In this introduction to medieval literature, we will look to medieval bodies as our point of entry. How is the body presented in scientific literature different from a saint's body in a vita (a saint's "life")? Where did medieval thinkers draw boundaries between celestial, divine, human, animal, and non-vital bodies (if at all)? (EN122)

Our class will focus on the role of “nature” as a structuring tool of embodiment and being in medieval texts. Reading medieval and early modern literature and drama alongside recent scholarship in gender and sexuality studies and queer ecologies, we will attend to the multiple and mutable forms of the premodern body. (“The Arts of Gender” EN326/WGS326)

This course introduces students to literary analysis through writing on monsters. From a young age we are invited to wonder what lives under the bed or in the shadows. As the etymology goes, monsters reveal that which is unknown or difficult to comprehend. In this course we will ask: How do we differentiate between human and monster? At what point does one exceed or not meet the standards of humanity and become a monster? What do monsters reveal? Together we will turn a light onto some of literature’s iconic and lesser-known monsters. Expect to encounter dog-headed saints, love-lost werewolves, cursed revenants, lesbian vampires, and shape-shifting aliens. (EN220)

This course introduces students to literary analysis through writing on dreams. Interspersed with poetry, drama, film and a short 2D art game "Every Day the Same Dream," our texts will challenge us to rethink the boundaries between reality and dreams and technology and imagination. The literature for this course is multigeneric, and thus will include a range of genres, periods, and media. (EN220)

This class considers the histories of transgender embodiment in literary, scientific, natural philosophical and religious texts from the Middle Ages (c. 500-1500). We will read about trans saints, alchemical hermaphrodites, sex workers, eunuchs, and personified vices and virtues. What can a medieval trans studies offer to contemporary trans studies and vice versa?

Is there such a thing as trans literature? This class explores how gender variance has long been bound up in text-based representation. We will read texts with trans resonance (to use Alexander Eastwood’s term), explore trans media objects, and read contemporary poetry and prose by trans writers. Some authors: Cameron Awkward-Rich, Ari Banias, Chase Berggrun, jos charles, Miller Oberman, Casey Plett, Jordy Rosenberg, Kai Cheng Thom, among others.

This course, "Major Authors," will introduce students to several authors and texts in the ancient and medieval world that have held sway in the literary canon for centuries. At the same time, this course will ask students to think critically about how literary canons form along the lines of race and gender, how authors become and remain "canonical," and most importantly, who gets to make these decisions about literary traditions. (EN221)

When we speak of personification, we speak of allegory, a mode of writing and a mode of interpreting. Allegory means to speak otherwise (from the Greek allos, ‘other’ + -agoria, ‘speaking’) and when this literary mode is fashioned with personification (prosopopoeia, from the Greek prosopon, ‘person, face, mask’ + poeiein, ‘to make’), we are faced with flexile, signifying textual bodies. Our course on medieval personification allegory will meditate on this bold literary device as an entry point to explore the contours of embodiment, faculty psychology, and personhood in premodern literature. We will chart how medieval allegory – its religious, moral, historical, and political interpretations – merges with ideas of metaphor, signification, and figural language, as well as how medieval allegory intersects with medieval genres like dream visions, morality drama, and debate poetry. We will read Latin and French works in translation, such as Prudentius’s Psychomachia and The Romance of the Rose. Following this, we will turn to medieval English texts like The Owl and the Nightingale and Piers Plowman, plus debates between the body and the soul, lyrics on Fortune’s Wheel, sermons on the deadly sins, and the morality drama Everyman. Some of the Middle English works will be available, and others we will read in translation.

Does “Geoffrey Chaucer” come to mind when you think about medieval literature? This is likely the case, in large part because about 300 years after Chaucer’s death, John Dryden dubbed him the “father of English poetry” and he has been heralded as a literary giant since. Despite the astronomic influence that Chaucer’s poetry has had on the English language and, indeed, modern perceptions of the late Middle Ages, there remains a curious absence of transgender analysis in scholarship on Chaucer’s work. This course attends to gender mutability as a critical framework across Chaucer’s poetry. We will examine fourteenth-century ideas of embodiment – from the Pardoner’s goatish voice and Sir Thopas’s dainty waistline to the Wife of Bath’s astrological body marks and the Manciple’s transmogrifying raven – to ask how Chaucer turns to bodily variation as a core instrument of his poetics. We will also consider the religious, legal, and social institutional structures that produced late medieval English ideas of embodiment’s web of gender, sexuality, race, disability, and class and consider both how these ideas inform Chaucer’s literary works and how Chaucer challenges the norms of his day. Students will read a handful of tales from Chaucer’s massive Canterbury Tales project, as well as selections from his dream vision trio and shorter poems in conjunction with excerpts from scientific, medical, and theological texts circulating in fourteenth-century England. As a “Methods” course, we will contend with the literary historicist debates and approaches to Chaucer’s poetic archive that have simultaneously informed and excluded transgender analyses from scholarship. We will consider how past and present inform each other and how literature bridges questions across time. Students will have the opportunity to research and situate primary works in their medieval context for their final projects.