Selected Courses

Medieval (includes courses at the Newberry Library available to U of C students)

• Old English
• Beowulf
• The Exeter Book
• Sin and Forgiveness in Anglo-Saxon England
• Holy Men and Holy Women
• Chaucer
• Arthurian Romances
• Medieval Epic
• Medieval Allegory
• Medieval Dream Poetry
• The Politics of Literacy in Pre-Modern England
• Perfection and Utopia in Late Medieval England
• Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Middle Ages

Renaissance/Early Modern

• The Matter of Law in Early Modern English Literature
• The Invention of Britain in Early Modern Literature
• Renaissance Intellectual Texts: Petrarch to Descartes
• Literature, the Disciplines, and the Renaissance Book
• Travelers on the Silk Road
• Renaissance Epic
• Spenser and Shakespeare
• Shakespeare and Skepticism
• Shakespeare and the Question of Value
• Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
• Shakespeare: Anatomy, Analysis, and the Archive
• Shakespeare and the Visual World
• Shakespeare’s Sonnets
• Renaissance Drama
• Modes of Renaissance Lyric
• Renaissance Love Poetry
• Religious Lyric in England and America
• Renaissance Romance
• Three Authors: Spenser, Marlowe, Jonson
• Seventeenth Century Secular Poetry
• Metaphysical Poetry
• Milton
• Milton and Early Modern Liberty

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

• Thinking and Acting in the Long Eighteenth Century
• On Beauty and Being Just in the Long Eighteenth Century
• The Eighteenth Century Public Sphere
• Visual Culture in the English Enlightenment
• Pornography: History, Theory, Text
• Yours Sincerely: Locating Truths
• Exoticism, Race, Sexuality, and Science in the 18^th Century
• Commerce, Luxury, and Consumption in the Early Modern Era
• British Literary Culture 1750-1850
• John Locke in Historical Context
• The Sentimental
• Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Lyrical Ballads
• Radical Culture in the 1790s
• English Women Writers and the Politics of the 1790s
• Wordsworth’s The Prelude
• Jane Austen and the War of Ideas
• Lyric Forms from Blake to Hardy
• Narrative Point of View: Theory/Practice, Fiction/Cinema
• History and Fiction in 19^th Century Britain
• The 19^th Century British Novel
• The 19^th Century Realist Novel
• Nineteenth Century British Gothic Fiction
• Victorian Women Writers
• The Pre-Raphaelites
• The Politics of Culture
• The Politics of Taste
• Victorian Childhood
• Victorian Liberalism: Institutions, Ideas, Literatures

Twentieth Century, Contemporary, and Transnational (includes modern and contemporary theory, drama, and poetics)

• Marxism and Modern Culture
• Modernity and the Sense of Things
• Objects and Artifacts
• Towards Modernity
• Realism, Modernism, Socialism: The Politics of Literary Form
• The Modernist Child
• Frankfurt School on Cinema, Modernity, and Mass Culture
• Frankfurt School Aesthetics and Modern Poetry
• Poetry and Socio-linguistics
• Elements of Poetry and Poetics
• Radical Poetics
• Poetry and Being
• The Cinematic Lyric
• T.S. Eliot
• Gottfried Benn and T.S. Eliot
• Contemporary Book-Length Poems and Lyric Sequences
• Joyce’s Ulysses
• Virginia Woolf
• Fiction’s Fictions
• The Short Plays of Samuel Beckett
• Brechtian Representations: Theatre, Theory, Cinema
• Drama, Theatre, Spectacle, Performance
• Interpreting Imperialism
• The Homoerotics of Empire
• South African Literature in English: Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, and Other Canonizations & Contestations
• Feminism, Post-Colonialism, and Southern African Writing
• Three African Women Writers
• Dialectic Today
• Literary Criticism and Theory Since Kant
• Topics in Literary Theory
• Critical Theory and the Life of Literature
• Totemism, Fetishism, and Idolatry
• Space, Place, and Landscape
• Media Theory
• Female Genius
• Psychoanalytic Interpretation