Literature from around the world as seen through the writings of Nobel Prize winners. Features authors from a range of countries, languages, and traditions to explore wide-ranging questions.

Across the globe, democracy is under siege.  How can we protect our basic rights, once thought to be inalienable, and restore those that have been stolen? The simple answer: Resistance. Through film and texts — including the writings of Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and Angela Davis — students will explore a partial history of protest and resistance, strategies and tactics of resistors, and the role of violence, if any, in resistance.

While wars seem “never ending, still beginning,” we seldom pay attention to what wisdom, if any, can be gleaned from how they are portrayed by poets and writers. 

This course examines modern Yiddish literature from its origins in the Russian Empire's western borderlands to its responses to ruptures of the twentieth century.

This class uses the larger-than-life emotions of classical epics, comparing those 
from two different cultures: the Greek Iliad and the Indian Mahabharata. We read from the 
originals (in translation) and take into account contemporary representations to trace how 
heroes, heroines, and villains deal with fear, anger, hatred, grief, pity… and yes, also love and 
humor! 

By examining fiction, poetry, memoirs, diaries, monuments, commix, and other aspects of popular culture, this course will explore literary responses to the Nazi Holocaust.

This quarter we will immerse ourselves in the reading of poems in order to learn how poems are made and received.

This course looks at how films by East European directors employed literary works of different genres to create some of the best and most internationally recognized films of these directors’ careers.