Graduate Seminar, Spring 2025

What is literary translation, and what future does it have? This course considers these questions through the messier sides of translation studies, including avant-garde translation practices, machine translation, and generative AI. Students will read canonical works of translation theory to gain a broad overview of the field of translation studies and its major debates. We will also look at how translators throughout history have embraced the concept of mistranslation—from expansions and deformations to purposeful fakes and frauds—and what it means to approach translation as a creative practice, or as a site of experiment and play. Along the way, we will ask if it’s possible to carve out an undeniably human aspect of translation, and to what degree new media technology alters the process, the relevance, or the stakes of translation and its relationship to (so-called) “original” writing.

Undergraduate Survey, Spring 2025

From poetry’s roots in ancient religious practices to contemporary novels which feature witchcraft and spirit possession, mystical experience has played an important role as both content and form for literary works across history. This course will take a global perspective to consider the relationship between literature and mysticism, broadly defined. We’ll read novels featuring visionary seers, watch films about prophets and shamans, and consider poetic performances that threaten to summon the divine. Along the way, we’ll ask such questions as: who are these mystical figures? What realities, anxieties, or ways of living do they represent? What can their visions mean, and what do they achieve in the so-called real world? What alternative ways of knowing or being do they project—communal, cultural, or spiritual?

Hybrid Graduate/Undergraduate Seminar, Fall 2025

What is the self? How (or when, or where, or why) is it formed? What is the relationship between an individual and society? And how do these questions relate to the study of literary texts? This course will give students an overview of major currents in literary theory by providing a few provisional answers to these questions, drawn from the domains of psychoanalysis, structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, feminist criticism, queer theory, post-colonial theory and other major subfields. In the process, we’ll also talk about how competing schools of theory set about asking these questions, what their primary assumptions are, and what other questions they can ask of literary and cultural objects.