Course Catalog

Through writing poetry and analyzing examples, students become familiar with poetic forms and techniques. This workshop, led by a publishing writer, includes weekly peer critique of poems written for the course. Students explore what makes a poem moving, evocative, and imbued with a sense of music, no matter what the approach: lyric, narrative, surreal, or experimental. May be taken twice for credit.

Whether a story is an imaginative transformation of life experience or an invention, the writing must be well crafted and convincing, driven not only by plot and theme but also through characterization, conflict, point of view, and sensitivity to language. Students produce and critique short stories and novel chapters while studying fiction techniques and style through examples.

This workshop gives students the opportunity to explore through reading, research and writing assignments an array of creative nonfiction forms, including memoir, travel writing, food and nature writing, and social essays. Assignments help students strengthen their ability to create the self as character, a first-person narrator who leads the reader into the world of personal experiences and research. The course explores narrative structure, description, characterization, dialogue, and tension, all key elements in making writing spirited and appealing. The workshop also includes guest speakers and field exercises in Paris. May be taken twice for credit.

Have you yearned to start a novel, a collection of related short stories or narrative essays, a memoir, or a series of poems? This cross-genre, seminar-style course is designed for students who want to pursue larger, more advanced creative writing projects. Students will submit project proposals for discussion and approval, and then present significant installments of writing at regular intervals during the semester. Revisions will be required along with student-professor individual conferences. Readings will be used as guiding examples, and required reaction papers will be tailored to individual projects.May be taken twice for credit.

Have you yearned to start a novel, a collection of related short stories or narrative essays, a memoir, or a series of poems? This cross-genre, seminar-style course is designed for students who want to pursue larger, more advanced creative writing projects. Students will submit project proposals for discussion and approval, and then present significant installments of writing at regular intervals during the semester. Revisions will be required along with student-professor individual conferences. Readings will be used as guiding examples, and required reaction papers will be tailored to individual projects.

Chooses as its focus for the semester a topic which is of constant and emblematic importance in the development of European culture over many centuries. Examines the evolution by various means, including text and film.

Focuses on Florence as a source of culture and artistic flowering, and locus of competition, contestation and strife. Examines the distribution of wealth and the structuring of society and politics, the development of humanist inquiry and pedagogy, the religious climate and artistic patronage. Surveys, for comparison, Rome and Venice.

Studies the foundations of the 19th-and 20th-century city, examining the cultural dynamics of key European cities. Uses film and other texts to question and explore urban modernity.

The presence of Ancient Greece and Rome in our world cannot be overestimated. The Greeks taught us demokratia, our computers have a Latin name. Through Ancient Greece and Rome Western civilization has assimilated Near Eastern achievements like the alphabet. Presenting striking show cases, this course enables you to recognize how your life and thought have been shaped by ancient influences and to acquire a basic overview of more than 2000 years of Greco-Roman civilization - from the time of Troy to the many ends of Rome in late antiquity.

Taking the founding of the Second Empire (1871-1918) as a point of departure, the course investigates Germany's historical transformations from Imperial Empire to Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the postwar Allied occupation, the creation of the two German states, and the unification of the country.