| |
| | Race, Ethnicity, and Health in the US |
| 19587 | 005 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 12 / 16 | Liana Richardson | We 2:00pm - 4:30pm | New Cabell Hall 287 |
| | In this course, we will examine the relationships between “race”/ethnicity and health. Drawing from research in a variety of disciplines, including epidemiology, demography, and sociology, we will examine how health is distributed by “race”/ethnicity, as well as the social, economic, and political factors that give rise to the differential distribution of health between and within racial/ethnic groups. We also will discuss whether contemporary health promotion and disease prevention policies are sufficient to address racial/ethnic inequities in health. Finally, we will consider the kinds of policies that could have a bigger impact, and the potential explanations for why they have not been pursued. |
| AAS 3559 | New Course in African and African American Studies |
| |
| | Horror Noire: History of Black Americans in Horror |
| 19808 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 12 / 12 (22 / 30) | Robin Means Coleman | Mo 4:00pm - 6:30pm | Wilson Hall 238 |
| | Black horror is a primer on the quest for social justice. What can such a boundary-pushing genre teach us about paths to solidarity and democracy? What can we learn about disrupting racism, misogyny, and anti-Blackness? If horror is radical transgression, then we have much to learn from movies such as Candyman, The First Purge, Get Out, Eve’s Bayou, Blacula, Attack the Block, Demon Knight, Tales from the Hood, and Sugar Hill. |
| American Studies |
| AMST 3250 | Black Protest Narrative |
| |
| 19947 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed  | 30 / 30 (30 / 30) | Marlon Ross | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | Bryan Hall 235 |
| | This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements, and black postmodernism. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion, crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Either directly or indirectly, all of these narratives ask pressing questions about the meaning of American citizenship and racial community under the conditions of racial segregation and the fight for integration or black nationalist autonomy. What does it mean to be “Negro” and American? How should African Americans conduct themselves on the world stage, and which international identifications are most productive? What roles do the press and popular media play in the sustenance and/or erosion of a sense of community both within a racial group and in relation to the country? What are the obligations of oppressed communities to the nation that oppresses them? What role should violence play in working toward liberation? How do intersectional subjectivities like gender, sexuality, religion, class, immigrant status, and color factor into ideologies and strategies of protest? We begin our study with the most famous protest novel, Richard Wright’s Native Son. Then we examine other narratives in this tradition, including works by Angelo Herndon, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gwendolyn Brooks, Malcolm X, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Joseph Beam, Marlon Riggs, and William Melvin Kelley. Films include Joseph Mankiewitz’s No Way Out, Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and The Watermelon Man, and Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied. Written assignments include an in-class midterm, a take-home midterm, a final exam.
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| AMST 3323 | Hemispheric Latinx Literature and Culture |
| |
| 19426 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 19 / 24 (19 / 24) | Carmen Lamas | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Bryan Hall 235 |
| | This course offers a survey of Latinx literature from a hemispheric perspective. We will examine how the histories of the US, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia come together to produce novels, poems, memoirs and films that are distinctly Latinx. In addition to exploring the integrated global histories that produce latinidades, we will analyze how race, class, gender and sexuality are presented in Latinx literature and other artistic forms. The course will introduce students to the different Latinx national-origin groups and the reasons individuals immigrate to the United States. Students will also read a variety of Latinx texts that demonstrate the hemispheric and trans-American nature of the Latinx experience. All readings, writing, and discussions are in English. |
| AMST 3422 | Point of View Journalism |
| |
| 20294 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 30 / 30 (30 / 30) | Lisa Goff | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | New Cabell Hall 132 |
| | No waitlist, but spaces often open up. Email Prof. Lisa Goff lg6t@virginia.edu if you want to join the class. |
| | This course examines the history and practice of “point-of-view” journalism, a
controversial but credible alternative to the dominant model of “objectivity”
on the part of the news media. Not to be confused with “fake news,”
point-of-view journalism has a history as long as the nation’s, from Tom Paine
and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century to "muckrakers" like
Ida B. Wells Barnett and Ida Tarbell at the end of the nineteenth, and “New
Journalism” practitioners like Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and Barbara
Ehrenreich in the twentieth. Twenty-first century point-of-view practitioners
include news organizations on the right (Fox News, One America News Network)
and left (Vice, Jacobin, MSNBC, Democracy Now), as well as prominent
voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Rebecca Solnit, Jia
Tolentino, and Roxane Gay. We will also consider the work of comedians such as
Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and John Oliver, who pillory the news (and newsmakers) in
order to interpret them.
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| AMST 3559 | New Course in American Studies |
| |
| | Hollywood Exile: German Filmmakers Flee Fascism |
| | Hollywood Exile: German Filmmakers Flee Fascism |
| 20165 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 3 / 30 (3 / 30) | Paul Dobryden | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 332 |
| | In the 1930s, many people employed in the German film industry whose lives were threatened by fascism took refuge in Hollywood. This course examines the contributions exiled directors, writers, actors, and others made in genres ranging from comedy and melodrama to film noir. In addition to indicting fascist violence, reflecting on the trauma of forced migration, and rousing anti-fascist affect, these films often turned a critical eye on the U.S. Selected films include: FURY (Lang, 1936), CASABLANCA (Curtiz, 1942), A FOREIGN AFFAIR (Wilder, 1948), and ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (Sirk, 1955). |
| AMST 3790 | Moving On: Migration in/to the US |
| |
| 13178 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 30 / 30 (30 / 30) | Lisa Goff | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 323 |
| | No waitlist, but spaces often open up. Email Prof. Lisa Goff lg6t@virginia.edu if you want to join the class. |
| | “Moving On: Migration In/To the U.S.” examines the history of voluntary, coerced, and forced migration in the U.S. Students will trace changing attitudes about migration over time using a variety of cultural products, including videos, books, documentaries, poems, paintings, graphic novels, photographs, fashion, digital humanities, and academic scholarship. Class participation/contribution is the core of this class. Other assessments include reading responses, presentations, papers, and reflective essays. There will be one scheduled test. Students will be required to volunteer 5-10 hours with a migration-related project during the course of the semester. |
| AMST 4500 | Fourth-Year Seminar in American Studies |
| |
| | Race, Space, and Culture |
| 19428 | 100 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 2 / 18 (2 / 18) | K. Ian Grandison+1 | Tu 5:00pm - 7:30pm | New Cabell Hall 044 |
| | Co-taught by K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross, this interdisciplinary seminar examines the spatial implications at work in the theories, practices, and experiences of race, as well as the cultural implications at stake in our apprehensions and conceptions of space. Themes include: 1) the human/nature threshold; 2) public domains/private lives; 3) urban renewal, historic preservation, and the new urbanism; 4) defensible design and the spatial politics of fear; and 5) the cultural ideologies of sustainability. The seminar foregrounds the multidimensionality of space as a physical, perceptual, social, ideological, and discursive phenomenon. This means melding concepts and practices used in the design professions with theories affiliated with race, postcolonial, literary, and cultural studies. We’ll investigate a variety of spaces, actual and discursive, through selected theoretical readings from diverse disciplines (e.g., William Cronon, Patricia Williams, Philip Deloria, Leslie Kanes Weisman, Gloria Anzaldúa, Oscar Newman, Mindy Fullilove); through case studies (e.g., Indian reservations, burial grounds, suburban homes, gay bars, national monuments); and through two mandatory local site visits: to Monticello on Sunday, Sept. 22, from 1 to 5 p.m.; and to downtown Charlottesville on Tuesday, Nov. 12, from 5 to 8:30 p.m. Requirements include a take-home midterm, a final critical reflection paper, and a major team research project and symposium presentation.
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| AMST 5559 | New Course in American Studies |
| |
| | Theories, Methods of Latinx Studies |
| 19432 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 9 / 12 | Lisa Cacho | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | Wilson Hall 214 |
| | This is a reading and writing intensive course for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. We will examine scholarship from a range of disciplines that have shaped how people study Latina/o/xs in academia and juxtapose this work against critical scholarship by Latinx Studies scholars within and outside these disciplines. Consistent attendance is expected. |
| Anthropology |
| ANTH 3679 | Curating Culture: Collection, Preservation, and Display as Cultural Forms |
| |
| 19252 | 100 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 14 / 18 | Lise Dobrin | Th 2:00pm - 4:30pm | Fayerweather Hall 215 |
| | Click on class details page (5-digit number to the left) for description specific to fall 2024. |
| | ANTH 3679 – Curating Culture: Collection, Preservation, and Display as Cultural Forms
This course explores the importance of understanding cultural meanings for curating items, whether material or intangible, drawn from social worlds other than one’s own. Rights and the power to control items of patrimony and their representation are extremely important when thinking about curation of cultural materials, but it is also important to understand how the meaning of these items can create challenges for curation.
The course addresses two main themes, which will be somewhat interwoven in the schedule. The first is a general introduction to collection, preservation, and display that emphasizes how these activities are cultural forms in their own right. We will historicize museums and archives and bring focus to situations that raise cultural challenges for curation, such as cases in which items are understood by those who created them to have power apart from the uses anyone makes of them, or where community ideas about the value of replication run up against preservation workers’ insistence on differentiating between “original” and “copy”, or where cultural protocols limit who can appropriately handle or view particular items. I will share with students my own work digitally curating texts, images, maps, and other materials from the Arapesh culture of Papua New Guinea, where I do research, so as to make them accessible to outsiders while also expressing their meaning and value from an Arapesh cultural perspective.
A second major theme this semester will be a focus on Jewish ritual practice. Students will gain direct experience with the problem of curating culture by studying items from a newly acquired collection of Torah pointers, or in Hebrew yads, at UVa’s Fralin Museum of Art. We will enter the Fralin’s storage facility to study how the objects are organized and preserved; we will read literature on Jewish ritual practice; we will visit Torah reading events in the Charlottesville community to see firsthand how Jewish people use these objects; and we will analyze the implications of the knowledge we gain for appropriate curation. As a final group project, we will contribute to the preparation of a culturally informed exhibit of the Fralin’s Torah pointer collection that is scheduled to be mounted in spring 2025. |
| ANTH 5559 | New Course in Anthropology |
| |
| | Crisis and Anti-Crisis |
| 20090 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 3 / 15 | Kath Weston | We 4:30pm - 7:00pm | New Cabell Hall 287 |
| | Many have characterized the 21st century as an era of urgent, overlapping, socially compelling crises. This course approaches the concept of crisis critically, through ethnographic case studies and a series of questions: What claims do researchers tacitly make when they describe things they have observed as symptoms of, or contributions to, an already denominated crisis? What are the historical and etymological roots of crisis as a category? Does the analytic value of "crisis" for 21st-century ethnography depend upon the specifics of the case: climate crisis, extinction crisis, financial crisis, refugee crisis, systemic racism as a public health crisis, democracy in crisis, the practice of "crisis management," anthropology in crisis? How does "crisis" operate within a relational field that includes semantically linked yet distinctive counterparts such as "disaster," "emergency," "catastrophe," "collapse," and "event"? To what extent is the concept of crisis declarative and performative, altering the political landscape and scope for action through its very proclamation? What is the relationship of "crisis" to perceived reversals of the order of things? What temporalities have shaped the concept? What might the abstraction of "crisis" conceal, especially as regards power relations? What textures of social relations does "crisis" flatten as commentators apply the term across different cultural domains? Then, if not "crisis," what? |
| Architecture |
| ARCH 5420 | Digital Animation & Storytelling |
| |
| Website 14494 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 18 / 21 | Earl Mark | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Campbell Hall 105 |
| | DESCRIPTION: Arch 5420 is a 3-credit workshop/seminar that explores moviemaking through 3D computer animation. Five independent short animations constitute the work of the term culminating in a one to five minute final project. An interdisciplinary group of students admitted to the seminar bring perspectives from across the university and design. The seminar is informed by screenings of student exercises and of other movies. Discussion of perceptual phenomenon provides a cognitive framework for the development and critique of this work. In addition to a physical computer classroom, the course will have fulltime access to high performance virtual computers and rendering. Movie projects may range in subject, including abstract or realistic studies such as short narrative character animation, scientific simulation, a physical simulation of architecture or landscape architecture, or related to computer music or synchronized captured sound.
APPROACH: Storytelling, whether by means of character animation or more complex scene description, may be related to simulated real or imagined environments. For any subject or scale, built structures and landscapes may be experienced according to our own changing eye point of view, the physics simulation of natural and mechanical phenomenon, the transformation of light and objects, as well as the exploration of fluids and particles under force fields. In addition, objects found in architecture and nature reveal patterns of forms, textures, structures and spaces when animated over over varied rates of time. Movement can also be explored in three dimensional living or human forms that transform or present a point of view.
TECHNOLOGY: The principal software Maya is widely used in 3D computer animation, movie production, visualization and design. Other products will be introduced for special effects, simulation, composite video, sound, motion capture, and image or video processing. An in-depth exploration of NURBS and Polygon 3D modeling and will be the basis for representing built and natural environments, sculpting characters and creating complex geometrical forms. Simulation of gravity and light energy add to the modeling of wind, water, fluids, particles, rainfall, snow, fabric, springs, particles, hinges and other physical phenomena. Motion capture data and a body suit (if Covid is no longer of concern) will be used to study human movement. All the required technology, including Maya, is free to download under educational licensing for academic use as will be described in the class. We also take advantage of new Virtual Workstations for high performance computing and that are accessible remotely from any current personal Windows or Mac OS computer.
ENROLLMENT: The class is open 2nd year and above undergraduate and all graduate students from any field. It may count as an Architecture Elective or an Architecture Visualization Elective. It also counts as an Integrative Elective in Computer Science and as a Practice of Media Approved Course in Media Studies. Please contact Earl Mark, ejmark@virginia.edu, with any questions. |
| Architectural History |
| ARH 4591 | Undergraduate Seminar in the History of Architecture |
| |
| | Everyday Medieval Life |
| | Lay Piety: Religion in Everyday Medieval Life |
| 14470 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 4 / 6 (10 / 12) | Lisa Reilly | Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm | Fayerweather Hall 206 |
| | This seminar fulfills the Second Writing Requirement.
Because this course is cross-listed, SIS will not create a waiting list - so if it is full and you are interested, just email me at lar2f@virginia.edu. |
| | This seminar will examine the changing dynamic of everyday religious practice with a focus on later medieval England through the material culture and architecture of the parish church. We will explore ordinary people’s experience of religion in the pre-Reformation period. Classes will be discussion based and each student will undertake a major research project on a topic developed in consultation with the instructor. |
| History of Art |
| ARTH 4591 | Undergraduate Seminar in the History of Art |
| |
| | Performance Art and NYC in the 1970s and 80s |
| | Street Actions |
| 11817 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (2 / 199) | 12 / 12 | David Getsy | Tu 3:30pm - 6:00pm | Fayerweather Hall 208 |
| | This discussion-based and reading-intensive seminar will examine how New York City's urban spaces enabled the proliferation of performance art in the 1970s and 1980s. The tumultuous shifts in the economic landscape of New York City facilitated new modes of non-commercial artistic practices that turned away from the commodified object and toward performance, event, and action. We will study the ways in which artists created disruptive public tactics, urban interventions, infiltrations of institutions, and public protests. Emphasis will be placed on performance art at public sites, often unauthorized and unsanctioned. A central question will be how artists actively sought unexpecting audiences and new locations for performance in order to contest mainstream narratives of race, sexuality, and gender. From eroticism to activism, performance art interacted with the city’s urban geography, contested zones, and infrastructure. |
| | Lay Piety: Religion in Everyday Medieval Life |
| 13145 | 004 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 6 / 6 (10 / 12) | Lisa Reilly | Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm | Fayerweather Hall 206 |
| | This course fulfills the second writing requirement.
Because this course is cross listed, SIS will not create a waiting list - so if it fills and you would like to enroll - just email me at lar2f@virginia.edu! |
| | This seminar will examine the changing dynamic of everyday religious practice with a focus on later medieval England through the material culture and architecture of the parish church. We will explore ordinary people’s experience of religion in the pre-Reformation period. Classes will be discussion based and each student will undertake a major research project on a topic developed in consultation with the instructor.
This course fulfills the Second Writing Requirement.
|
| Biology |
| BIOL 4585 | Selected Topics in Biology |
| |
| | Advances in Drug Discovery & Emerging Therapies |
| Website 19535 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 27 / 40 | Mike Wormington | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | Chemistry Bldg 206 |
| | This course examines the fundamental science behind today's important medicines and explores the question, "What defines a drug as transformative?" The disease it targets? Patient demographics? Profitability? Examples to be considered include anti-cancer drugs (e.g., Gleevec, Herceptin, ADCs); Metabolic regulators (e.g., Statins, Metformin, Ozempic, ACE inhibitors, Caffeine); Neurobehavioral and pain modulators (e.g., Adderall, Prozac, Clozapine, Ketamine, Sumatriptan, Valium); "Recreational drugs" (e.g., Psilocybin, LSD).
This course is based on a Drug Discovery perspective Fundamental science behind today's important medicines written by Jonathan Spector, Rosemary Harrison & Mark Fishman that was published in the April 25 2018 issue of Science Translational Medicine. Spector et al presented the fundamental discoveries that underlie 27 of today's most transformative medicines spanning diverse diseases. The overall goal is to explore and appreciate how the generation of new drugs rests upon one or more fundamental discoveries that were made without regard to practical practical outcome and with their relevance to therapeutics typically only appearing decades later. This exemplifies the transition from “basic” to “translational” research and illustrates that many years of fundamental work often elapses before the realization of such work holds the key to a medical breakthrough. We will use a case study approach to examine several of the transformative medicines summarized in Spector et al. as well as additional drugs of interest. Assigned reading will come from the primary scientific literature. Students will work in groups to critically read, interpret, and evaluate primary research papers in a historical context and to present their findings in both informal "whiteboard talks" and formal presentations. Although no textbook will be used, relevant background material can be found in the Lodish et al Molecular Cell Biology text.
Prerequisites: BIOL 3000 and any one of the following: BIOL 3010, 3030, 3050, 3240, CHEM 4410. |
| BIOL 4910 | Independent Research in the Life Sciences |
| |
| Website 11339 | 001 | IND (2 Units) | Open | 44 / 150 | Masashi Kawasaki | TBA | TBA |
| | Undergraduate research in the field of broadly defined biology under the mentorship of a UVA professor who doesn't belong to the Biology Department. The research mentor must hold a title of Professor, Associate Professor, or Assistant Professor in any departments or programs at UVA (Research Assistant Professors, Research Associates, and Graduate Students are excluded). Students should obtain verbal consent from the professor for mentorship before registering themselves to BIOL4910 on SIS. A form will be sent (every Friday) to the registered students on which they enter information about their mentors and their official approval for mentorship. Please read the syllabus (link below) before you register on SIS. |
| Biomedical Engineering |
| BME 4550 | Special Topics in Biomedical Engineering |
| |
| | Mechanobiology |
| 16663 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 34 / 40 | Brian Helmke | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Biomed Engr & Med Sci 1041 |
| | Why are tumors detectable as stiff lumps? Why do fatty plaques in arteries only occur at certain locations? How does cell sensing of mechanical forces determine what kind of cell it becomes? These questions involve relationships between physical forces and biological mechanisms at the tissue, cell, and molecular length scales. In mechanobiology, we aim to understand how forces cause biological signaling in health and disease. This semester, you will explore examples in biomedical engineering research and in your own lives. We will work together to analyze key papers in the field and to practice explaining how mechanobiology impacts our lives and careers. |
| College Advising Seminar |
| COLA 1500 | College Advising Seminars |
| |
| | Interplay of Language, Culture & Cognition |
| 19961 | 045 | SEM (1 Units) | Open | 0 / 2 | Jun Wang | Tu 3:30pm - 4:45pm | Fayerweather Hall 215 |
| | We all know a language carries its rich culture behind it. Do you know that the language we speak affects our cognition and worldview, and the way people think and perceive the world is heavily influenced by the language? This course invites freshmen to embark on a fascinating journey exploring the intricate relationships between language, thought, and cultural contexts. We would discuss how language shapes our perception of the world and, conversely, how our cognitive frameworks influence linguistic structures. Students will uncover the profound ways in which language mirrors and molds our cultural and cognitive realities. |
| Commerce |
| COMM 3570 | Topics in Finance |
| |
| | Foundations of Sustainable Commerce |
| 20093 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 16 / 35 (16 / 35) | Mark White | MoWe 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Robertson Hall 260 |
| | Climate change, species extinctions, water scarcity and social inequity are part and parcel of our modern world, and business leaders are recognizing both the opportunities and threats posed by these and other sustainability issues. Wise managers are actively seeking ways to integrate sustainable business practices into their organizations to drive strategic and competitive advantage.
COMM 3570-001 provides instruction in the foundations of sustainable commerce, that is, business activities designed for a finite and equitable planet. The course begins with a review of our pressing sustainability challenges, then describes how the fundamental business disciplines (strategy, accounting, marketing, operations, finance and management) are innovating, operating and facilitating commercial solutions to these issues.
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| Computer Science |
| CS 4501 | Special Topics in Computer Science |
| |
| | Autonomous Vehicles: Perception,Planning & Control |
| | F1Tenth Autonomous Racing |
| Website 16398 | 006 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (20 / 199) | 48 / 48 | Madhur Behl | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Rice Hall 120 |
| | Students work in teams to build, drive, and race 1/10th scale autonomous racecars, while learning about the principles of perception, planning, and control for autonomous vehicles. The course culminates in a F1/10 ‘battle of algorithms’ race amongst the teams. |
| CS 6501 | Special Topics in Computer Science |
| |
| | Wireless Sensing for Internet of Things |
| Syllabus 19576 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 22 / 35 | Kun Qian | MoWe 11:00am - 12:15pm | Rice Hall 032 |
| | Wireless sensing technologies repurpose wireless signals for sensing physical environment and gaining situational awareness. Formed by pervasive wirelessly connected devices, the IoT can be turned into a universal sensor network with wireless sensing, enabling the vision of ambient intelligence. This course covers the wireless sensing basics (e.g., radar, Wi-Fi) and cutting-edge applications (e.g., motion tracking, activity recognition, environmental sensing). The evaluation will be based on assignments, a course project, a mid-term exam, and a final presentation. |
| | Geometry of Data |
| Website 16608 | 013 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 35 (12 / 48) | Tom Fletcher+1 | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Thornton Hall E303 |
| | Modern data are high-dimensional, multi-modal, and large-scale, for example, images with millions of pixels, text corpora with millions of words, gene sequences with billions of base pairs, etc. However, these data tend to concentrate on lower-dimensional, nonlinear subspaces known as manifolds. Learning and sampling from this real distribution, hence, is of tremendous value. This class covers the mathematical theory of high-dimensional geometry and manifolds and how it applies to the latest advances in artificial intelligence. |
| Electrical and Computer Engineering |
| ECE 6501 | Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering |
| |
| | Geometry of Data |
| Website 16399 | 005 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 2 / 13 (12 / 48) | Tom Fletcher+1 | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Thornton Hall E303 |
| | Modern data are high-dimensional, multi-modal, and large-scale, for example, images with millions of pixels, text corpora with millions of words, gene sequences with billions of base pairs, etc. However, these data tend to concentrate on lower-dimensional, nonlinear subspaces known as manifolds. Learning and sampling from this real distribution, hence, is of tremendous value. This class covers the mathematical theory of high-dimensional geometry and manifolds and how it applies to the latest advances in artificial intelligence. |
| | Geometry of Data |
| Website 16679 | 602 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 0 / 30 | Tom Fletcher+2 | TBA |  TBA |
| | Modern data are high-dimensional, multi-modal, and large-scale, for example, images with millions of pixels, text corpora with millions of words, gene sequences with billions of base pairs, etc. However, these data tend to concentrate on lower-dimensional, nonlinear subspaces known as manifolds. Learning and sampling from this real distribution, hence, is of tremendous value. This class covers the mathematical theory of high-dimensional geometry and manifolds and how it applies to the latest advances in artificial intelligence. |
| Creative Writing |
| ENCW 3310 | Intermediate Poetry Writing I |
| |
| | VIRGINIA (FOR POETS) |
| 19987 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 10 / 12 | Kiki Petrosino | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | New Cabell Hall 038 |
| | This course is open to students with experience in writing & workshopping poetry. To apply: send Professor Kiki Petrosino (cmp2k@virginia.edu) a sample of 4-5 original poems + a cover letter specifying whether you are in any majors, minors, or special concentrations for which this course may be needed/required. Please also specify any other creative writing workshops to which you may be applying. Make sure to send an official request for instructor permission on SIS along with any e-mail requests. Enrollment for returning students begins April 8 & will continue until the section is filled. For full consideration, please apply as soon as possible. Confirmation of your spot in the class may arrive in early summer, but hopefully much sooner. |
| | In this intermediate poetry workshop, we’ll explore our intellectual & artistic connections to place, specifically to UVA & the Commonwealth of Virginia. We’ll read recent published works of poetry by writers with ties to the University, Charlottesville, & the region. We’ll also think about & explore the physical space of Grounds as a site for reading, writing, researching, & sharing poems. Students in this course will engage in a regular writing practice and will take seriously the processes of composition, critique, and revision. We’ll spend a significant portion of each class “workshopping” student poems, but we also will devote time to discussing assigned reading and to performing in-class writing exercises. These activities, plus attendance, participation, & a final portfolio, will inform the grading policy. |
| ENCW 3350 | Intermediate Nonfiction Writing |
| |
| 20001 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 8 / 12 | Anna Martin-Beecher | Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm | Bryan Hall 233 |
| | Admission by Instructor Permission. Please send a sample of your prose writing (around 5 pages) and a brief statement about why this course interests you to am2aw@virginia.edu. Writing sample not required for APLP and APPW students. |
| | Creative nonfiction invites us to activate our curiosity, examine the texture of our lives, uncover meaning in the chaos of experience, question reality, cultivate empathy and become braver thinkers. Expect to create original work in this class, to receive feedback and to read and discuss essays, memoir, literary journalism, imaginative biography and other forms.
This workshop is for students with some experience of creative writing who have already taken 2000 level ENCW classes.
Admission by Instructor Permission. Please send a sample of your prose writing (around 5 pages) and a brief statement about why this course interests you to am2aw@virginia.edu. Writing sample not required for APLP and APPW students. |
| ENCW 3500 | Topics in Creative Writing |
| |
| | Storytelling and Performance Prose |
| 20545 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 2 / 12 | Anna Martin-Beecher | Th 11:00am - 1:30pm | Bryan Hall 233 |
| |
Admission by Instructor Permission. Please send a sample of your prose writing (around 5 pages) and a brief statement about why this course interests you to am2aw@virginia.edu. Writing sample not required for APLP and APPW students |
| |
This oral storytelling course is for students with experience of writing creatively who are interested in writing fiction and other texts to be spoken aloud, embodied and shared with others in real time. Over the semester you will develop original stories, work on putting them ‘up on their feet’ in performance and explore how liveness and orality can challenge, shape and invigorate writing. We will touch upon the oral roots of literature, reading works such as the 1001 Nights and the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm and the texts they have inspired, and we will read, watch and discuss works of fiction, live-art, narrative comedy, spoken word and drama. You may be a fiction writer interested in how spoken stories could attune your ear for language and narrative pattern, or writer and performer interested in marrying those two passions. Performance experience is not a requirement for this class, but a willingness to explore performance in a supportive atmosphere is essential.
Admission by Instructor Permission. Please send a sample of your prose writing (around 5 pages) and a brief statement about why this course interests you to am2aw@virginia.edu. Writing sample not required for APLP and APPW students. |
| ENCW 3559 | New Course in Creative Writing |
| |
| | New Mythologies |
| 19992 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Permission | 5 / 12 | Jane Alison | Fr 11:00am - 1:30pm | Bryan Hall 233 |
| | To apply, send me (jas2ad) a note saying what draws you to this course, and attach a brief sample of your creative writing. Be sure to apply via SIS, too. |
| | A girl runs from a man who wants her, but she can’t run fast enough—so turns into a tree. A young woman craves a boy so much she wraps herself around him and holds him so tightly their two bodies fuse. A girl’s in love with another girl, but this isn’t allowed in her world, yet lo! her wish is granted, and she turns into a boy. Another boy hates his violent father, has to defend his mother, so cuts off his father’s most offensive member and throws it into the sea—and from it spring the spirits of both passion and rage. A woman grieves the loss of her children until she becomes a weeping stone. A man is so greedy that the spirit of hunger infests him, and he can’t stop eating until there’s nothing but his own flesh to eat. An old couple who adore each other can’t bear the idea of being parted, and just as they’re about to die, they turn into trees, entwined . . .
These are ancient stories about primary feelings, primal feelings, caught in the amber of literary myth: turned into beautiful, strange, small objects. In this workshop we’ll look at several such stories each week—drawing first upon Ovid’s Metamorphoses, then branching outward—and each week you will create your own new myth or fabulist story inspired by what you’ve read, a tiny story that isn’t “fantasy” but springs from secret truths and realities you find in these myths.
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| ENCW 3610 | Intermediate Fiction Writing |
| |
| 19999 | 002 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 0 / 12 | Micheline Marcom | We 3:00pm - 5:30pm | New Cabell Hall 411 |
| | *******THIS CLASS WILL BE TAUGHT BY A NEW PROFESSOR ******* To apply: send Professor Micheline Marcom (mam5du@virginia.edu) 3-5 pages of fiction + a cover letter detailing why you'd like to take this course and what classes you have already taken and with whom. Make sure to send an official request for instructor permission on SIS along with any e-mail requests. Enrollment will continue until the section is filled. Confirmation of your spot in the class may arrive in early summer to mid summer. |
| | *******THIS CLASS WILL BE TAUGHT BY A NEW PROFESSOR ******* To apply: send Professor Micheline Marcom (mam5du@virginia.edu) 3-5 pages of fiction + a cover letter detailing why you'd like to take this course and what classes you have already taken and with whom. Make sure to send an official request for instructor permission on SIS along with any e-mail requests. Enrollment will continue until the section is filled. Confirmation of your spot in the class may arrive in early summer to mid summer. |
| ENCW 4550 | Topics in Literary Prose |
| |
| | Post-Apocalyptic Narratives |
| | Post-Apocalyptic Narratives |
| 19995 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 11 / 12 | Kevin Moffett | Tu 11:00am - 1:30pm | Bryan Hall 233 |
| | Unless you are in the APLP program, instructor permission required. Please email sem9zn@virginia.edu with 3-5 pages of your writing and a brief statement about why you are interested in the class. |
| | In this course we’ll look at novels and stories set in the aftermath of various cataclysms: nuclear, environmental, biological, spiritual. The post-apocalyptic narrative has long attracted satirists and social critics, sci-fi writers, and, more and more of late, writers of mainstream literary fiction. We’ll examine how it borrows elements from other genres and consider ideas of revelation, nostalgia, assimilation, and re-creation. Authors may include Cormac McCarthy, Ling Ma, José Saramago, Bernard Malamud, Octavia Butler, Walter Miller, and others. You’ll respond to the texts critically and creatively. |
| ENCW 4830 | Advanced Poetry Writing I |
| |
| 19989 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 4 / 12 | Kiki Petrosino | Mo 2:00pm - 4:30pm | Bryan Hall 310 |
| | *******THIS CLASS WILL BE TAUGHT BY CAMILLE DUNGY, KAPNICK WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE*******
To apply: send Professor Kiki Petrosino (cmp2k@virginia.edu) a sample of 4-5 original poems + a cover letter specifying whether you are in any majors, minors, or special concentrations for which this course may be needed/required. Please also specify any other creative writing workshops to which you may be applying. Make sure to send an official request for instructor permission on SIS along with any e-mail requests. Professor Petrosino will consult with Professor Dungy on permissions. Enrollment for returning students begins April 8 & will continue until the section is filled. For full consideration, please apply as soon as possible. Confirmation of your spot in the class may arrive in early summer. |
| | This workshop is for students with prior experience in writing and revising poetry. The class will involve discussion of student poems and of assigned reading, with particular attention to issues of craft, form, and content. The course will be offered in a hybrid manner, with one in-person synchronous class per month and the rest of the synchronous classes on an online platform. We will work with a variety of workshop models as we explore ways of thinking about how poetry might be written and discussed. Students will be expected to attend class for each session both in-person or online, to write and revise six to nine poems in response to writing prompts, to regularly participate in class discussion, to offer detailed responses to other students’ work, to attend one poetry reading (in person or virtual) and submit a written response to, to turn in close-reading responses to two assigned readings, and to participate in a public presentation near the end of the term. Enrollment by instructor permission.
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| ENCW 5310 | Advanced Poetry Writing II |
| |
| | POETS' MEMOIRS |
| 19986 | 001 | WKS (3 Units) | Permission | 4 / 12 | Kiki Petrosino | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Dawson's Row 1 |
| | This class is open to graduate & undergraduate students via instructor permission. To apply: send Professor Kiki Petrosino (cmp2k@virginia.edu) a sample of 4-5 original poems + a cover letter specifying whether you are in any programs or special concentrations for which this course may be needed/required. Please also specify any other creative writing workshops to which you may be applying. Make sure to send an official request for instructor permission on SIS along with any e-mail requests. Enrollment for returning students begins April 8 & will continue until the section is filled. For full consideration, please apply as soon as possible. Confirmation of your spot in the class may arrive in early summer, but hopefully much sooner. |
| | In this advanced course, we'll explore several published memoirs by contemporary poets, reading them alongside their books of poetry. Through discussion, workshop, writing exercises & other coursework, we'll attempt to imagine our way through several related questions: how do poets approach the forms & possibilities of memoir? How might a "poet's memoir" work within & against the constraints or expectations of autobiographical writing? How does what we think of as a poet's "voice" shift & change when their writing encompasses both verse and prose? And what new connections--among emotions, narratives, mysteries, & astonishments--can we make in our own writing practice, once we witness how poets work across genres? This class will engage a combination of seminar & workshop-style techniques. For a final project, students will compose & revise a group of original poems alongside one or more works of original lyric prose (short essays, memoir, &c).
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| English-Literature |
| ENGL 2502 | Masterpieces of English Literature |
| |
| | Four Books, Four Centuries, Four Forms |
| 19788 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (13 / 99) | 10 / 10 | John O'Brien | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | New Cabell Hall 395 |
| | We will read devote our time together to studying four great masterpieces, works produced over the last four centuries, each in a different genre: a play (William Shakespeare’s King Lear, first staged in 1606); a novel (Jane Austen’s Emma, published in 1816); a poem (T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922); and a film (Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, issued in 1968). We will consider each of these works slowly and carefully. We will also use them as case studies for exploring the strategies that scholars in the disciplines of literature and film criticism have developed to achieve rich understandings of their objects of study. These will include (among other strategies) close reading, source study, comparison of variant editions, and historical contextualization. Our objective is to emerge at the end of the semester with expertise in these four works, and with experience in using different critical strategies to analyze other works in these genres. Requirements: four writing exercises, class participation, final examination.
This course serves as a prerequisite for students who wish to major in English. This course also fulfills the College’s second writing requirement. |
| ENGL 2506 | Studies in Poetry |
| |
| | Introduction to Renaissance Poetry |
| | Practice the art of poetic reading with Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Herrick, and Milton. |
| 19786 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (6 / 99) | 9 / 9 | Rebecca Rush | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Nau Hall 142 |
| | What is poetry? What sets it apart from other modes of writing, thinking, imagining, feeling? What are the distinctive tools at the poet’s disposal? How do these tools work, and how can we describe their workings? Should poetry be plain or intricate, delightful or didactic, passionate or rational, heavenly or human? In this course, we will explore the many Renaissance responses to these questions by reading a selection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century verse. We will inspect a range of poetic styles and genres, beginning with sonnets by Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and Mary Wroth. Other poets will include Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, John Milton, Katherine Philips, Richard Lovelace, Abraham Cowley, and Andrew Marvell. We will move slowly at first, sometimes reading only one poem per class, and will work together to develop the interpretive skills to unpack a poem. This course also aims to help you sharpen your skills as a writer; we will focus in particular on close reading and on logical organization. The first written assignment will be a bulleted list of observations about a sonnet that you will then transform into a structured close reading paper. You will have the opportunity to revise the first paper based on feedback from your instructor and your classmates.
No prior knowledge of poetry, meter, or rhyme is expected. Lovers and despisers of poetry are equally welcome. The only prerequisite is a willingness to read with the utmost attention—and a dictionary.
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| | Contemporary Poetry |
| 19823 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (8 / 99) | 10 / 10 | Jahan Ramazani | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Kerchof Hall 317 |
| | In this seminar, we will examine an array of postwar idioms, forms, and movements. While devoting much of our attention to some of the most influential poetry from the second half of the twentieth century, we will also bring ourselves up to date by examining some of the best poems published in recent years by poets of diverse backgrounds. To hone our attention, we will focus on several specific genres, forms, or kinds of poetry, including sonnets, elegies, and poems about the visual arts. The seminar will emphasize the development of skills of close reading, critical thinking, and imaginative, knowledgeable writing about poetry. |
| ENGL 2508 | Studies in Fiction |
| |
| | Dystopia |
| | The Dystopian Novel |
| 19822 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (19 / 99) | 10 / 10 | Mrinalini Chakravorty | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | Kerchof Hall 317 |
| | This course will survey modern dystopian novels. Dystopias offer apocalyptic visions; they summon aesthetics of disease, speculation, pessimism, horror, and dysfunction to warn against seeing modern developments as benevolent. A singular feature of dystopian fiction is its questioning of modern state forms, both totalitarian and democratic. Dystopian novels also ask us to think about how we live our increasingly technological lives. Do conditions of modern living such as of surveillance, conformity, comfort, militarism, mechanization, mobility, reproductive facticity, incarceration, medicalization, and scientificity lead to better futures? The bleak worlds that dystopias imagine starkly suggest that they do not. Instead, dystopian novels ask that readers contemplate, and even critique, the ethical cost of our acceptance of modern social conditions, the depletion of freedom, autonomy, and humanity. Through our reading, we will ask what lessons we are to learn from such bleak and desperate fictions. |
| | Nineteenth-Century Speculative Fiction |
| | Nineteenth-Century Speculative Fiction |
| 19825 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (9 / 99) | 10 / 10 | Stephen Arata | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Nau Hall 242 |
| | The nineteenth century was an age of lively experimentation in narrative fiction. In this course we will read a range of texts that depart from conventional realism: Gothic tales, science fiction, stories of ghosts and the supernatural. Likely authors include Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Vernon Lee, Bram Stoker, and H. G. Wells. Like all ENGL 2500 classes, this course is designed to help you read closely, think creatively, and write lucidly about literary and other texts. It fulfills the Second Writing Requirement and counts towards the fulfillment of the Artistic, Interpretive, and Philosophical Inquiry requirement.
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| ENGL 2599 | Special Topics |
| |
| | Nature and Romanticism |
| 19779 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (4 / 99) | 10 / 10 | Jon D'Errico | MoWeFr 1:00pm - 1:50pm | New Cabell Hall 395 |
| | In this class we will read a selection of texts exploring the roots of contemporary attitudes toward nature. The readings range from the mid-14th century to the present, and the genres include poetry, short fiction, drama, and novels. Although we will, in passing, consider some literary theory, our focus in this class will be on your close analysis of the texts, via class discussions and your written assignments.
We will explore in broad terms some of the major literary traditions that contribute to modern understandings of nature. We will especially attend to three overlapping themes: the evolving understanding of nature, the relationship between nature and human nature, and the boundaries between the natural and the unnatural.
Along the way, we'll provide guided practice in managing key elements of argument and style. |
| | Criticism in the First Person |
| | Criticism in the First Person |
| 19828 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (3 / 99) | 10 / 10 | Emily Ogden | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | The Rotunda Room 150 |
| | In this course, we’ll discuss how we know what we know about aesthetic objects like literary texts. What are we claiming when we claim that a work is beautiful? To what extent is such a claim knowledge, and to what extent mere opinion? Our focus will be on the place of first-person experience—the I and what the I knows, sees, and feels--in our aesthetic judgments. We’ll spend about half our time learning to understand Stanley Cavell’s theory of what happens when we claim a work of art is beautiful, with a special focus on what role the first person has in such claims. We’ll spend the other half reading the work of various writers who use the first person prominently in their work. We’ll read critics practicing in the academy as well as critics working as reviewers in the periodical press. Writers we may read include Maggie Nelson, Christina Sharpe, Nathalie Léger, T. J. Clark, D. A. Miller, Elizabeth Hardwick, Cristina Rivera Garza, and others. Students should expect to do a lot of writing. Many assignments will be opportunities to write criticism as a form of creative nonfiction, in the first-person voice. |
| | The World Wars in European Literature |
| 19830 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (11 / 99) | 10 / 10 | Sarah Cole | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | Monroe Hall 114 |
| | The First and Second World Wars transformed European culture and challenged poets, novelists, and filmmakers. Why create art in a time a mass violence and upheaval? How could a poem, film, or literary narrative do justice to the raw experience of war? In this course, we will explore a diverse group of responses from authors in Britain, France, and Germany, ranging from the gritty realism of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front to the elegant modernism of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. We will pay equal attention to literary techniques and social identities, examining questions of gender, class, ethnicity, and disability in war literature. The seminar will emphasize close reading, active participation, and analytical writing. Requirements include three essays, an in-class presentation, and weekly discussion questions. Among our main texts will be poems by Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Paul Celan; novels by Virginia Woolf, Erich Maria Remarque, and Irene Nemirovsky; memoirs by Vera Brittain and Elie Wiesel; and films by Jean Renoir and Louis Malle. |
| | Literatures of the Nonhuman |
| 19835 | 005 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (7 / 99) | 8 / 8 | Adrienne Ghaly | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | New Cabell Hall 064 |
| | This course explores ideas of the ‘nonhuman’ in literature. From John Keats’s address to autumn and Franz Kafka’s giant bug, Gregor Samsa, to imagining yourself into another species, ‘alien’ forms of life, and experiments with artificial intelligence, are human and nonhuman distinct categories? Where and how do they overlap, or even merge? The focus will be on developing strategies of close reading and introducing the basics of literary critical analysis through shorter forms in poetry and prose that examine the nonhuman across a range of genres from the nineteenth century to the present. No prior knowledge required. This course fulfills the Second Writing Requirement of 20+ pages of written work. Active class participation, reading responses, shorter pieces of writing, and a final essay. |
| | Ecologies Across Genres |
| | Reading Ecology Across Genres |
| 19847 | 006 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (1 / 99) | 10 / 10 | Brian Teare | MoWe 6:00pm - 7:15pm | New Cabell Hall 283 |
| | How do literary works represent living ecosystems? How do literary genres - nonfiction, fiction, poetry - attempt to do so by playing to specific strengths like factual reporting, character-based plot, or songfulness? What other species live and thrive inside the built environment of literary worlds? In this course, we’ll discuss how nonfiction writers, novelists, and poets situate words in ethical relation to the natural world. We'll spend some of our time learning about the relationship between what Aldo Leopold calls a "land ethic" and what Kimberly Ruffin calls "social ecology," thus allowing us to think about how the biological sciences and environmental politics inevitably intertwine in literature attempting to represent both ecological and social systems. Some of the worlds we'll inhabit together will include Robin Wall Kimmerer's Gathering Moss, Richard Powers's The Overstory, JJJJJerome Ellis' Aster of Ceremonies, Ann Pancake's Strange As This Weather Has Been, and Lauret Savoy's Trace. We should expect to do a lot of writing in this course, and many assignments will be opportunities to write criticism from an ecological standpoint, in the first-person voice. |
| | Modern Literature and the Quest for Self |
| | Modern Literature and the Quest for Self |
| 20003 | 008 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (5 / 99) | 10 / 10 | Kate Stephenson | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | John W. Warner Hall 113 |
| | How does modern literature redefine subjectivity? What does it mean to perform the self? How do race, gender, and class complicate these questions? We will focus on short stories, poetry, and novels from the twentieth century. Authors will include Woolf, Plath, Sexton, Morrison, Heaney, Giovanni, and Berry among others. |
| | Reading Toni Morrison |
| | Reading Toni Morrison |
| 20005 | 009 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (1 / 99) | 10 / 10 | Deborah McDowell | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Cocke Hall 101 |
| | This special topics course introduces students to selected works from the prodigious corpus of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison—novelist, philosopher, essayist, editor, librettist and public intellectual. Her eleven novels encompassed the history of Black folk in the U. S., from colonial Virginia to slavery to the Korean War. We will explore the socio-historical, political and cultural contexts from which Morrison’s writings emerged, its dominant threads and aesthetic strategies, as well as its critical reception across the decades of her long and storied career.
Required texts will include Morrison’s novels The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, A Mercy and Beloved, the film adaptation of Beloved, as well as selections from her nonfiction collections The Source of Self-Regard and What Moves at the Margins.
Topics will include the construction and politics of race, the power and ethics of language, ecologies of race and place, the place of literature in public life, philosophies of love and friendship, the persistence of the past in the present, and Morrison as the piercing, visionary analyst of world history, contemporary society, literature and language. The course will conclude with a consideration of censorship and book banning. Although Morrison was among the most influential authors of the 20th century, her books have been consistently banned from school curricula and purged from the shelves of libraries. In 2023, the public school system in Spotsylvania, Virginia banned both The Bluest Eye and Beloved. Current Virginia Governor, Glenn Youngkin made banning her novel, Beloved, a central aspect of an ad created for his successful gubernatorial race. In prisons across the country, Morrison’s novels Song of Solomon and Paradise are frequently banned. We will read selections from Morrison’s edited collection, Burn This Book: Notes on Literature and Engagement. While examining the realities and workings of censorship and challenges to free expression, especially in this contemporary moment, we will train our focus on Morrison’s sublime “word-work,” on the transformative power of language in the writings of this towering figure in world literature.
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| | Landscapes of Black Education |
| 20007 | 100 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (0 / 99) | 10 / 10 | K. Ian Grandison | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | New Cabell Hall 111 |
| | This course examines how seemingly ordinary spaces and places around us, “landscapes,” are involved in the struggle to democratize education in the United States. It uses the African American experience in this arena to anchor the exploration. We explore how landscape is implicated in the secret prehistory of Black education under enslavement; the promise of public education during Reconstruction; Booker T. Washington’s accommodation during early Jim Crow; black college campus rebellions of the 1920s; the impact of Brown v. Board of Education; the rise of black studies programs at majority campuses in the 1960s and ‘70s; and the resonance of Jim Crow assumptions affecting education access in our current moment. We also touch on the experience of other marginalized groups. For example, women’s college campuses, such as those of Mount Holyoke and Smith College, were designed to discipline women to accept prescribed gender roles at the height of the women’s suffrage movement. Armed with this background, on Saturday, Sept. 19, from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., there will be a required field trip to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center and its setting in downtown Charlottesville. This was the site of Charlottesville’s first public elementary and later high school for African Americans. Some of the materials we study include excerpts from the following: Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, Raymond Wolters’ The New Negro on Campus, and James D. Anderson’s The Education of Blacks in the South. Films include Peter Gilbert's With All Deliberate Speed. We’ll explore interpreting historical and contemporary maps, plans, and other design- and planning-related materials to help develop the ability to interrogate landscapes critically. Graded assignments include two midterms, a team research project, a final team project symposium, and an individual critical reflection on the team project. There will be a number of informal in-class and take home exercises connected especially with developing skills in preparation for the midterms, field trip, and final project.
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| ENGL 3220 | The Seventeenth Century |
| |
| | An age of scientific and political revolution |
| 20030 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (3 / 99) | 18 / 18 | Rebecca Rush | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Bryan Hall 203 |
| | Read Bacon, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Hobbes, Herrick, and Milton. |
| | In this course we will study a period marked by two big-name revolutions—the scientific revolution and the political revolution known as the English Civil War—but our task will be to examine the subtler currents of thought that ran beneath these epochal changes. We will focus in particular on vigorous seventeenth-century debates about the origins of knowledge and the purpose of liberty. Seventeenth-century writers put pressure on all the received ways of explaining the human mind, the natural world, and the political regime. They asked whether we should trust political customs, intellectual authorities, or even our own eyes and minds. They wondered whether goodness, greatness, and honor are meaningful ideas or fictions that had long impeded progress toward certain knowledge and secure peace. They debated about the primary aim of political life and what kinds of freedom are desirable and achievable. As we study political and philosophical prose by Francis Bacon, John Milton, and Thomas Hobbes in conversation with poems and plays by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Robert Herrick, and Andrew Marvell (among others), we will practice reading with the utmost care—and a dictionary by our sides. Our aim will be not only to understand the complexities of these authors’ thought but also to draw out the rich particularities of their language. |
| ENGL 3271 | Shakespeare: Histories and Comedies |
| |
| 13757 | 100 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 32 / 60 | Clare Kinney | MoWe 12:00pm - 12:50pm | John W. Warner Hall 104 |
| | Combative wit; desire and disguise. Guilty kings and uppity women. The performance of power. Gender-bending and genre-bending drama. First years and non-majors welcome! |
| | A survey of the first half of Shakespeare’s dramatic career, focusing in particular on the comedies and history plays. Among the things we’ll be looking at: the intricate relations between desire, disguise and the transformation of identity in plays like The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It; the ways in which various kinds of drama can simultaneously question and reaffirm the status quo; the representation of gender and agency on the comic stage; suggestive connections between comedy and tragedy in Romeo and Juliet; comedy and history in Henry IV part I (and to a lesser extent in Henry V); tragedy and history in Richard II; the pressing of comedy to its limits in The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure. Lectures will remain attentive throughout to the power of the Shakespearean wordhoard and also to the relationship between play text and performance.
Course requirements: Regular attendance at lectures; regular attendance at (and lively participation in) discussion sections; two 6-7 page papers, midterm and final exams.
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| ENGL 3275 | History of Drama I: Ancient Greece to the Renaissance |
| |
| 19843 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 28 / 30 | John Parker | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Dell 2 100 |
| | The first third of this course will cover the drama of classical antiquity in translation, beginning with Greek plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, then moving from there to the Latin plays of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca. The next third of the course will consider the kinds of performance that displaced (and in some cases transformed) these pagan traditions after the Christianization of the Roman empire; we will likely read a liturgical drama, a morality play, a saint play, some vernacular Biblical drama and a secular farce. The final third of the course will cover plays from the Renaissance, focusing particularly on the commercial London stage of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.
A major goal of the course will be to answer some of the questions posed by historical period: what does it mean, in the context of this particular genre, to move from antiquity to the Middle Ages to the Renaissance? How seriously should we take the differences between paganism and Christianity? What portion of early modern drama derives from classical antiquity, what portion from the Middle Ages, and what portion, if any, is new? What does it mean to say that drama by the time of Shakespeare had been secularized? |
| ENGL 3310 | Eighteenth-Century Women Writers |
| |
| 19780 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 25 / 30 | Alison Hurley | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | New Cabell Hall 058 |
| | During the eighteenth century, social, economic, and technological developments in Britain converged to alter the ways in which texts were produced and consumed. The result of these innovations was a print culture that offered women the opportunity to step onto the public stage as professional authors for the first time. Female authors, nevertheless, remained intensely aware of their “delicate situation” within the literary public sphere. They responded to this situation by deploying a variety of authorial strategies that ingeniously combined self-promotion with self-protection in order to legitimize their appearance in print. This class will be particularly interested in examining the relationship between gender and genre in eighteenth-century Britain. Our readings will highlight a series of specific literary forms – drama, poetry, and the novel – each of which implicates gender in distinctive and compelling ways.
Class requirements include frequent discussion thread posts; in-class quizzes; two thesis-driven essays; a poetry annotation assignment; and a “blue book” essay-based final exam.
This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement
|
| ENGL 3380 | The English Novel I |
| |
| | Run Runaway! |
| 19793 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 30 | Cynthia Wall | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Bryan Hall 328 |
| | In 1775, the German physicist and satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg declared that England had the best novels because England had the best roads. Daughters could escape from their fathers; sons could strike out on adventures; young ladies could make Entrances into the World; criminals could flee their crimes; highwaymen could make their fortunes. This course will explore the ways that eighteenth-century British novels themselves explored time and space, country and city, roads and inns, carriages and ships, in the fiction of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, Tobias Smollett, Jane Austen, and Anonymous. Requirements: Attendance, participation, weekly analytical commentaries, one short (5-7pp.) paper, a midterm, a small group project, and a final exam. |
| ENGL 3480 | The English Novel II |
| |
| | The Way We Live Now: The Novel in the Nineteenth Century |
| 19827 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 17 / 30 | Stephen Arata | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 168 |
| | You do not have to complete English Novel I to enroll in English Novel II |
| | “Novels are in the hands of us all,” wrote Anthony Trollope in 1870, “from the Prime Minister down to the last-appointed scullery maid. We have become a novel-reading nation.” Indeed, over the course of the nineteenth century the novel became the most popular—and profitable—literary genre in Great Britain. Its success was due to many factors, none perhaps more important than the extraordinary sophistication and emotional power with which novelists set out to portray (as the title of one of Trollope’s own novels puts it) “the way we live now.” More than ever before, novelists were committed to recording the visible world in all its abundant detail while also exploring the complex interior lives of individual women and men. They accomplished these feats, moreover, by way of gripping stories full of adventure, love (lust too), betrayal, mystery, and wonder. In this course we will immerse ourselves in a half-dozen or so of the finest examples of the genre, chosen from among such writers as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, Thomas Hardy, and Trollope himself. Requirements will likely include bi-weekly email responses, two essays, a midterm, and final exam. |
| ENGL 3540 | Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature |
| |
| | Romanticism |
| 19773 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (2 / 99) | 30 / 30 | Mark Edmundson | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Bryan Hall 328 |
| | Romantic Poetry: We’ll read and interpret the six major English Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron. We’ll reflect on the pleasures of their work, and on what they might have to teach us about love, politics, nature, art, the self, society, and the imagination. We may end with a Jane Austen novel for contrast, probably Pride and Prejudice. Two fact-based exams, one paper at the close.
|
| ENGL 3560 | Studies in Modern and Contemporary Literature |
| |
| | US Modernisms in Word and Image |
| 20027 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 20 | Joshua Miller | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | New Cabell Hall 283 |
| | How does one write something that’s never been thought? Why would an author write in mixed or invented languages? How do visual images respond to written narratives (and vice-versa)? We will discuss a broad range of novels, short fiction, film, photography, and graphic arts composed between 1898 and 1945 and the historical, political, and cultural trends that they were responding to and participating in. This was an extraordinary and tumultuous period of demographic change, artistic invention, economic instability, racialized violence, and political contestation that witnessed mass immigration, migration, and emigration. In paying particular attention to trends of demographic displacement and change within and across national borders, we’ll consider the heady experiments in language and narrative that took place during the first half of the twentieth century. The historical events of this period—framed by the wars of 1898 and World War II—will provide context for the novels we read.
Some of the broad questions that we’ll track throughout the term include the following. How do these authors define the “modern”? What, for that matter, is a “novel” in twentieth-century U.S. literature? How did these authors participate (and resist) the process of defining who counted as an “American”? What role did expatriates and immigrants play in the “new” United States of the twentieth century? How did modernists narrate the past? How did trends in technology (mass production, cinema, transportation), science (relativity), and politics influence novelists’ roles within U.S. modernity? How did these authors reconcile the modernist imperative to “make it new” with the histories of the U.S. and the Americas? What were the new languages of modernity?
|
| ENGL 3570 | Studies in American Literature |
| |
| | Hemispheric Latinx Literature and Culture |
| 13754 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 19 / 24 (19 / 24) | Carmen Lamas | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Bryan Hall 235 |
| | This course offers a survey of Latinx literature from a hemispheric perspective. We will examine how the histories of the US, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia come together to produce novels, poems, memoirs and films that are distinctly Latinx. In addition to exploring the integrated global histories that produce latinidades, we will analyze how race, class, gender and sexuality are presented in Latinx literature and other artistic forms. The course will introduce students to the different Latinx national-origin groups and the reasons individuals immigrate to the United States. Students will also read a variety of Latinx texts that demonstrate the hemispheric and trans-American nature of the Latinx experience. All readings, writing, and discussions are in English. |
| | American Wild |
| 19777 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 17 / 30 | Stephen Cushman | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Dell 2 101 |
| | With biblical images of wilderness in mind, seventeenth-century English colonizers of Massachusetts described what they found as another wilderness, howling, savage, terrible. For them it was to be feared, avoided, and, where possible, tamed. Four centuries later, with eighty percent of U.S. citizens living in cities, many of them exposed to wilderness only through calendar pictures or screensaver photos, what meaning or value does American wildness have? Is it only a fantasy image, part of an American brand, as in the phrase “the wild West.” Are wildness and wilderness the same thing? Has the howling, terrible, untamed wildness of the seventeenth-century forest relocated to another sphere, in the wildness of wildfires in California and throughout the west? Is climate the new frontier, the new wilderness, where Americans encounter untamed wildness in droughts, floods, violent storms, and extreme weather? Have we come full circle to more biblical imagery, with apocalypse replacing wilderness as the rubric under which we encounter the wild?
This course will begin with a look at biblical antecedents and their influence on white colonists encountering landscapes inhabited by native people. From there we’ll move to the literature of westward exploration, and further encounters with indigenous populations and their lands, in selections from the journals of Jefferson-commissioned Lewis and Clark. Then it’s on to the mid-nineteenth pivot toward wildness in the eyes of Romantic beholders, foremost among them Henry David Thoreau, patron saint of the environmental movement. Next comes John Muir, whose vision of wilderness preservation begat the U.S. National Park System. Proceeding to the twentieth-century, we’ll add important voices, such as Aldo Leopold’s and Rachel Carson’s and Rebecca Solnit’s, as the preservation impulse merges with concern about public health and social justice. We’ll complete our tour in the twenty-first century by joining the intensifying conversation, along with Robert Bullard, Alice Walker, Linda Hogan, Carol Finney, Lauret Savoy, J. Drew Lanham, and Garnette Cadogan, about whether the visions of Thoreau, Muir, et al. are exclusively white and male.
Open to all. Those in the Environmental Thought and Practice Program welcome. |
| | Contemporary American Fiction |
| | Graphic Novels, Eccentric Narrators, Alternative Histories, Magical Realities |
| Website 19984 | 003 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 14 / 30 | Caroline Rody | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Monroe Hall 118 |
| | Narrative Experiment in Contemporary American Fiction:
Graphic Novels, Eccentric Narrators, Alternative Histories, Magical Realities
Contemporary American fiction brims with surprises. It’s not just that an unprecedent diversity of voices is generating a global literature centered upon U.S. territory, but also that this influx of the world’s energies has accelerated the modern and postmodern experimentation with new ways to tell a story.
In this course we will explore the possibilities generated by narrative innovation of several kinds. We’ll take up from the booming genre of the graphic novel, in which the visual dimension bursts open the conventional boundaries of narrative fiction (in texts like Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, Thuy Bui’s The Best We Can Do, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home). We’ll read novels narrated by outrageous, elusive, sometimes magical voices (in texts like Junot Diaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, and Ruman Alaam’s Leave the World Behind). And we’ll consider novels that re-imagine ethnic American histories by means of inventive strategies: magical, multi-vocal, counterfactual, or speculative (in texts like Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s “My Monticello”).
Requirements: devoted reading and active participation, multiple online postings, leading of class discussion (in pairs), a short and a long paper.
|
| ENGL 3572 | Studies in African-American Literature and Culture |
| |
| | Black Protest Narrative |
| | Black Protest Narrative |
| 19611 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Closed | 30 / 30 (30 / 30) | Marlon Ross | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | Bryan Hall 235 |
| | This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements, and black postmodernism. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion, crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Either directly or indirectly, all of these narratives ask pressing questions about the meaning of American citizenship and racial community under the conditions of racial segregation and the fight for integration or black nationalist autonomy. What does it mean to be “Negro” and American? How should African Americans conduct themselves on the world stage, and which international identifications are most productive? What roles do the press and popular media play in the sustenance and/or erosion of a sense of community both within a racial group and in relation to the country? What are the obligations of oppressed communities to the nation that oppresses them? What role should violence play in working toward liberation? How do intersectional subjectivities like gender, sexuality, religion, class, immigrant status, and color factor into ideologies and strategies of protest? We begin our study with the most famous protest novel, Richard Wright’s Native Son. Then we examine other narratives in this tradition, including works by Angelo Herndon, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gwendolyn Brooks, Malcolm X, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Joseph Beam, Marlon Riggs, and William Melvin Kelley. Films include Joseph Mankiewitz’s No Way Out, Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and The Watermelon Man, and Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied. Written assignments include an in-class midterm, a take-home midterm, a final exam.
|
| ENGL 3790 | Moving On: Migration in/to US |
| |
| 20293 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Closed | 30 / 30 (30 / 30) | Lisa Goff | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 323 |
| | No waitlist, but spaces often open up. Email Prof. Lisa Goff lg6t@virginia.edu if you want to join the class. |
| | “Moving On: Migration In/To the U.S.” examines the history of voluntary, coerced, and forced migration in the U.S. Students will trace changing attitudes about migration over time using a variety of cultural products, including videos, books, documentaries, poems, paintings, graphic novels, photographs, fashion, digital humanities, and academic scholarship. Class participation/contribution is the core of this class. Other assessments include reading responses, presentations, papers, and reflective essays. There will be one scheduled test. Students will be required to volunteer 5-10 hours with a migration-related project during the course of the semester. |
| ENGL 3915 | Point of View Journalism |
| |
| 20295 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 30 / 30 (30 / 30) | Lisa Goff | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | New Cabell Hall 132 |
| | No waitlist, but spaces often open up. Email Prof. Lisa Goff lg6t@virginia.edu if you want to join the class. |
| | This course examines the history and practice of “point-of-view” journalism, a
controversial but credible alternative to the dominant model of “objectivity”
on the part of the news media. Not to be confused with “fake news,”
point-of-view journalism has a history as long as the nation’s, from Tom Paine
and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century to "muckrakers" like
Ida B. Wells Barnett and Ida Tarbell at the end of the nineteenth, and “New
Journalism” practitioners like Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and Barbara
Ehrenreich in the twentieth. Twenty-first century point-of-view practitioners
include news organizations on the right (Fox News, One America News Network)
and left (Vice, Jacobin, MSNBC, Democracy Now), as well as prominent
voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Rebecca Solnit, Jia
Tolentino, and Roxane Gay. We will also consider the work of comedians such as
Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and John Oliver, who pillory the news (and newsmakers) in
order to interpret them.
|
| ENGL 4500 | Seminar in English Literature |
| |
| | Seven Ages, Seven Questions |
| 19774 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open, WL (1 / 99) | 17 / 18 | Mark Edmundson | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | Bryan Hall 312 |
| | Seven Ages / Seven Questions or How to Live, What to Do.
The course emerges from Jaques’s speech in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” on the seven ages of human life. We’ll consider childhood and education, erotic love, religion, warfare and courage in war, politics, the quest for wisdom, and old age. Readings from, among others, Plato, Beauvoir, Freud, Wordsworth, Schopenhauer, and Marx. Regular writing assignments and a long essay at the end.
|
| | Gothic Forms |
| | Gothic Forms |
| 19794 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 12 / 18 | Cynthia Wall | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | John W. Warner Hall 113 |
| | Gothic literature burst onto the scene in the eighteenth century with ruined castles, ethereal music, brooding villains and surprisingly sturdy heroines, all performing as metaphors of our deepest fears and fiercest resistances. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the gothic continued as a genre of cultural anxiety. This seminar will survey gothic literature through both history and genre: the classic novels, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1797), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818); 18thC German vampire poetry and poems by John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Sylvia Plath; the plays of Matthew Lewis and Richard Brinsley Peake; and the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W. W. Jacobs, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King. And we will ask ourselves: What are we afraid of? Active participation, a presentation , weekly short commentaries, one short paper (5-7pp), and one longer research paper (10-12pp). |
| ENGL 4540 | Seminar in Nineteenth-Century Literature |
| |
| | Jane Austen in Her Time and Ours |
| 19782 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (8 / 99) | 14 / 14 | Susan Fraiman | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Nau Hall 242 |
| | An intensive study of the work of Jane Austen. Take this course if you’re new to Austen or already a fan. Take it for Austen’s epigrammatic sentences and love stories, but also for her biting social commentary and (beneath the light, bright surface) her probing of the darker emotions. How do the novels treat such topics as family conflict, first impressions, sexual jealousy, women’s property rights, New World slavery, and the Napoleonic Wars? Why have Austen’s happy endings been accused of haste? In addition to exploring Austen’s formal strategies, thematic concerns, and engagement with the issues of her time, we will touch on her reception in subsequent eras, including a cinematic interpretation or two. Two papers and a final exam. This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement. |
| ENGL 4560 | Seminar in Modern and Contemporary Literature |
| |
| | Contemporary Poetry |
| 19824 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 18 | Jahan Ramazani | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | Kerchof Hall 317 |
| | In this seminar, we will examine an array of postwar idioms, forms, and movements. While devoting much of our attention to some of the most influential poetry from the second half of the twentieth century, we will also bring ourselves up to date by examining some of the best poems published in recent years by poets of diverse backgrounds. To hone our attention, we will focus on several specific kinds of poetry, including sonnets, elegies, and poems about the visual arts. The seminar will emphasize the development of skills of close reading, critical thinking, and imaginative, knowledgeable writing about poetry. |
| | Photography and Literature |
| | Visual Fictions: Photography and 20th/21st-Century US Literature |
| 20028 | 004 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 3 / 18 | Joshua Miller | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 111 |
| | The emergence of photography in the 19th and early 20th centuries participated in an extraordinary vitality in both visual and literary cultures of the time. The force of new kinds of images and icons was immediate and transformative. Photographs were used in a wide range of ways during this period, from multimedia art forms (collage) to new surveillance methods (mug shots and passport photos) to advertising, journalism, family and personal mementos, among others. This was also the era of mass movements of people (immigration and migration). This course will provide an introduction to the emergence of photography as a popular and artistic medium in the 20th century US, which we will put in dialogue with the literary and cultural movements of realism, modernism, postmodernism, and the as-yet unnamed contemporary. We’ll consider how word-based arts changed—primarily narrative prose and the novel form—in response to the visualities generated by photography.
We’ll read key instances of photographic theory and ask how they also illuminate trends in 20th and 21st century US novels. Some questions we’ll consider include: How did novels respond to the emergence of photography as a new visual medium? How might novels be read as competing and collaborating with photography? How did literary narrative inform the trends and techniques of photography? How did (and do, today) photography and literary narrative respond to the social tensions around immigration and racialization? We’ll read works by some of the most prominent US novelists and photographers as well as those who have been overlooked.
|
| ENGL 4561 | Seminar in Modern Literature and Culture |
| |
| | Literature and Human Rights |
| 19842 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 3 / 18 | Christopher Krentz | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Bryan Hall 334 |
| | What does literature have to do with human rights, with the aspirational effort to ensure the protection of persons everywhere from persecution and deprivation? In this course we will begin by considering the history of human rights, including debates over their legitimacy. Then we will study recent theory on the relationship of rights to literature and read a variety of relevant contemporary fiction. The syllabus is still under construction, but possibilities here include Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Sinha’s Animal’s People, Abani’s Song for Night, and Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis. These works often deal with difficult, troubling topics, but they do so with grace and occasionally unexpected beauty. Requirements include the usual careful preparation and participation, quizzes, a short presentation, a 5-page paper, and a 10-page research paper. |
| ENGL 4570 | Seminar in American Literature since 1900 |
| |
| | Reading Toni Morrison in the Round |
| | Toni Morrison in the Round |
| 20006 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 3 / 14 | Deborah McDowell | We 3:30pm - 6:00pm | New Cabell Hall 038 |
| | “Word-work is sublime . . . because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures
our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other.”
Toni Morrison, from the Nobel Lecture
This advanced seminar focuses on varied selections from the prodigious corpus of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison—novelist, philosopher, essayist, editor, librettist and public intellectual. Her eleven novels encompassed the history of Black folk in the U. S., from colonial Virginia to slavery to the Korean War. We will explore the socio-historical, theoretical, political and cultural contexts from which Morrison’s writings emerged, its dominant threads and aesthetic strategies, as well as its critical reception across the decades of her long and storied career.
Required texts will include Morrison’s novels The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, A Mercy and Beloved, the film adaptation of Beloved, selections from The Source of Self-Regard and What Moves at the Margins, as well as Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. We will also examine Morrison’s work as a book editor, who nurtured and developed the craft of such writers as Gayl Jones, Angela Davis, June Jordan among others. These were the writers who, along with Morrison herself, constituted what she termed a “renaissance” of African American women writing during the 1980s and 90s. We will read Jones’s Corregidora, Davis’s Angela Davis: An Autobiography, and selected poems from Jordan’s Things that I Do in the Dark.
Topics will include the construction and politics of race, the power and ethics of language, ecologies of race and place, the place of literature in public life, philosophies of love and friendship, the persistence of the past in the present, and Morrison as the piercing, visionary analyst of world history, contemporary society, literature and language. The course will conclude with a consideration of censorship and book banning. Although Morrison was among the most influential authors of the 20th century, her books have been consistently banned from school curricula and purged from the shelves of libraries. In 2023, the public school system in Spotsylvania, Virginia banned both The Bluest Eye and Beloved. Current Virginia Governor, Glenn Youngkin made banning her novel, Beloved, a central aspect of an ad created for his successful gubernatorial race. In prisons across the country, Morrison’s novels Song of Solomon and Paradise are frequently banned. We will read selections from Morrison’s edited collection, Burn This Book: Notes on Literature and Engagement. While examining the realities and workings of censorship and challenges to free expression, especially in this contemporary moment, we will train our focus on Morrison’s sublime “word-work,” on the transformative power of language in the writings of this towering figure in world literature.
|
| ENGL 4580 | Seminar in Literary Criticism |
| |
| | Race, Space, Culture |
| 19614 | 100 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 2 / 18 (2 / 18) | K. Ian Grandison+1 | Tu 5:00pm - 7:30pm | New Cabell Hall 044 |
| | Co-taught by K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross, this interdisciplinary seminar examines the spatial implications at work in the theories, practices, and experiences of race, as well as the cultural implications at stake in our apprehensions and conceptions of space. Themes include: 1) the human/nature threshold; 2) public domains/private lives; 3) urban renewal, historic preservation, and the new urbanism; 4) defensible design and the spatial politics of fear; and 5) the cultural ideologies of sustainability. The seminar foregrounds the multidimensionality of space as a physical, perceptual, social, ideological, and discursive phenomenon. This means melding concepts and practices used in the design professions with theories affiliated with race, postcolonial, literary, and cultural studies. We’ll investigate a variety of spaces, actual and discursive, through selected theoretical readings from diverse disciplines (e.g., William Cronon, Patricia Williams, Philip Deloria, Leslie Kanes Weisman, Gloria Anzaldúa, Oscar Newman, Mindy Fullilove); through case studies (e.g., Indian reservations, burial grounds, suburban homes, gay bars, national monuments); and through two mandatory local site visits: to Monticello on Sunday, Sept. 22, from 1 to 5 p.m.; and to downtown Charlottesville on Tuesday, Nov. 12, from 5 to 8:30 p.m. Requirements include a take-home midterm, a final critical reflection paper, and a major team research project and symposium presentation.
|
| ENGL 4901 | The Bible Part 1: Hebrew Bible / Old Testament |
| |
| 19775 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (3 / 99) | 15 / 15 | Stephen Cushman | MoWe 11:00am - 12:15pm | Dawson's Row 1 |
| | The stories, rhythms, and rhetoric of the Bible have been imprinting readers and writers of English since the seventh century. Moving through selections from the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, from Genesis through the prophets, this course focuses on deepening biblical literacy and sharpening awareness of biblical connections to whatever members of the class are reading in other contexts. Along the way we will discuss English translations of the Bible; the process of canonization; textual history; and the long trail of interpretive approaches, ancient to contemporary. Our text will be the New Oxford Annotated Bible, 5th ed. All are welcome. No previous knowledge of the Bible needed or assumed.
PLEASE NOTE: Professor John Parker will teach a course focusing on the New Testament in spring 2025. Both courses will read the New Testament gospel of Mark, connecting the semesters, but you do not have to take the fall course as a prerequisite for the spring one. |
| ENGL 5559 | New Course in English Literature |
| |
| | Anne Spencer and/of the Harlem Renaissance |
| | Anne Spencer, Poet & Gardener in Lynchburg: Archives of the Harlem Renaissance |
| 19797 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 5 / 15 | Alison Booth | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Bryan Hall 233 |
| | This discussion-based seminar will focus on the celebrated woman poet Anne Spencer (1882-1975), part of the Harlem Renaissance while living in segregated Lynchburg, Virginia. Spencer’s lasting presence in 30 published poems, a preserved house and garden museum, and the papers at UVA as well as in Lynchburg inspire a planned exhibition in Harrison-Small Library September 2024, along with a slowly expanding body of critical studies. We can advance Spencer studies together in light of reading her work in relation to some other writers she interacted with and our theoretical questions about race, gender, place, environment, and cultural heritage, with some consideration of digital humanities. Our work will include exploring unpublished archives (Special Collections), taking a field trip to the Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum, attending the exhibit and associated events, reading biographies and criticism, practicing skills of reading and interpreting poetry, writing two essays, experimenting with digital tools. The Library hopes to generate support for digitizing images and manuscripts in the UVA collection of many of her papers, as well as examination of her books also archived here. There is no scholarly edition of her works, and our studies will advance scholarship on the evolution of her multi-faceted writing practice (in used notebooks, on walls; prose segueing into poetry and back again). |
| ENGL 5900 | Counterpoint Seminar in Teaching Modern Literature |
| |
| | Teaching Literature with Equity and Justice |
| 19792 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 6 / 15 | Cristina Griffin | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Bryan Hall 310 |
| | This seminar is about how and why teaching literature matters today. How do secondary school and college instructors teach literature in challenging times? How do teachers make tough decisions about what to teach and why? What responsibility do teachers have to promote equity and justice through the literature they teach and the methods they use? In this course, we will tackle these big questions together as we explore what it means to pursue a career in teaching literature to middle school, high school, or college students. Each week, we will weave together your existing knowledge of literature and your emerging knowledge of pedagogy. You will be introduced to theories of learning-focused, culturally relevant, and culturally responsive pedagogy, and you will put your newfound knowledge into practice as we work step by step through designing your own teaching philosophy and materials.
This course will bring together students who already have experience as classroom instructors, students who are in the process of teaching for the very first time, and students who have yet to step up to the front of a classroom in the role of teacher. We will build on this diversity of experiences, learning together how to bring transformative pedagogies into our present and future classrooms. |
| ENGL 8380 | Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction |
| |
| 19789 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 4 / 15 | John O'Brien | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | Brooks Hall 103 |
| | The novel and modernity arrived together in the course of the eighteenth century, and they’ve been intricately interwoven ever since. In this course, we will read some of the landmark works of fiction of this period as a way of exploring the relationship between the novel and the modern world that it described, heralded, mocked, celebrated, and helped bring into being. We will taste the heroic romances of the seventeenth century against which the English novel of the eighteenth frequently set itself against (while occasionally ripping off) before reading a list that includes Eliza Haywood’s erotically-charged short novels of the 1720s, Daniel Defoe’s pseudo-autobiographical “histories,” Samuel Richardson’s compulsively-readable epistolary fictions, Henry Fielding’s “comic-epics in prose;” the late-century emergence of sensational Gothic fictions, and Jane Austen’s wry social satires. We will contextualize these works within the eighteenth-century’s own deep and broad river of writing on prose fiction, and also sample a number of modern critical approaches to the eighteenth-century novel, from Ian Watt’s paradigm-setting The Rise of the Novel to contemporary theorists of the cognitive work involved in reading prose fiction like Blakey Vermeule and Natalie Philips. Requirements: active participation, one short and one more substantial final paper. |
| ENGL 8520 | Studies in Renaissance Literature |
| |
| | Sources of Shakespeare |
| 19844 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 6 / 15 | John Parker | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 044 |
| | Shakespeare rarely thought up plays on his own. Instead he borrowed plotlines, characters, and, often enough, verbatim wording from previous works while combining them with other materials that he had read. We'll examine his dramas alongside these sources toward the end of developing a deeper understanding of terms like influence, imitation, inspiration, invention, collaboration, allusion, adaptation, quotation, renaissance, revival, remake, and plagiarism.
At the same time we'll need to look at our sources for Shakespeare's plays: some of the most famous exist in multiple, equally authentic versions, though they differ from one another substantially. How do editors decide between these competing sources when they produce contemporary editions? How do you know which version you're reading in a modern textbook?
We'll use this double focus — on the sources Shakespeare adapted to write his plays and on the earliest printed sources for modern editions of Shakespeare — as a way to investigate larger questions about authorship, textual authority, authenticity, and originality. Plays to be considered will likely include The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, The Winter's Tale, plus some plays by others: Seneca's Medea (translated by John Studley in1566), the anonymous King Leir, Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy and Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta. |
| ENGL 8540 | Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature |
| |
| | Jane Austen and Her Critics |
| 19781 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 8 / 12 | Susan Fraiman | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | Bryan Hall 310 |
| | A semester devoted to the patient close reading of Austen’s work, with attention to its historical context as well as formal attributes. Novels will be paired with critical essays illustrating diverse theoretical approaches. Any notion of Austen as a harmless spinster—narrow in her purview, complacent in her outlook—will quickly be dashed. Possible secondary materials include Eve Sedgwick’s queer perspective on Sense and Sensibility, Claudia Johnson’s feminist defense of Pride and Prejudice, Joseph Litvak’s deconstructive analysis of Emma, and Robyn Warhol’s narratological discussion of Persuasion. We may also consider an adaptation or two for screen or stage. Requirements include an article-length paper and a final exam. This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement.
|
| ENGL 8570 | Studies in American Literature |
| |
| | Latinx Literature and History |
| 19622 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 5 / 15 | Carmen Lamas | Mo 5:00pm - 7:30pm | New Cabell Hall 068 |
| | This seminar provides a comprehensive overview of Latinx literature and histories by engaging the major critical debates in the field of Latinx literary studies (critical race theory, border studies, hemispheric frameworks, among others). We will explore the writings and histories of different national-origin Latinx groups and the construction of the term Latinx. Methodological strategies for researching Latinx topics will be addressed. Those who wish to increase their knowledge of Latinx topics; who wish to contextualize their own projects within Latinx literature and history; and/or who are considering a chapter or dissertation that include Latinx literary expression are encouraged to take this course. Proficiency in Spanish is not required. All readings and discussions will be in English. |
| ENGL 8580 | Studies in Critical Theory |
| |
| | Novel Theory: Current and Emergent |
| 19836 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 15 | Adrienne Ghaly | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Kerchof Hall 317 |
| | This course introduces students to the novel’s social, cultural, and political power through its most significant critical imaginaries, from established theories to emergent ideas. We’ll map a broad range of theoretical and literary historical developments of thinking about ‘the novel’ and its core structures: character, description and reality effects, worlds, centers and peripheries, interiority and free indirect discourse, race, planetary crisis, and more. We’ll investigate the durability of ‘canonical’ thinkers such as M.M. Bakhtin, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Toni Morrison, and Deleuze and Guattari, and explore how recently published and emerging work on the novel from Roland Barthes, Caroline Levine, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Tim Bewes, among others, offer exciting new ways to the think about the novel now. |
| | Introduction to Critical Theory |
| 19841 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 3 / 15 | Nasrin Olla | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | Kerchof Hall 317 |
| | This course introduces students to a wide range of 20th and 21st century theoretical paradigms. These approaches include: poststructuralism, structuralism, postcolonial thought, African diasporic thought, and gender & queer theory. Authors will include: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir and others. This course would be of interest to a wide range of students interested in thinking about continental philosophy, traditions of critique, and postcolonial worlds. |
| ENGL 8596 | Form and Theory of Poetry |
| |
| | To be Grounded: Space, Place, and Setting |
| | To Be Grounded: Understanding Space, Place, and Setting as a Growth Templates for Poetry |
| 19988 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 5 / 15 | Kiki Petrosino | Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm | Shannon House 111 |
| | *****THIS CLASS WILL BE TAUGHT BY CAMILLE DUNGY, KAPNICK WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE*****
Priority enrollment will be for 1st & 2nd year MFA poetry students, but graduate students from other programs may be admitted, pending instructor permission. If you are *not* in the MFA program, but are a graduate student who would like to add this course, contact Professor Kiki Petrosino at cmp2k@virginia.edu with a brief request & rationale. Professor Petrosino will consult with Professor Dungy on permissions. All e-mail requests for permission should be accompanied by a request on SIS. Enrollment for returning students begins April 8 & will continue until the section is filled. For full consideration, please apply as soon as possible. Confirmation of your spot in the class may arrive in early summer. |
| | This semester we'll be thinking about the role of place and space in poetry. How do specific settings shape the poem on the page? Reading works by poets such as Molly McCully Brown, Anne Spencer, Remica Bingham, Brenda Hillman and others, we'll consider how intersections of geographies, histories, landscapes, flora, demographies, and purpose influence poetic practices. The course will be offered in a hybrid manner, with one in-person synchronous class per month and the rest of the synchronous classes on an online platform. Students will be expected to attend class for each session both in-person or online, to write and revise their own poems in response to class prompts, to regularly participate in class discussion, to offer detailed responses to other students’ work, to attend one poetry reading (in person or virtual) and submit a written response to, to turn in close-reading responses to assigned readings, and possibly to participate in a group presentation near the end of the term. |
| ENGL 8598 | Form and Theory of Fiction |
| |
| | Designing the Novel |
| 19993 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 7 / 15 | Jane Alison | We 2:00pm - 4:30pm | Bryan Hall 233 |
| | Instructor permission required. To apply, send a note (to jas2ad) telling me about your writing and reading practice, and what draws you to this class. |
| | Writing a novel can feel like being mid-ocean, in the dark, with only a bedsheet to float on. Where is structure? How do you move forward? Do you even know where you are? How on earth do you reach the end? In this course we’ll explore ways of composing longer fictional narratives by examining both classic and more extravagant forms some have taken: we’ll consider linear works based on the dramatic arc, and others that find looser or more experimental shapes; we’ll sample novels that are fabulist or journalistic, densely textured or line-broken, lyrical or faux-documentary. We’ll pay attention to many ways in which narratives create movement and how writers deploy points of view, manipulate time, employ varying techniques of discourse, and press image and syntax into serving vision. Texts might include works by Sándor Márai, Jean Rhys, B. S. Johnson, Edna O’Brien, Alison Mills Newman, Mariama Bâ, Murray Bail, Marie Redonnet, W. G. Sebald, Annie Ernaux, Anne Carson, Alejandro Zambra, Mary Robison, Jim Crace, Jamaica Kincaid, Mieko Kanai. In addition to reading, you’ll experiment weekly with your own writing. |
| ENGL 8810 | Criticism in Theory and Practice |
| |
| | Criticism in the First Person |
| 19829 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 15 | Emily Ogden | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Dell 1 104 |
| | In this course, we’ll discuss the theory and practice of subjective knowledge in literary criticism. Is there such a thing as subjective knowledge (knowledge that depends on and is irreducibly routed through the knower’s perspective), or are such viewpoints mere opinions? What are we saying, exactly, when we say that a work of art is beautiful? We’ll spend about half our time learning to understand Stanley Cavell’s theory of what happens when we make a value judgment about a work of art, with a focus on the role the first person has in such claims. Our study of Cavell’s theory will include some of the aesthetic theorists he has influenced (Sianne Ngai, Imani Perry, Michel Chaouli, and others). We’ll spend the remainder of the semester reading the work of various writers who use first-person perspective in their work. We’ll read critics practicing in the academy, critics working as reviewers in the periodical press, and writers of creative nonfiction. Writers we may read include Maggie Nelson, Christina Sharpe, Nathalie Léger, Roland Barthes, T. J. Clark, D. A. Miller, Elizabeth Hardwick, Cristina Rivera Garza, Monica Huerta, and others. Students will have the opportunity to write criticism in the first person as part of the final assignment. |
| Entrepreneurship |
| ENTP 1501 | Special Topics in Entrepreneurship Management |
| |
| | Money Matters |
| | An introduction to personal finance |
| 20111 | 005 | Lecture (0.5 Units) | Open | 11 / 100 | Roger Martin | TBA | TBA |
| | Class is entirely online and can be completed at your own pace. There is no class meeting time - it is completely asynchronous. |
| | What can you do to improve your financial well-being? What can you learn about your personal finances that will give you more control over your financial life now and in the future? This course will help you understand the financial choices you should be making now and in the future and how to set yourself up for a great start financially when you leave school. It will provide a basic introduction to income taxes, budgeting, insurance, savings goals and investments. All content is online and asynchronous, so you can complete the course at your pace. |
| Writing and Rhetoric |
| ENWR 3760 | Studies in Cultural Rhetoric |
| |
| | The Cultural Work of Stories |
| 20172 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (1 / 10) | 16 / 16 | Tamika Carey | Mo 6:00pm - 8:30pm | Bryan Hall 312 |
| | Every culture has its own way of making meaning and communicating through persuasive means. Native American groups, for instance, have retained ceremonial customs and spiritual practices despite the conquests that have shaped this country. Queer communities, for example, have strategic ways that they use to make sense of the world and joy for themselves despite and in relation to heteronormativity. African-Americans, LatinX, and Asian Americans all have strategic language practices and social customs they use to fortify their collective identities and advocate for themselves amid historical hostility. Differently abled people have developed strategic ways of making their needs met despite design choices that disadvantage them. Individuals in this country’s working-class employ strategic techniques to advocate for themselves in challenging environments. This course will explore how these various cultural locations (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, ability, sexuality) impact how people generate rhetorical practices to maintain community and resist social division. Our work will involve exploring a variety of contexts wherein these practices are made, learning methodologies for studying rhetorical production across media and modality, and tracking these practices and their historical developments. Ideally, this work will enrich how you understand and participate in real-world cross-cultural and intercultural communications in professional and public spheres as well as personal encounters. Projects are likely to include: a cultural-message autobiography; an analysis/annotation presentation; and, a final project presentation. |
| Enviromental Thought and Practice |
| ETP 3500 | Topics in Environmental Thought and Practice |
| |
| | Nature Connectedness: Hope, Health, and Community |
| | Pathways for Hope, Health and Community Action |
| Website 20208 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 7 / 20 | Dorothe Bach+1 | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Campbell Hall 108 |
| | Please see website for more info and how to request permission to enroll. |
| | This course explores the critical importance of nature connectedness as a social determinant of health, a social justice issue, the root of pro-environmental behaviors, and a foundation for community building. We ground our study in experiential nature connection activities, scientific readings, the wisdom of local activists, and Indigenous ways of knowing. Together, we will identify and enact mindsets, practices, and perspectives that make way for the shift in consciousness needed for human and planetary health. |
| | Nature Connectedness: Hope, Health, and Community |
| | Pathways for Hope, Health and Community Action |
| Website 20209 | 110 | SPS (0 Units) | Open | 7 / 20 | Dorothe Bach+1 | 09/15 TBA | TBA |
| | Dorothe Bach | 10/19 TBA | TBA |
| | Please click on "Website" for syllabus and info about how to enroll. |
| | This course explores the critical importance of nature connectedness as a social determinant of health, a social justice issue, the root of pro-environmental behaviors, and a foundation for community building. We ground our study in experiential nature connection activities, scientific readings, the wisdom of local activists, and Indigenous ways of knowing. Together, we will identify and enact mindsets, practices, and perspectives that make way for the shift in consciousness needed for human and planetary health. |
| French |
| FREN 3031 | Finding Your Voice in French |
| |
| | ON AIR! Finding Your Voice in French: Podcast Edition |
| 10184 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 0 / 18 | Spyridon Simotas | MoWeFr 10:00am - 10:50am | New Cabell Hall 107 |
| | In French the words voix (voice) and voie (way) are homonyms. This is perhaps a happy linguistic coincidence. Or, perhaps, it reminds us that finding your way in the world is often also a process of finding your voice. Keep this homonym in mind as you set out to find your voice in French, because as you become more fluent in the French language you will discover new ways of experiencing the world and new pathways for personal and academic growth. This course will offer you the opportunity to explore and develop your voice in written and spoken French through the creation of a podcast. You will cultivate your own sense of style, tone, creativity, and expressiveness, by drawing on a variety of cultural artifacts as inspiration for a series of writing and recording activities. Whether it means starting to feel more like yourself when you write and speak in French, or enjoying sounding wonderfully different from yourself, this course will encourage you to deepen your appreciation for the profound and transformative process of starting to think in French and to think of yourself as a Francophone person.
Course conducted in French. |
| | ON AIR! Finding Your Voice in French: Podcast Edition |
| 10186 | 002 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 4 / 18 | Spyridon Simotas | MoWeFr 11:00am - 11:50am | New Cabell Hall 107 |
| | In French the words voix (voice) and voie (way) are homonyms. This is perhaps a happy linguistic coincidence. Or, perhaps, it reminds us that finding your way in the world is often also a process of finding your voice. Keep this homonym in mind as you set out to find your voice in French, because as you become more fluent in the French language you will discover new ways of experiencing the world and new pathways for personal and academic growth. This course will offer you the opportunity to explore and develop your voice in written and spoken French through the creation of a podcast. You will cultivate your own sense of style, tone, creativity, and expressiveness, by drawing on a variety of cultural artifacts as inspiration for a series of writing and recording activities. Whether it means starting to feel more like yourself when you write and speak in French, or enjoying sounding wonderfully different from yourself, this course will encourage you to deepen your appreciation for the profound and transformative process of starting to think in French and to think of yourself as a Francophone person.
Course conducted in French. |
| FREN 3043 | The French-Speaking World III: Modernities |
| |
| | Great Books |
| 19197 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (2 / 199) | 20 / 18 | Ari Blatt | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Nau Hall 142 |
| | Rather than focus on any single theme, movement, motif, or overarching problematic, this seminar will examine a few of the most admired and influential novels in the history of modern French literature. Special attention will be paid to the potential uses (but also to the ultimate uselessness) of literature. How might reading fiction (and learning how to read it well) inform our understanding of the world and our place in it? Texts may include, but are certainly not limited to: Balzac’s tale of a young law student’s drive to make it in the big city in Le Père Goriot; Flaubert’s portrait of the original desperate housewife in Madame Bovary; Robbe-Grillet’s scandalously puzzling colonial novel, La jalousie ; Georges Perec's critique of consumer society in the 1960s (Les Choses); and Maylis de Kerangal's mesmerizing, polyphonic novel about love, loss, and the rhythms of our beating hearts (Réparer les vivants). We might also end our semester with an "extremely contemporary" novel published during the last year or two.
Required work will likely include: a decent amount of [fun, illuminating, occasionally challenging but always edifying] reading (no matter how grounded in French culture and history our readings will be, this is still a lit class, after all); active participation in discussion; informal, bi-weekly ruminations on the readings posted to a forum on Canvas; an oral presentation designed to hone your close reading chops; and two or three short, analytical essays. What this course will not include is a lot of "busy work" (and no quizzes or exams). Course conducted entirely in French (save for occasional forays into English when your professor gets overly excited about a turn of phrase, a minor detail, or a map). Prerequisite: FREN 3032. |
| FREN 3051 | History and Civilization of France: Revolution to 1945 |
| |
| | Histoire et civilisation de la France contemporaine |
| 19196 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (0 / 199) | 18 / 18 | Janet Horne | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Wilson Hall 244 |
| | Beginning with a study of the French Revolution and ending with World War Two, this course focuses on the cultural and historical influences that have shaped Modern France. We will explore the relationship between culture and political power, the changing role of government, and how ordinary men and women experienced social change. Readings will be drawn from primary documents, memoirs and secondary historical texts. Visual elements will be incorporated in this course as well as selected films. Readings in this course will be done in both French and English. All lectures, discussions, and writing will be done in French. |
| FREN 4560 | Advanced Topics in Nineteenth-Century Literature |
| |
| | 19th-century French Romanticism. |
| | Entre pensée et émotion: sensibilité dans le romantisme français |
| 19198 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 4 / 15 | Claire Lyu | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | French House 100 |
| | Ce cours vous invite à explorer la triple quête––du moi, de la sensibilité authentique et du bonheur––dans laquelle s’engage la jeunesse romantique française de la première moitié du 19ème siècle où de nombreux facteurs culturels, sociaux, historiques et politiques (y compris la tombée de Napoléon Ier) concourent à façonner un courant artistique et littéraire à la fois complexe et contradictoire.
Nous découvrirons l'épreuve de l'âme sensible qui, en essayant de se libérer des contraintes et d'aspirer à un idéal, bute contre le réel et erre sans répit entre l’émotion et la pensée, la mélancolie et l'exaltation, le spleen et l'idéal. Nous dégagerons la pertinence de l'expérience romantique du passé pour notre époque contemporaine tout aussi préoccupée par le moi (ou son image), la mélancolie (ou la dépression) et le bonheur (ou le succès). Ce faisant, nous évaluerons les vestiges de la perspective romantique envers la nature, la conquête du "nouveau monde", la figure de Napoléon et la question du genre dans les soucis majeurs du 21ème siècle—par exemple, le réchauffement planétaire, le traitement des peuples indigènes, le débat sur l’héritage de Napoléon et le mouvement "Me Too"—pour apprécier la distance et la proximité entre l'époque romantique et la nôtre. Une étude approfondie des poèmes, récit, roman et traités/ manifestes nous permettra de mener ensemble un projet collectif de concevoir et de bâtir un Musée du Romantisme. |
| FREN 4585 | Advanced Topics in Cultural Studies |
| |
| | History of Paris |
| | Global Paris: The Complexity of Place |
| 12903 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Wait List (1 / 199) | 19 / 18 | Janet Horne | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | New Cabell Hall 107 |
| | A global city, Paris is today so much more than the capital of France; it holds meaning the world over. A real city of grit and struggle, it is also symbolic of lofty and complex ideals. A crossroads for people from every imaginable background, Paris has always been a transnational city of immigrants, students, political exiles, formerly colonized peoples, artists, writers and people just trying to make a living. The principal theater of the French Revolution, it earned a reputation for insurrection and protest. The vibrant heart of artistic life and intellectual debate, Paris became the model of a19th-century city. How did Paris achieve such iconic status on the world stage? What myths and historical moments have defined it? Why did James Baldwin or Ernest Hemingway go there and what did they find? What might you hope to find there?
Together, we will explore maps, paintings and film that illustrate key features of the history, topography, architecture, and neighborhoods of Paris. We will discover the imagined city in art, literature and song. In particular, we will interrogate the “American dream” of Paris, Black Paris, its promises and mirages. By the end of this course, Paris will be a familiar place and you will have a good understanding of how the traces of the past remain inscribed on the modern urban landscape. You will be able “to read” the city, unlock its codes, and hopefully find personal enrichment there, even from a distance.
|
| | Portraits |
| 13649 | 002 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 13 / 18 | Cheryl Krueger | TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 107 |
| | An exploration of human portraits in France from prehistoric cave art to the selfie. Students will examine a variety of genres and media including painting, drawing, film, photography, autobiography, autofiction, poetry, essays, and journals. We will focus on narrative believability (in text and image), on the creation of self-image and public persona, and on the mediated self. Coursework includes a final autobiographical, auto-fictional, or biographical audio-visual project.
Pre-requisite: FREN 3031 and 3032 (or equivalent) and one literature or culture course at the 3000 level.
|
| FREN 5510 | Topics in Medieval Literature |
| |
| | Medieval Saints' Lives |
| 19202 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 1 / 15 (3 / 20) | Amy Ogden | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Gibson Hall 142 |
| | African saints. Trans saints. Saints’ Lives as media. Saints in material culture and literature and history.
Recent academic enthusiasm for medieval saints’ Lives has begun to uncover the usefulness of this genre for gaining deeper understanding of both medieval and modern attitudes toward a variety of topics, from sexuality and sentiments to materiality and foreign cultures. Reading Lives written between 880 and the late thirteenth century, together with the work of some of the most engaging scholars in the field of hagiography studies, we will investigate a variety of issues that resonate with current interests in the broader fields of medieval and French studies. Readings include the Lives of St. Mary the Egyptian (a courtesan turned hermit), St. Catherine of Alexandria (known for her wisdom), St. Alexis (who abandoned his family), St. Louis IX (king of France), St. Euphrosyne (a woman who became a male monk), and St. Moses the Ethiopian (a brigand turned abbot).
|
| FREN 5540 | Topics in Eighteenth-Century Literature |
| |
| | Monarchy, Tyranny, Revolution |
| 19199 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 1 / 10 (2 / 15) | Jennifer Tsien | Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm | French House 100 |
| | This course will cover some of the classics of Ancien Régime France, including Le Cid, Le Mariage de Figaro, and Candide, along with less canonical works by women writers and Haitian revolutionaries. These will be presented within their historical and political context, with an emphasis on the troubled relationship between writers and the king of France, in France and in the colonies. |
| FREN 8510 | Seminar in Medieval Literature |
| |
| | Medieval Saints' Lives |
| 19203 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 2 / 5 (3 / 20) | Amy Ogden | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Gibson Hall 142 |
| | African saints. Trans saints. Saints’ Lives as media. Saints in material culture and literature and history.
Recent academic enthusiasm for medieval saints’ Lives has begun to uncover the usefulness of this genre for gaining deeper understanding of both medieval and modern attitudes toward a variety of topics, from sexuality and sentiments to materiality and foreign cultures. Reading Lives written between 880 and the late thirteenth century, together with the work of some of the most engaging scholars in the field of hagiography studies, we will investigate a variety of issues that resonate with current interests in the broader fields of medieval and French studies. Readings include the Lives of St. Mary the Egyptian (a courtesan turned hermit), St. Catherine of Alexandria (known for her wisdom), St. Alexis (who abandoned his family), St. Louis IX (king of France), St. Euphrosyne (a woman who became a male monk), and St. Moses the Ethiopian (a brigand turned abbot).
|
| German |
| GERM 3110 | Literature in German II |
| |
| | Narratives of Trauma and Hope in German Literature from the 1890s to Today |
| 20328 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 9 / 18 | Chrisann Zuerner | MoWeFr 12:00pm - 12:50pm | New Cabell Hall 485 |
| | This course seeks to ground students in understanding and grappling with the contentious pasts related to genocides of Europe spanning from the Shoah, Soviet labor camps, to the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. Culminating with a turn to our present moment in history, we will consider current political events and narratives, to examine potential parallels and differences from what we see throughout the other case studies of genocides. Engaging with historical events through a critical perspective of multidirectional memory (Rothberg), this course will examine various aspects of genocide through the means of cultural production (film, novels, etc.). Students will work with diverse texts – from novels (autofictional, fictional, and biographical), to news reports, newspaper articles, films, scholarly articles, etc. to gain an understanding of the events. By the end of the course students will be able to discuss and analyze these various moments in history, to thereby engage with contemporary events – from parallels and differences between the atrocities, as well as to analyze their own placement within history – to work to become engaged citizens in this day in age.
Course conducted in German |
| GERM 3620 | New Voices in German: Transnational and Multilingual Literature Today |
| |
| 19814 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 11 / 15 | Julia Gutterman | TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm | Pavilion VIII 102 |
| | What do German speakers read these days? In “New Voices in German,” we will explore a selection of prose works fresh off the press and ask how these works critically engage with Germany’s multilingual and transnational literary landscape. Readings include Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s "Der Hof im Spiegel," Fatma Aydemir’s "Dschinns," Katja Petrowskaja’s "Vielleicht Esther," Khuê Phạm’s "Wo auch immer ihr seid," and Saša Stanišić’s "Herkunft." See the schedule below for more information on these authors. This course is especially suited to students who wish to enhance their vocabulary through focused reading and develop their writing and conversational skills. GERM 3559 is conducted in German. Prerequisite: GERM 3000 or equivalent.
|
| German in Translation |
| GETR 3470 | Writing and Screening the Holocaust |
| |
| 19698 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 9 / 30 | Jeffrey Grossman | Tu 5:00pm - 7:30pm | New Cabell Hall 338 |
| | Description of the Course:
The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard likened the effect of the Holocaust to that of an earthquake that “destroys not only lives, buildings, and objects but also the instruments used to measure earthquakes directly and indirectly.” In the death camp Treblinka, as many as two to three thousand people per day were gassed to death for months on end; at Auschwitz, nearly 1.1 million were killed; and as many as 2 million Jews were rounded up and murdered in mass shootings and associated massacres in Poland, Ukraine, and other locations, mostly in Eastern Europe. How, to follow upon Lyotard, have survivors and others concerned with the events contributing to the Holocaust and with its impact sought to write it? Or to represent it visually, e.g., in film? What role does memory, whether individual or collective, play in their attempts? Can their works give expression to the trauma experienced by the victims and survivors? And if so, how? This course explores different approaches taken by writers and filmmakers and others who have grappled with these questions.
Readings drawn from Primo Levi, Art Spiegelman, Hannah Arendt, Charlotte Delbo, Theodor Adorno, Alexander Kluge, Ruth Kluger, Tadeusz Borowski, and others, and others; screenings of films like Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956); parts of Claude Lanzman’s Shoah (1985), Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), and possibly others.
The course assumes no prior knowledge of the subject matter. Students at all levels are welcome to attend. The course meets the second writing requirement. There is no final exam.
|
| GETR 3559 | New Course in German in Translation |
| |
| | Hollywood Exile: German Filmmakers Flee Fascism |
| | Hollywood Exile: German Filmmakers Flee Fascism |
| 19699 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 3 / 30 (3 / 30) | Paul Dobryden | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 332 |
| | In the 1930s, many people employed in the German film industry whose lives were threatened by fascism took refuge in Hollywood. This course examines the contributions exiled directors, writers, actors, and others made in genres ranging from comedy and melodrama to film noir. In addition to indicting fascist violence, reflecting on the trauma of forced migration, and rousing anti-fascist affect, these films often turned a critical eye on the U.S. Selected films include: FURY (Lang, 1936), CASABLANCA (Curtiz, 1942), A FOREIGN AFFAIR (Wilder, 1948), and ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (Sirk, 1955). |
| Global Studies-Global Studies |
| GSGS 3559 | New Course in Global Studies |
| |
| | The Individual and the World |
| 19210 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 3 / 20 | Peter Furia | We 6:00pm - 8:30pm | New Cabell Hall 303 |
| | Is it possible for young adults to change the world? Is it desirable to try to do so? In what if any sense should students aspire to lead global lives after graduation? This new seminar explores these and other questions of "cosmopolitanism" or global citizenship with reference to a small selection of canonical ethical texts and a wide variety of recent journalistic and biographical readings. |
| | Is it possible for young adults to change the world? Is it desirable to try to do so? In what if any sense should students aspire to lead global lives after graduation? This seminar explores these and other questions of "cosmopolitanism" or global citizenship with reference to a small selection of canonical ethical texts and a wide variety of recent journalistic and biographical readings. |
| | eGlobal: Sustainable Engagement in Rwanda - Part I |
| Website 20225 | 003 | Lecture (1 Units) | Open | 7 / 100 | Phoebe Crisman | TBA | TBA |
| | Online Course | Flexible Schedule |
| | eGlobal provides a way for UVA students to have meaningful long-term engagement with international peers. UVA students work with students from the University for Global Health Equity (UGHE) in Rwanda, in teams of four, to investigate global health topics relevant to both countries. The program provides a list of possible topics to work on for groups to choose from (although groups can also define their own topics). Estimated time commitment will be one hour per week on Zoom with the group, and about another hour per week for online research on the topic. The program runs the full academic year, and culminates in an online symposium where all groups present their research findings. For interested eGlobal groups options exist to publish their findings in Conflux, the University of Virginia global health journal.
Questions? Contact course coordinator, Haylee Ressa (qnx7rs@virginia.edu)
|
| History-General History |
| HIST 3501 | Introductory History Workshop |
| |
| | Into the Archives |
| 13062 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 12 / 16 | Erin Lambert | Tu 5:00pm - 7:30pm | New Cabell Hall 036 |
| | See class details for course description. |
| | In this seminar, we will explore the archive as the foundation of the historian's work, and we will work with archives ourselves. What is an archive, how is it created, and how can historians use it to recover the voices of people in the past? Why do some voices speak loudly in the archive, and why are others silenced? We will read texts from across a broad range of historical subfields and examine how historians use their archives--traditional collections of written documents, as well as non-textual sources such as images, objects, or landscapes. We will use these secondary sources as inspiration for our own work in the archives. Through visits to Special Collections, students will implement a research project that uses primary sources to develop a historical argument. |
| HIST 5002 | Global History |
| |
| | Microhistory, Macrohistory, and the Historian's Craft |
| 19368 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 6 / 15 | Fahad Bishara | Mo 2:00pm - 4:30pm | New Cabell Hall 183 |
| | This course is designed to introduce students to questions of scale, connection, movement, and circulation in history writing. Over the course of the semester, we will think about the analytical and narrative choices we make as historians.but shifting scales between the micro and macro, we think about how to make the large scale past come to life. |
| Liberal Arts Seminar |
| LASE 2515 | A&S Skills Accelerator-Catalyst |
| |
| | The Writing Lab |
| 14224 | 005 | WKS (2 Units) | Open | 10 / 15 | Cristina Griffin | Tu 9:30am - 10:45am | Pavilion VIII 108 |
| | The capacity to clearly communicate ideas in writing is a prerequisite for nearly any career. In this course, students will practice taking a concept from initial idea to final draft with a focus on professional writing. We will tackle some common professional communication modes together, and practice a variety of ways to make every student a stronger and more confident writer. The bulk of the writing in this course will be student-driven and student-designed, individualized to each student’s particular career goals and fields. Our classroom will function both as a simulation of on-the-job writing and as a safe space for writerly experimentation: students will craft career-based writing projects in order to practice future writing tasks, and our classroom will also function as an experiential lab space for writing, revising, experimenting, failing, and writing again. Students will work with MS Word, Copilot, and test out drafting software (such as Worst Draft). Students will leave this class as more confident and more adept writers, ready—and even excited—to incorporate writing into their future careers. |
| Linguistics |
| LING 2430 | Languages of the World |
| |
| | Formerly ANTH 2430 |
| 19609 | 100 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 35 / 60 | Armik Mirzayan | TuTh 4:00pm - 4:50pm | McLeod Hall 1004 |
| | This course introduces you to the world of linguistic diversity. We seek to understand what languages are, how they are related to one another, where and by whom they are spoken, what is happening to them in this period of rapid global transformation, and why we should care. In order to explore the diversity of languages we first learn some of the vocabulary and analytical tools of linguistics. This toolbox provides a range of technical concepts that enable us to represent and discuss grammatical structures in more precise ways, allowing us to also discuss language histories which form the basis for grouping languages into families. We then use these methods of linguistic analysis we survey the world’s languages region by region, focusing on the shared, unusual, or interesting characteristics exhibited by the languages of each region and learning to appreciate the diversity of human languages. |
| Leadership and Public Policy - Policy |
| LPPP 3559 | New Course in Public Policy and Leadership |
| |
| | Strategic Decision-Making |
| 20221 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 16 / 200 | Alexander Bick | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Wilson Hall 301 |
| | How do leaders make choices? What factors weigh most heavily? Where do leaders err – and why? The course explores these questions in the context of national security and foreign policy. Part one focuses on theory and models for understanding and improving strategic decision-making. Part two examines a set of historical cases relevant to today’s most important challenges. Case studies may include the outbreak of World War I, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and tensions over Taiwan. |
| LPPP 7700 | Applied Policy Project I |
| |
| 17309 | 004 | SEM (3 Units) | Closed | 13 / 13 | Daniel Player | We 12:30pm - 3:00pm | Pavilion VIII 103 |
| | This course investigates practical challenges policy researchers face conducting causal impact evaluations. Students develop deep intuition around prominent experimental and quasi-experimental methods through theory and simulation, practice replicating findings from key papers, and present results in compelling, accessible formats. The course assumes a basic proficiency with Stata and prior grad-level instruction in experimental & quasi-experimental methods. |
| Media Studies |
| MDST 3111 | Food Media and Popular Culture |
| |
| 13175 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (32 / 199) | 28 / 28 | Pallavi Rao | We 3:30pm - 6:00pm | Wilson Hall 238 |
| | In this course, we ask, how do various media tell the stories of the food that we eat? Food is critical to human survival, but it also constructs identities, it travels and connects people, histories, cultures, and labor and livelihoods. Representations of food in the media across time and place offer us a lens through which we can understand the cultural politics of the food experience--who produce our food, who labor for it, who prepare it, how it represents a culture, who consume it, and who profit from it.
Studying a range of food media genres from food writing and cookbooks to Instareels and food porn, Mukbangs, dietary media, food countercultures, food podcasts, celebrity chefs, travel shows and competitive cooking programming, this course will explore media storytelling about and around food, along with the racial, ethnic, gendered, class, and trans/national complexities that characterize our food narratives. A word of advice not to come to our class hungry! |
| MDST 3510 | Topics in Media Research |
| |
| | Children on Social Media |
| 13241 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (10 / 199) | 28 / 28 | Ashleigh Wade | Tu 3:30pm - 6:00pm | Wilson Hall 214 |
| | How young is too young to be on social media? This course explores the social, practical, and ethical implications of children on social media. We will view and analyze social media content from children ranging in age from 0 - 17 in order to identify and evaluate the benefits and risks of social media at various stages of childhood. Discussion topics will highlight the potential impact social media has on children’s overall well-being. |
| MDST 4510 | Capstone Topics |
| |
| | Creative Labor and the Digital Media Economy |
| 12715 | 003 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (15 / 199) | 20 / 20 | Pallavi Rao | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | New Cabell Hall 183 |
| | Media "products" are not typical commodities, nor is the labor undertaken to produce them typical industrial labor. The added context of digital technologies and media platforms have also transformed "work" in media organizations in fundamental ways. How have algorithms and social media analytics changed expectations of organizational media labor? Why did the Writers Guild of America strike in the summer of 2023 and how were anxieties around digital media and streaming platforms central to this? What is an influencer and is what they do "work"? Can a YouTuber be protected under existing labor laws? Can fans, who freely volunteer so much of their time and labor in online forums, be considered workers? This course is interested in such an examination of media/creative labor as well as the industrial contexts in which creative products are created and distributed.
In our classes, we will explore new theories of what is known as monetizable "creative labor" in the digital economy as well as its non-monetized unpaid avatars. We try to understand how aspiration/hope nurtures new kinds of work in the digital age, how it relates to inequality and precarity in the job market, the media industries' transformations linked to globalization and the spread of digital technologies, and the risky individualization of labor online. Finally, we will study the sociopolitical stakes of such labor by discussing: 1) the tech industry’s impact on media work cultures; 2) the invisible laborers of the online ecology; 3) and emergent economies of platforms. |
| MDST 4660 | Watching the Detectives |
| |
| 19028 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Permission | 16 / 20 | William Little | TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm | Cocke Hall 101 |
| | MDST 4660 Professor William G. Little
Fall 2024 Wilson Hall 204
Cooke Hall 101 Office Hours: by appointment
TR 12:30-1:45 e-mail: wgl2h@virginia.edu
Watching The Detectives
This seminar mounts an investigation into the origins and legacy of a distinctive, significant American art form: the portrayal of the private eye. The course will focus on the genre’s exploration of the relationship between detective work and the dynamics of modern industrial and post-industrial life. Students will consider how cases presented in the films dramatize concerns about class, race, gender, urbanization, the rationalization of experience, the disappearance of “real” life, the blurring of boundaries between bodies and machines, the collapse of distinction between private life and public life. Clues to the significance of the detective’s work will be gathered by analyzing the relationship of this work to such modern developments as photography, psychoanalysis, statistical analysis, and the social science of making cases. Substantial consideration will also be given to how the private eye’s authority compares to the authority of the “eye” of the film camera and to the gaze of the film spectator.
Potential Course Films
John Huston, The Maltese Falcon (1941) 101 min
Howard Hawks, The Big Sleep (1946) 114 min
Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo (1958) 128 min
Roman Polanski, Chinatown (1974) 130 min
Francis Ford Coppola, The Conversation (1974) 113 min
Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (1982) 114 min
Kathryn Bigelow, Blue Steel (1990) 102 min
Christopher Nolan, Memento (2000) 116 min
David Fincher, Zodiac (2007) 156 min
Carl Franklin, Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) 102 min
David Lynch, Mulholland Drive (2001) 147 min
Karyn Kusama, Destroyer (2018) 121 min
Park Chan-wook, Decision to Leave (2022) 139 min
Graded Requirements:
Forum Posts (5 @ 4 points each) 20 points
Participation 10 points
Essay #1 (5-7 pages) 30 points
Final Essay (8-10 pages) 40 points
------------
TOTAL 100 points
|
| Music |
| MUSI 2090 | Sound Studies: The Art and Experience of Listening |
| |
| 19666 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Wait List (2 / 199) | 20 / 20 | Noel Lobley | MoWe 9:30am - 10:45am | Contact Department |
| | When we think about knowing the world through the senses, we are likely to think first of the visible world. But sound, hearing and listening are crucial too and often take precedence in many communities. Recently scholars in history, anthropology, geography, literary studies, acoustics, music, ecology, environmental science, and art have come together in the field of Sound Studies, reflecting on the role of sounds as forces that flow in and beyond human life. How do sound art, technology, and design create the world we inhabit and our everyday social and political experience? How can vibrations both heal and destroy? What does it mean to experience immersive and embodied sound? We will ponder these and other questions, moving between theoretical, experiential, and creative explorations.
Please note: this course is an introduction to Sound Studies, there is no pre-requisite, and students from all backgrounds, levels and experiences are welcome to come and explore myriad ways to engage with sound. |
| MUSI 3020 | Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Music |
| |
| 20159 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 16 / 25 | Bonnie Gordon | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Old Cabell Hall 113 |
| | n 1977, NASA launched the space probe Voyager 1 out of our Solar System. It carried a gold-plated copper record called “The sounds of earth,” that, theoretically, would work until eternity. Should a close encounter of the third kind occur, it would include among other things greetings in 55 languages The Queen of the Night’s rage aria from the Magic Flute. 1791 and 2024 were and are unprecedented times. What do music and sound teach us about those times? What sounds fascinated listeners in the 17th and 18th century? The class will tune in to diverse musical selections including symphony and opera to folk song and free improv for keyboard, by composers including but not limited to Handel, Haydn, Vivaldi, De la Guerre, Mozart, Gluck, and J.S. Bach (and his kids). The class takes a global perspective. Chronologically, it centers the 17th and 18th centuries. The course lingers on the history of sound in Early Virginia. Course work will include reading, writing, listening, visits to special collections, making music, and reflection. The course is taught at the music major level. Majors and non-majors are welcome. There are no prerequisites, and knowledge of Western music notation is not required. |
| MUSI 3570 | Music Cultures |
| |
| | Curating Sound: Art, Ethnography, and Practice |
| 19678 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 20 | Noel Lobley | MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm | Contact Department |
| | This practical and discovery-driven design course explores the intersections of curatorial practice, sound studies, ethnography, composition, sound art, and community arts practice, through a series of engagements linking archival collections, local and international artists and art and community spaces, and the method and philosophies of embodied and experiential deep listening. Drawing from both the histories and potential affordances of sound curation we engage with practical examples ranging from sub-Saharan Africa to Australia, from Europe to New York, and right back here to the Charlottesville and UVA communities, asking what it means to curate local sound within globalized arts circuits. We will explore multiple and diverse case studies where artists, curators, communities, industries and institutions have both collaborated and clashed, as we ask whether it is desirable or even possible to curate the elusive, invasive and ephemeral object, medium and experience of sound.
Throughout the entire course we will be working closely with professional artists and curators most notably Around HipHop Live Café and the Black Power Station based in Makhanda, South Africa, the Kluge Ruhe Museum of Aboriginal Art, and the Virginia Film Festival
Less a lecture format, and more of an interactive workshop, critical and creative content will be explored in an open-pedagogical model where students apprentice as curators and eventually take an active role in curating the class itself. Expect a mix of group project work, individual reflection and portfolio curation, and real-world collaborative work with professional partners. |
| MUSI 4331 | Theory III |
| |
| 19679 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 6 / 15 | Michael Puri | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Old Cabell Hall 113 |
| | In this course we read, analyze, and write music in the western classical tradition to learn how it is formed, from its smallest parts (motives) to its largest wholes (sonatas). We focus on music of the High Classical Era: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Prerequisite: MUSI 3320 (Theory 2) or instructor permission. Send questions to puri@virginia.edu. |
| MUSI 4545 | Computer Applications in Music |
| |
| | Designing Audio Effect Plug |
| | Designing Audio Effect Plugins |
| 12107 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Permission | 9 / 15 | Luke Dahl | MoWe 2:30pm - 3:45pm | Old Cabell Hall B011 |
| | Audio effects are common and useful tools used in the recording, mixing, and mastering of music and sound, as well as in sound design.
This course focuses on understanding, designing and implementing audio effects, and using them for musical projects. We will cover the signal processing involved in effects such as EQ, delay, chorus, flanger, reverb, distortion, and compression, and we will implement these effects as VST or AudioUnit plug-ins by programming in C++ and using the JUCE framework. We will emphasize the musical application of our designs, and as a final project students will create a unique effect that addresses their own musical goals.
In other words we will learn fundamental aspects of digital audio, how audio effects work, how all real-time audio processing works "under the hood", and we will design and build our own audio effects.
Enrollment is by instructor permission. Students are expected to have experience using digital audio tools (for example as covered in Musi 2350 or Musi 3390), and to have an ongoing music-making or sound-based practice. Previous programming experience is _highly_ desirable.
Enrollment requires instructor permission. Please sign up on the Waitlist in SIS and describe your experience with digital audio tools (such as DAWs), your musical experience, your programming experience, your major, and your year.
|
| MUSI 4559 | New Course in Music |
| |
| | The Sound of Film |
| | The Sound of Film |
| 19681 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 15 | Nomi Dave | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Old Cabell Hall 107 |
| | How do we listen to film? What is the relationship between sound and images? What stories does sound tell? This course will explore the role of sound and listening in film, from lo-fi to hi-fi, from sound effects and ambient noise to voiceovers, music, and sound design. We will consider the history of sound recording in film and will listen to and watch several different examples and techniques of sound story-telling. Students will also learn about different types of microphones, experiment with making recordings, and create their own short sound films. No musical experience necessary. |
| MUSI 4581 | Composition I |
| |
| | Introduction to Music Composition |
| | Composition I |
| 19682 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Permission | 4 / 10 | Leah Reid | TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am | Old Cabell Hall B011 |
| | MUSI 4581 is an upper level music composition course. Students will receive a combination of individual lessons and group sessions. The course will provide a forum for students to listen, discuss, workshop, develop, and explore inspirations, compositions, and ideas.
Over the course of the semester, students are expected to compose a large-scale work or a series of smaller works in the style of their choosing. Students may compose electronic, acoustic, or electroacoustic music.
The course can be repeated for credit with approval of the instructor.
Prerequisite: Students are expected to have some prior composition experience and should be comfortable with standard music notation or DAWs. While not required, it is recommended that students have taken MUSI 3380, 3390, or another course where they have composed prior to taking MUSI 4581. |
| MUSI 7500 | Studies in Pre-Modern Music to 1500 |
| |
| | Premodern Sounds and Cultures |
| 19805 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 0 / 10 (0 / 20) | Bonnie Gordon | We 2:00pm - 4:30pm | Old Cabell Hall S008 |
| | This course uses sound to explore dynamic and new approaches to the premodern period. It promises a dynamic and dynamic and fresh look at the premodern (loosely conceived as stretching from the 5th c. to 1700) that will privilege new avenues of scholarship focused on a global, transhistoric, and multidisciplinary approach to the past. Presented through a series of sonic case studies and team-taught modules by UVA faculty that will address the long history of slavery, cross-cultural exchange, gender and sexualities, and global religious practices with an eye to encouraging debate and dialogue between faculty and students. Students will be guided in producing a final seminar paper that works across disciplinary boundaries. Modules will include topics like “Travel, Trade Routes and the Sonic Passage” “Joan of Arc and the Voice then and now” The Invention of Race and the Slave Trade,” This seminar is of the music PhD curriculum and the graduate certificate in Premodern Cultures & Communities. |
| Religion-Christianity |
| RELC 3077 | Christian Theologies of Liberation |
| |
| 20566 | 001 | SEM (3 Units) | Open | 10 / 15 | Paul Jones | MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm | New Cabell Hall 315 |
| | “Liberation theology” refers to perspectives that connect theological, ethical, and political inquiry. In the context of Christian thought, it encompasses scholarship that ties reflection on God, Jesus of Nazareth, human beings, creation, the Holy Spirit, and Christian ethics to analyses of race and racism, sex and gender, economic injustice, poverty, sexuality, colonialism, and human rights. Subsequent to an initial engagement with the Bible, early Christian and modern Christian writing, this class focuses on landmark and contemporary texts by liberation theologians, many of whom hail from North and South America. Among the authors considered are James Allison, Marcella Althaus-Reid, Leonardo Boff, James Cone, Kelly Brown Douglas, Ignacio Ellacuría, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Serene Jones, and Pope Francis. Students will be evaluated in light of in-class discussion, weekly journal entries, and a take-home final exam or research paper. |
| Religion-Hinduism |
| RELH 2090 | Hinduism |
| |
| 12952 | 100 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 47 / 95 | John Nemec | MoWe 2:00pm - 2:50pm | Wilson Hall 301 |
| | This course gives a comprehensive look at Hinduism, its major ideas and traditions, reading original texts in English translation. Featured are some of the most vital works in the entire history of religions, including the famed Upaniṣads that inspired T.S. Eliot and others, and the great Hindu epic about war and righteousness, the Mahābhārata. We also read poems of Hindu saints, look at the origins of Sikhism, and discuss the historical connection between Islam and Hinduism in India. A comprehensive survey through literature. |
| South Asian Studies |
| SAST 2050 | Classics of Indian Literature |
| |
| 19331 | 001 | Lecture (3 Units) | Open | 7 / 30 | Richard Cohen | TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm | New Cabell Hall 489 |
| | The course satisfies the Second Writing Requirement. I will sign the electronic form at the end of the semester. |
| | We will explore Indian civilizations through their ‘classic’ texts. I use single quotes around classic because what exactly is a classic text is usually determined by the politics of culture at any given time, as well as the academy, and that can be, as you might imagine, a contestable and controversial business. Therefore, the texts we will encounter in this course have been chosen to represent the diversity of Indian literature, especially highlighting competing voices; basically, because the history of the Indian continent is multi-layered and of extremely long duration, accounting for its complexity. In contemporary India, ‘competing voices’ usually are found in a political context, with a somewhat heavy religio-social undercurrent. Thus, the texts we read in this course often have a Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Islamic, as well as socially hierarchical identity. Thus, you will learn not only about Indian literary history, but also religious and social identities, and how they have changed over time.
Each text we read – and we will debate them in class – will be presented in the cultural and political context they were created, as well as the contemporary context of academia, which has been known on more than one occasion to accept blithely, without enough debate, their relevance in the overall canon of Indian literature.
|
| University Studies |
| UNST 8130 | Teaching & Learning in Higher Education |
| |
| 20481 | 01 | SEM (1 Units) | Open | 2 / 18 | Elizabeth Dickens | Tu 2:00pm - 3:30pm | New Cabell Hall 056 |
| | Where do our teaching practices come from? What do we hope to achieve when we teach, and why do we have those goals?
This seminar invites graduate students to explore theories and philosophies of education in order to guide their own professional development and practices as educators. Through our own educational experiences, we have all inherited a variety of assumptions and beliefs about the purposes and nature of education. In this course, we will unpack and critically reflect on our beliefs and assumptions, contextualizing them through the study of ideas that have significantly influenced educational discourse and the operations of higher education. We will investigate a diverse set of topics, including students' intellectual and social development, social justice, democratic and civic engagement, and what it means to be a critically reflective educator. In this course you will have an opportunity to connect concrete pedagogical practices to theoretical frameworks and to develop an intentional approach to your teaching through thinking reflectively and critically about what we do when we teach and why we do it.
This 1-credit course, graded on a credit/no credit basis, will be held on Tuesdays from 2:00-3:30 pm in Fall 2024. Graduate students from any discipline, with any amount of teaching experience, are invited to enroll. Reach out to Elizabeth Dickens (edickens@virginia.edu) with questions.
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