Spring 2018 Graduate Course Descriptions

See Fall 2019.

ENGL 7215 Topics in 20th-Century American Literature: Harlem Renaissance

Instructor: Professor Carla Kaplan
CRN: 37211
Sequence: Wednesdays, 3:30-5:45 p.m.
Attributes: Fulfills 19th/20th -or- Theories & Methods; WGSS certificate elective

The Harlem Renaissance was unprecedented in its cultural productivity. It was also as notable for its paradoxes. On the one hand, Harlem was black America’s Mecca, “the symbol,” as Adam Clayton Powell Sr. put it, “of liberty and the Promised Land to Negroes everywhere.” To many, Harlem embodied black self-determination: after decades of devastating racism, the Harlem Renaissance gave cultural expression to eschewing white values and embracing Blackness. And yet, the Harlem Renaissance was also thoroughly and complexly interracial: financially underwritten by many white philanthropists; promoted by white editors, publishers, gallery owners and theater producers; and deeply influenced – including in its black self-definitions – by a range of white writers, musicians, visual artists, actors, editors, publishers, and political activists. Unraveling the impact of that interracialism will be one of our goals. Too narrow a focus on the emergent formation known as “The New Negro” can limit seeing how this social movement also built from and contributed to the creation of other identities as well (queer, feminist, multiracial, nonracial, and so on) which we will consider in our course. In attending to the identity politics of this movement we will also consider its own arguments against all identity categories and against seeing literature as their manifestation. We will also investigate the Harlem Renaissance’s myriad ties to both modernism and realism, looking at points of indebtedness and points of departure. Students will be encouraged to think critically about this period’s perennial popularity as well. Applying a range of critical methods, from close reading to theories of intersectionality and periodization, we will read widely among diverse Harlem Renaissance writers, including Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois, Claude McKay, Mary White Ovington, Nancy Cunard, Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Bruce Nugent, Countee Cullen, Carl Van Vechten, and others. Taking advantage of Boston’s excellent resources for archival work in this period, students will be encouraged (but not required) to build an archival component into their final projects, as well as to use final projects to advance and explore specific critical methods and theories which advance and support their own larger projects.

ENGL 7358-02 Topics in Literature and other Disciplines: Race & Artificial Intelligence: Technology & Empire

Instructor: Professor Eunsong Kim
CRN: 37282
Sequence: Wednesday, 6:15-8:30 p.m.
Attributes: Fulfills 19th/20th C -OR- Theories & Methods

Immigration, labor and the formation of racialized communities occupy a particular aesthetic in the US imaginary. All of the familiar tropes, from model minority, to suspicious foreigner to the pain-immune, emotionless body, situate the composited machinery of The Other’s exterior. This course examines multi-ethnic literature, art and film that address racialized politics and subjectivities through speculative poetry, cyborg dramas, machine learning and take up the racialized and gendered contours of artificial intelligence. In the course we will read selections of: Lisa Nakamura’s, Digitizing Race, Octavia’s Brood, Bhanu Kapil’s Autobiography of a Cyborg, Don Mee Choi’s The Morning News is Exciting, Simone Browne’s Dark Matters, Neferti Tadiar’s Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences in the New World Order, Karel Capek’s R.U.R, and view Advantageous (2015) and Humans (2015).

ENGL 7358-03 Topics in Literature and other Disciplines: Feminism and Visual Culture

Instructor: Professor Hillary Chute
CRN: 37435
Sequence: Tuesdays, 1:35-5:05 p.m. *

 Cross-listed. Space is limited.

This interdisciplinary course offers both historical footing and a spotlight on contemporary practice.  It focuses on articulating frameworks for understanding varieties of feminist cultural production that exist in the realm of visual culture—and also that themselves shape what “visual culture” means.  The course offers a grounding in key concepts driving feminist cultural production, and in overlapping debates about visual culture, including around issues such as embodiment, subjectivity, spectatorship, and desire.  What does the visual accomplish for differently-conceived feminisms?  To that end, we will establish a critical trajectory by reading historically important works of theory and criticism (including by Linda Nochlin and Laura Mulvey, among others), alongside additional feminist and visual theory.  We will explore a range of creative forms, including but not limited to comics and graphic novels, film, painting, performance art, theater, photography, propaganda, television, digital projects, and music videos.

Next offered in 2019-2020.

Next offered in Fall 2018.

ENGL 7215 Topics in 20th-Century American Literature: Harlem Renaissance

Instructor: Professor Carla Kaplan
CRN: 37211
Sequence: Wednesdays, 3:30-5:45 p.m.
Attributes: Fulfills 19th/20th -or- Theories & Methods; WGSS certificate elective

The Harlem Renaissance was unprecedented in its cultural productivity. It was also as notable for its paradoxes. On the one hand, Harlem was black America’s Mecca, “the symbol,” as Adam Clayton Powell Sr. put it, “of liberty and the Promised Land to Negroes everywhere.” To many, Harlem embodied black self-determination: after decades of devastating racism, the Harlem Renaissance gave cultural expression to eschewing white values and embracing Blackness. And yet, the Harlem Renaissance was also thoroughly and complexly interracial: financially underwritten by many white philanthropists; promoted by white editors, publishers, gallery owners and theater producers; and deeply influenced – including in its black self-definitions – by a range of white writers, musicians, visual artists, actors, editors, publishers, and political activists. Unraveling the impact of that interracialism will be one of our goals. Too narrow a focus on the emergent formation known as “The New Negro” can limit seeing how this social movement also built from and contributed to the creation of other identities as well (queer, feminist, multiracial, nonracial, and so on) which we will consider in our course. In attending to the identity politics of this movement we will also consider its own arguments against all identity categories and against seeing literature as their manifestation. We will also investigate the Harlem Renaissance’s myriad ties to both modernism and realism, looking at points of indebtedness and points of departure. Students will be encouraged to think critically about this period’s perennial popularity as well. Applying a range of critical methods, from close reading to theories of intersectionality and periodization, we will read widely among diverse Harlem Renaissance writers, including Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois, Claude McKay, Mary White Ovington, Nancy Cunard, Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Bruce Nugent, Countee Cullen, Carl Van Vechten, and others. Taking advantage of Boston’s excellent resources for archival work in this period, students will be encouraged (but not required) to build an archival component into their final projects, as well as to use final projects to advance and explore specific critical methods and theories which advance and support their own larger projects.

ENGL 7358-02 Topics in Literature and other Disciplines: Race & Artificial Intelligence: Technology & Empire

Instructor: Professor Eunsong Kim
CRN: 37282
Sequence: *CORRECTION 10/31/17* Wednesday, 6:15-8:30 p.m.
Attributes: Fulfills 19th/20th C -OR- Theories & Methods

Immigration, labor and the formation of racialized communities occupy a particular aesthetic in the US imaginary. All of the familiar tropes, from model minority, to suspicious foreigner to the pain-immune, emotionless body, situate the composited machinery of The Other’s exterior. This course examines multi-ethnic literature, art and film that address racialized politics and subjectivities through speculative poetry, cyborg dramas, machine learning and take up the racialized and gendered contours of artificial intelligence. In the course we will read selections of: Lisa Nakamura’s, Digitizing Race, Octavia’s Brood, Bhanu Kapil’s Autobiography of a Cyborg, Don Mee Choi’s The Morning News is Exciting, Simone Browne’s Dark Matters, Neferti Tadiar’s Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences in the New World Order, Karel Capek’s R.U.R, and view Advantageous (2015) and Humans (2015).

ENGL 7392 Writing and the Teaching of Writing

Instructor: Professor Elizabeth Britt
CRN: 33592
Sequence: Tuesdays, 6:15-8:30 p.m.

This course prepares graduate students to teach writing at the university level, drawing on recent scholarship in rhetoric and writing studies, as well as research in other fields into how people learn. We will explore various theories regarding the nature of writing, how people learn to write, and what kinds of environments and activities best help students learn writing. The goal is for each graduate student to use these theories to develop a coherent position on the teaching of writing, along with practical teaching materials that can be employed at Northeastern and elsewhere. Assignments will include a writing history, an assignment analysis, a textbook review, an observation report, and a syllabus for first-year writing. Note: Required of first-year PhD students. MA students may enroll with permission of instructor.

INSH 7910 NULab Project Seminar – 1 SH

Instructor: Professor Julia Flanders
CRN:
Sequence: Mondays, 2:00-3:00 p.m.

This workshop course supports the project development component of the certificate in Digital Humanities, aimed at graduate students enrolled in MA and PhD programs in humanities and social sciences. Students in the course will engage in a sustained, interdisciplinary exploration of digital humanities methods and projects as they plan and develop their own research projects during their progress on the certificate. As needed, the course will also organize working groups on special topics to cover additional skills and methods. The course is designed to be taken in successive years by students in the certificate program, but may also be taken on its own. No prior technical experience or familiarity with digital humanities or digital tools is required, but participants should be prepared to identify an area of research interest that is connected in some way with the general domain of digital humanities, computational social science, and related fields.

ENGL 7215 Topics in 20th-Century American Literature: Harlem Renaissance

Instructor: Professor Carla Kaplan
CRN: 37211
Sequence: Wednesday, 3:30-5:45 p.m.

The Harlem Renaissance was unprecedented in its cultural productivity. It was also as notable for its paradoxes. On the one hand, Harlem was black America’s Mecca, “the symbol,” as Adam Clayton Powell Sr. put it, “of liberty and the Promised Land to Negroes everywhere.” To many, Harlem embodied black self-determination: after decades of devastating racism, the Harlem Renaissance gave cultural expression to eschewing white values and embracing Blackness. And yet, the Harlem Renaissance was also thoroughly and complexly interracial: financially underwritten by many white philanthropists; promoted by white editors, publishers, gallery owners and theater producers; and deeply influenced – including in its black self-definitions – by a range of white writers, musicians, visual artists, actors, editors, publishers, and political activists. Unraveling the impact of that interracialism will be one of our goals. Too narrow a focus on the emergent formation known as “The New Negro” can limit seeing how this social movement also built from and contributed to the creation of other identities as well (queer, feminist, multiracial, nonracial, and so on) which we will consider in our course. In attending to the identity politics of this movement we will also consider its own arguments against all identity categories and against seeing literature as their manifestation. We will also investigate the Harlem Renaissance’s myriad ties to both modernism and realism, looking at points of indebtedness and points of departure. Students will be encouraged to think critically about this period’s perennial popularity as well. Applying a range of critical methods, from close reading to theories of intersectionality and periodization, we will read widely among diverse Harlem Renaissance writers, including Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois, Claude McKay, Mary White Ovington, Nancy Cunard, Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Bruce Nugent, Countee Cullen, Carl Van Vechten, and others. Taking advantage of Boston’s excellent resources for archival work in this period, students will be encouraged (but not required) to build an archival component into their final projects, as well as to use final projects to advance and explore specific critical methods and theories which advance and support their own larger projects.

See the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities or Graduate Certificate in Womens, Gender and Sexuality Studies websites for course lists and more information.