Spring 2026: In this course, students will read English translations of ten novels that have recently won major prizes. In addition to exploring themes of contemporary literature from around the world, special attention will be paid to the role of translation in shaping the work and its reception, and to the question of what makes for a prize-winning translation. Each week students will read a prize-winning translated novel alongside reports from the prize committee, reviews of the translation, and what the translators say about their work.

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In this course we will examine how media and communication technologies both drive and depict the complex set of processes known as globalization. We will explore case studies from sixteenth century maps to twenty-first century supply chains, as well as Huallywood, Hollywood, Bollywood, and Nollywood films. In the process, we will grapple with major questions and tensions that have defined the modern era. Why have human societies become more closely connected over the past few centuries than at any prior time in human history? How has this interdependence changed the ways that we understand ourselves and one another? What new visions and freedoms has it created? Why has it made us more unequal than ever before?

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One of the towering literary figures of the 20th century, Italo Calvino is remembered for his inventiveness, versatility, philosophical acuity, and interest in exploring combinatorial and computational approaches to creative practice. Using as its point of departure his 1967 lecture Cybernetics and Ghosts, the course is built around readings of some of Calvino’s most celebrated novels, among them: The Castle of Crossed Destinies, If on a winter’s night a traveler, and Invisible Cities. But we will also read from his Six Memos for the Next Millennium and critical writings, from writings by figures in contemporary cybernetics and communication theory, and from the Italian structuralist tradition, Oulipo, and the Programmed Art movement of the 1970s. Class assignments will involve the speculative, creative, and critical use of Generative AI tools and the generation of plausible “new” works by Calvino forty years after his death.

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The poetics (or songmaking) of Sappho will be studied from a wide variety of perspectives, suited to the interests of the students enrolled.

Note: For those taking the course as COMPLIT 235, there are no particular language requirements. The emphasis for students, in this case, is to engage creatively with Sappho’s songmaking in a variety of English translations, or to compare with other poetry or songs (composed in whatever language). Students are free to bring into the educational experience a pursuit of their personal interests. For graduate students taking the course as CLASPHIL 235, research will involve reading the original texts in Greek, and comparing texts of other classical Greek and Latin poets like Euripides and Catullus.

How do queer and crip accounts of love and desire redefine “modernity” in Greater China and Latin America? How do the Sinophone and Hispanophone worlds encounter each in translation and transmediation? What is the relationship between love and passion, infatuation and desire? How are conceptions of love culturally contingent? How do cultural, economic, social and political factors shape expressions and narratives of love and desire in Sinophone and Hispanophone contexts? How do myth, illusion, and projection influence our romantic philosophies? In what ways do non-normative, non-ableist, queer and crip accounts of gender, sexuality, and desire redefine “modernity”?

In this course, we examine modern and contemporary Sinophone and Hispanophone “love stories” and their transmediated afterlives (films, plays, operas, digital archives, and so forth), with an emphasis on romantic encounters in queer literature, magical realism, dystopian, and sci-fi/speculative fiction. We cover a range of works by Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Sandra Cisneros, Julio Cortázar, Rosario Ferré, Isabel Allende, Kenneth Pai, Eileen Chang, Liu Cixin, and Wang Xiaobo, paired with transmedial adaptations by Zhang Yuan, Wong Kar-wai, Jonathan Basile, Manuel Antín, Jason Brauer, and Fernando Frías. Course evaluation will be based on discussions, oral presentations, thesis-based papers, and creative assignments.

This course explores the complex relationship between media, technology, and social change. We will examine how activists from a range of places and historical periods have used new media and technologies to build movements challenging existing laws, norms, institutions, and arrangements. At the same time, we will consider the role that new media and technologies themselves play in changing society, by reshaping how people learn, communicate, work, play, find love, make war, and so on.

Throughout, we will consider recurring themes, tensions and trade-offs that media activists encounter. While it is commonplace to associate media activism with “progress,” we will dwell on its ambivalence and ambiguities. By experimenting with multiple methods of analyzing and making activist media, students will develop their own theories of change. By the end of the semester, you will have gained an overview of the histories of contemporary media technologies and institutions and mastered core concepts and methods in the study of media, technology, and culture.

Genres, forms, and themes of oral traditions in poetry and prose. Theories of performance and composition. Comparative metrical and formulaic analysis. Students are free to select non-Greek traditions as their focus of research, such as medieval French lays, Indic fables, Gregorian Chant, early Italian opera, Apache female initiation songs, Latin prosimetrum narratives, etc.

No previous knowledge of any language other than English is required. Only Classics Department graduate students who take the course for credit will work on original Greek texts. This course is cross-listed in Classics and can be taken for concentration credit in either Classics or Comparative Literature.