Graduate Courses in British Studies

Victorian Poetry

Prof. Erik Gray

ENGL W4404y Lecture, MW 10:35-11:50
This course examines the works of the major English poets of the period 1830-1900. We will pay special attention to Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, and their great poetic innovation, the dramatic monologue. We will also be concentrating on poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, A. E. Housman, and Thomas Hardy.

The Fin de Siècle: Sensation and Degeneration, 1880-1900

Prof. Victoria Rosner

ENGL W4405y Lecture, TuTh 2:40-3:55
This course will survey the tumultuous scene of England - chiefly London - in the 1890s, focusing on the most significant cultural, political, and social debates of the period. We will be concerned in particular with the fin-de-siècle rhetorics of degeneration and the concomitant fascination with sensation and sensory experience. Topics to include: sexology and the criminalization of sex; monstrosity, racial science, and physiogamy; feminism and the New Woman; urban poverty, crime, and policing; spiritualism and psychic research; new technologies of visuality and communication; and the new imperialism. We will also study the significant aesthetic movements of the period, including Decadence, Aestheticism, and Pre-Raphaelitism. Writers will include: Grant Allen, Sarah Grand, Thomas Hardy, Max Nordau, Walter Pater, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats.

Eliot and Trollope

Prof. Nicholas Dames

ENGL G6402y Seminar, Th 11-12:50
Two major practitioners of the novel in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, presented with an eye to undoing, or rethinking, their presumed differences. The great novelist of the moral imagination versus the novelist of moral compromise and accommodation; the cosmopolitan novelist of ideas versus the nativist, even xenophobic English gentleman; the all-knowing, all-forgiving Mother versus the distant, genial Father; profundity versus prolixity: by thinking these myths relationally, even dialectically, we might achieve a better understanding of the horizon of the Novel in its most culturally dominant period in Britain. We will attend most strenuously to challenges of form faced by both writers, such as: beginnings and endings (or origins and purposes), sequentiality (and thus causality and consequence), scales of space and time, the balancing of dialogue and description, the evocation of consciousness in narrative, and generating ethical lessons out of contingent events. Selected major novels of both, read in alternation, along with important non-fiction (Trollope's Autobiography, numerous essays of Eliot's), pivotal critical pieces of recent years, and samples of Victorian and modern moral philosophy from J. S. Mill to Bernard Williams.

Modernism and the Imperial Imagination

Prof. Sarah Cole

ENGL G6506y Seminar, Tu 2:10-4
What was the relationship between British modernist literature and the British Empire? Modernism has been construed in nearly oppositional terms-as deeply collusive with imperial thinking, or, alternatively, as hostile to empire. In this course, we will attempt to theorize this relationship in our own terms, reading a variety of writers and texts from the first half of the twentieth century. The bulk of our readings will be English, but we will also read material from Ireland, India and Africa.

Early 20th-Century British Drama

Prof. Edward Mendelson

ENGL G6740y Seminar, Tu 4:10-6
Modern British drama was the focus of every contentious literary and cultural question in the early twentieth century: coterie audience versus mass audience, visionary versus realist theory and practice, cultural and linguistic versus political and economic nationalism, eternal archetypal sexual roles versus evolving constructed gender identity, cyclical versus linear ideas of history and time, epic theater versus dramatic theater, among many other issues. Because the dramatists all knew and responded to each other, the issues and arguments tend to be more starkly and clearly defined than in other periods. This seminar will pursue these questions through plays by Wilde, Yeats, O'Casey, Shaw, Granville-Barker, Woolf, Eliot, Auden, Priestley, Beckett, Wesker.

HISTORY

John Stuart Mill: Life, Work, Legacy

Prof. Susan Pedersen

HIST W4345y Seminar, Tu 9-10:50
This course is designed for undergraduates and graduate students who, having had some introduction to Mill, would like to spend a semester exploring his life, thought, and impact.  This task is particularly interesting today, for Mill, revered by progressives in his own time for his support for intellectual liberties, a wider democratic franchise, and women's suffrage, and for his fierce criticism of military repression in Jamaica, is now often seen as one of the architects of Victorian imperialism.  After spending two weeks learning about Mill's life, we will turn to Mill's thought, examining his writings in the context of political debates at the time, as well as his own involvement in key controversies over economic policy, the nature of the Victorian state, political reform and imperial governance.  Together, we will try to understand not only what Mill thought and did, but why he has continued to act as a lightning-rod for political controversy, in his time and in our own.

Introduction to the Literature of European History

Prof. Emma Winter

HIST G8311y Seminar
This course is designed to introduce incoming graduate students to the major questions, paradigms and debates that have dominated the recent historiography of Modern European History. Subjects covered will thus include: state formation, the transformation of the public sphere, industrialization, revolution, nation-building, class, gender, secularization and religious revivalism, and so forth. Readings will be drawn from studies primarily, though not exclusively, of western European history from the mid-eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth.

History of Political Economy

Prof. Pierre Force and Prof. Carl Wennerlind

HIST G8165y Colloquium, W 11-12:50
The first claim by economics to be a separate and autonomous field of knowledge was made by Jean-Baptiste Say in his 1803 "Treatise on Political Economy," which systematized the findings of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" and presented political economy as a science. The goal of this course is to study the emergence of political economy in the eighteenth century, a time when theorizing efforts were NOT predicated on a distinction between "economics" and "politics." The focus is equally on French and British writings.

Resistance in the Black Atlantic

Prof. Natasha Lightfoot

HIST G8924y Seminar, Tu 4:10-6
This course investigates in-depth the significance of resistance among African-descended communities in the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone and Lusophone Atlantic World from approximately 1700-1950. We will examine the genesis of resistance as it affected key historical transformations such as slavery and abolition, labor and migration, and transatlantic political organizing. The class will explore various forms of resistance to racial epistemologies, racialized labor regimes, and gendered discourses that formed a continuum of cultural and political opposition to oppression among Black Atlantic communities. The course will also reflect on how resistance plays a central role in the formation of individual and collective identities among black historical actors. Resistance will be explored as a critical category of historical analysis, and a central aspect in the making of the "Black Atlantic."