Main Programme

‘Nature poetry’ . . . ‘pastoral’  . . . ‘environmental poetry’ . . .  ‘green poetry’  . . . ‘ecopoetry’: this proliferation of names for related sub-genres highlights the diverse and changing ways in which poems construct ‘nature’ as a subject. For all their differing contexts, objectives, attitudes, and forms, such poems are linked by their common history, inherited tropes, and shared responsiveness to the natural world.

As we analyse the particularities of individual poems and explore points of connection between them, we'll consider such questions as the following: How does poetry illuminate the varied and changing ways in which humans perceive, construct, interact with, inhabit, and alter our environments?

How did 16th- and 17th-century English writers talk about love, sex, and friendship, and how were early modern representations of love and desire shaped by understandings of gender, sexuality, race, disability, class, and other identity categories?

This course focuses on representations of relationships between friends, lovers, and spouses in 16th- and 17th-century literature.

Flannery O’Connor wrote, “Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.” Writing a novel can be challenging, but it can also be exhilarating and rewarding—unlike anything else you will ever try to do. If you have ever dreamed of writing a novel, this course will help you get started.

The ancient Romans thought and wrote a lot about sex, sexual desire, gender, and gender identity. Much of their literature is more open and explicit about these topics than is most modern European and American writing. Recent scholarship has argued, however, that their notion of sexuality/ sexual identity was radically different from our own. 

In this course, we will explore how the Romans organized the world of sex by reading a wide range of texts from the Roman period in English translation, all of which have to do with the experience of sexual desire and/ or gender identity and presentation.

Everyone spies and everyone is spied upon, but how do we learn to surveil ourselves and others? Using a range of genres including picture books, novels, short stories, plays, and video, we will investigate ideas about both the stories we tell and the choices we make while telling them. We will explore how narrative structures shape attitudes toward surveillance and truth, compare the ways different genres function in relation to surveillance, and examine how attitudes toward surveillance have changed over time in literature, both reflecting and enabling cultural shifts.