Curriculum

WINTER 2026

ENGLISH 111: Women Making Modernism

Modernism as a movement touched on and altered many forms of art from literature to painting and sculpture, to architecture, to dance, to film. It was a highly experimental, sometimes radical, and deeply politically and aesthetically engaged era at the turn of the last century when, as the poet Ezra Pound exclaimed, artists had to 'make it NEW'! What 'it' was and what 'new' meant were up for grabs. Everything about art, life, living, identity, and meaning was up for renovation and remaking. Women writers were especially interested in the possibilities and problems for what it might mean to live anew, without the constraints and formalities of how culture had historically conformed gender, class, racial, and national identities for them. In this course, we will be reading a series of novels, poems, essays, and manifestoes from British and American women writers (1900-1950) that will give you a sense for how different women writers responded to the opportunities and challenges of self-expression in this era, and what resonances their writings continue to have in our own times. Some writers may include: Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Jean Rhys, Djuna Barnes, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Mansfield, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks. 

Instructor: Staveley, A. (PI)

ENGLISH 160: Poetry and Poetics

Introduction to the reading of poetry, with emphasis on how the sense of poems is shaped through diction, imagery, and technical elements of verse. English majors must take this class for 5 units.

Instructor: Ashton, M. (PI) 

CHINA 174: New Directions in the Study of Poetry and Literary Culture (CHINA 374)

Inquiry into new approaches and interpretations of the poetic tradition in China in the context of cultural history. Readings in recent scholarship and criticism that situate poetry in print history, manuscript culture, gender studies, social history, etc. Readings in English. Reading knowledge of Chinese desirable but not required.Terms: Win | Units: 3-4 | Repeatable 4 times (up to 12 units total)

Instructor: Egan, R. (PI)

COMPLIT 208: The Cosmopolitan Introvert: Modern Greek Poetry and its Itinerants

Overview of the last century of Greek poetry with emphasis on modernism. Approximately 20 modern Greek poets (starting with Cavafy and Nobel laureates Seferis and Elytis and moving to more modern writers) are read and compared to other major European and American writers. The themes of the cosmopolitan itinerant and of the introvert, often co-existing in the same poet, connect these idiosyncratic voices. The course uses translations and requires no knowledge of Greek but original texts can also be shared with interested students. Note: The course is open to both undergraduate and graduate studentsTerms: Win | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-

Instructor: Ioannidis, J. (PI)

COMPLIT 269: Modernist Poetry and the Crisis of Knowledge

Modernist poetry was born in a period of acute epistemic crisis. The era of modernism (roughly 1880-1945) saw the overturning of major scientific paradigms, the development of new methods of observation and experiment, the flourishing of new forms of spirituality and mysticism, and philosophical investigations into perception and epistemology, from phenomenology to logical positivism. This seminar will examine how modernist poets navigated this problematic terrain. We will ask: how do poems make sense of their own epistemic status? What kinds of knowledge does poetry register or produce? How did modernist poetry engage with or contribute to philosophical debates about skepticism, empiricism, or perspectivism? How did poetic form adapt under pressure from documentary technologies and the epistemic regime of scientific objectivity? Readings will include texts by Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Lyn Hejinian as well as William James, Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.Terms: 

Instructor: Kleinbock, E. (PI)

HISTORY 240C: Great Minds of the Italian Renaissance and their World (ARTHIST 210, ITALIAN 140, ITALIAN 240)

What enabled Leonardo da Vinci to excel in over a dozen fields from painting to engineering and to anticipate flight four hundred years before the first aircraft took off? How did Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel Ceiling? What forces and insights led Machiavelli to write "The Prince"? An historical moment and a cultural era, the Italian Renaissance famously saw monumental achievements in literature, art, and architecture, influential developments in science and technology, and the flourishing of multi-talented individuals who contributed profoundly, expertly, and simultaneously to very different fields. In this course on the great thinkers, writers, and achievers of the Italian Renaissance, we will study these "universal geniuses" and their world. Investigating the writings, thought, and lives of such figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Galileo Galilei, we will interrogate historical and contemporary ideas concerning genius, creativity, and the phenomenon of "Renaissance man" known as polymathy.

Instructor: Prodan, S. (PI) 

ITALIAN 217: Love, Death and the Afterlife in the Medieval West (FRENCH 217, FRENCH 317, HISTORY 217D, HISTORY 317D, ITALIAN 317)

Romantic love, it is often claimed, is an invention of the High Middle Ages. The vocabulary of sexual desire that is still current in the twenty-first century was authored in the twelfth and thirteenth, by troubadours, court poets, writers like Dante; even by crusaders returning from the eastern Mediterranean. How did this devout society come to elevate the experience of sensual love? This course draws on primary sources such as medieval songs, folktales, the "epic rap battles" of the thirteenth century, along with the writings of Boccaccio, Saint Augustine and others, to understand the unexpected connections between love, death, and the afterlife from late antiquity to the fourteenth century. Each week, we will use a literary or artistic work as an interpretive window into cultural attitudes towards love, death or the afterlife. These readings are analyzed in tandem with major historical developments, including the rise of Christianity, the emergence of feudal society and chivalric culture, the crusading movement, and the social breakdown of the fourteenth century.

 Instructor: Phillips, J. (PI)

ARTHIST 418A: Michelangelo: Gateway to Early Modern Italy (ARTHIST 218A, HISTORY 237B, HISTORY 337B, ITALIAN 237, ITALIAN 337)

Revered as one of the greatest artists in history, Michelangelo Buonarroti's extraordinarily long and prodigious existence (1475-1564) spanned the Renaissance and the Reformation in Italy. The celebrity artist left behind not only sculptures, paintings, drawings, and architectural designs, but also an abundantly rich and heterogeneous collection of artifacts, including direct and indirect correspondence (approximately 1400 letters), an eclectic assortment of personal notes, documents and contracts, and 302 poems and 41 poetic fragments. This course will explore the life and production of Michelangelo in relation to those of his contemporaries. Using the biography of the artist as a thread, this interdisciplinary course will draw on a range of critical methodologies and approaches to investigate the civilization and culture of Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Course themes will follow key tensions that defined the period and that found expression in Michelangelo: physical-spiritual, classical-Christian, tradition-innovation, individual-collective.

Instructor: Prodan, S. (PI)