This seminar introduces graduate students to theory, broadly construed. We will move through diverse texts to offer a range of contemporary theories about race, gender, literature, environment, indigeneity, and other matters. Throughout the semester we will ask ourselves “what is theory?” and, no doubt, come up with multiple answers.

Professor Rebecca Oh Thurs, 12:30 - 02:50 PM Genre and infrastructure are both structuring forms that shape how things will go. Generic properties shape emplotment, likely or unlikely events, types of characters, and readerly expectations; genre organizes both narrative elements and the relations between them. Likewise, infrastructures are sociotechnical systems that organize and distribute both things and the relations between them, whether by enabling or blocking the movement of people, ideas, and objects. This seminar will consider the affordances of genre for infrastructure and of...

Professor D. Fairchild Ruggles Thurs, 5:30 - 8:20 PM The seminar introduces students to the historiography of architecture and landscape by exploring diverse approaches used by historians to understand and interpret the built environment. Reading key texts and attending the weekly MCT lectures, we will investigate conventions of the recent past as well as newer interpretive frameworks and theoretical positions in order to understand a range of possible approaches to historical research and writing. As such, we will focus not on the content of history but instead on the...

Professor D.F. Ruggles Thurs, 5:30-8:20PM   The seminar introduces students to the historiography of architecture and landscape by exploring diverse approaches used by historians to understand and interpret the built environment. Reading key texts and attending the weekly MCT lectures, we will investigate conventions of the recent past as well as newer interpretive frameworks and theoretical positions in order to understand a range of possible approaches to historical research and writing. As such, we will focus not on the content of history but instead on the historians’ methods as...

Professor Anustup Basu Tue, 12:30-02:50PM Keeping the Covid 19 pandemic in mind, in this class we will look at a set of texts to understand the biopolitical and governmental restructuring of European societies after the French revolution. Europe suffered half a dozen cholera pandemics in the course of the long 19th century and lost millions of people, but not to the extent in which the Black Death of the 14th century wiped out a significant portion of its population. The pandemics were checked to the extent that western European powers were able to meet the key historical condition for...

Professor Deena Rymhs Mon, 1:00-2:50PM In “How Do We Behave as Good Relatives?” Daniel Heath Justice writes about “making kin as oddkin […] where the range of relatives to whom we are responsible extends far beyond our biological relatives and, indeed, the category of the human itself.” This practice of “making oddkin” serves as centerpiece of this seminar, which turns to literary and visual texts by Indigenous artists whose work sees the human as thoroughly imbricated in more-than-human worlds—and indeed, challenges the coherence of such categories altogether. The various kinscapes invoked...

Professor Irvine Hunt Thur, 9:00-11:50AM Black Women Poets on Radical Black Futures - In the collection Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING (2018), Erica Hunt explains why she and Dawn Lundy Martin brought this fleet of living writers together: “One dimension that drew our curiosity was to know how this particular group… would respond to the question of tomorrow.” Hunt and Martin were curious about how Black women writers are imagining “alternate ways of living out and through strictures of time.” Extending the temporal turn in Black literary scholarship, this seminar...

Professor Brett Kaplan Wed, 3:00-5:00PM Reading World Literatures is open to graduate students in all fields who want to expand their close reading practices. It's primarily a chance to read together, engage in close reading, and explore literature from some (alas not all) parts of the world. Throughout the semester we'll read a variety of texts and use diverse critical and theoretical skills to approach literary analysis. Polyglots can read in the original languages, but all books will be available in English and students will propose some of the readings. Everyone writes short...