ART 364 - Seminar in Twentieth Century and Contemporary Art

ART 366 - Art and Activism in the United States

ART 367 - Artists’ Books from the Women’s Studio Workshop

ART 370 - Scandinavian Modernism

ART 382 - Belle Ribicoff Seminar

ART 385 - Darkness and Disorder: Gothic American Art

ART 391 - Advanced Fieldwork in Art Education at Dia: Beacon

ART 399 - Senior Independent Work

EDUC 162 - Education and Opportunity in the United States

EDUC 235 - Issues in Contemporary Education

EDUC 237 - Early Childhood Education: Theory and Practice

EDUC 250 - Introduction to Special Education

EDUC 255 - Race, Representation, and Resistance in U.S. Schools

EDUC 262 - The Fairy Tale

EDUC 263 - The Adolescent in American Society

EDUC 269 - Constructing School Kids and Street Kids

EDUC 275 - International and Comparative Education

EDUC 278 - Education for Peace, Justice and Human Rights

EDUC 286 - Framing Autism in U.S. Policy and Practice

EDUC 290 - Field Work

EDUC 294 - Educational Pedagogy

EDUC 296 - Vassar Language in Motion Program

EDUC 297 - Independent Reading

EDUC 298 - Independent Study

EDUC 299 - Vassar Science Education Internship Program

EDUC 300 - Senior Portfolio: Childhood Education

EDUC 301 - Senior Portfolio: Adolescent Education

EDUC 302 - Senior Thesis/Project

EDUC 336 - Childhood Development: Observation and Research Application

EDUC 350 - The Teaching of Reading: Curriculum Development in Childhood Education

EDUC 351 - The Teaching of Reading: Curriculum Development in Childhood Education

EDUC 353 - Pedagogies of Difference: Critical Approaches to Education

EDUC 360 - Workshop in Curriculum Development

EDUC 361 - Seminar: Mathematics and Science in the Elementary Curriculum

EDUC 362 - Student Teaching Practicum: Childhood Education

EDUC 367 - Urban Education Reform

EDUC 372 - Student Teaching

EDUC 373 - Adolescent Literacy

EDUC 384 - Advanced Seminar in Education - Urban Educational Reform

EDUC 385 - American Higher Education: Policy and Practice

EDUC 388 - Schooling in America: Preparing Citizens or Producing Workers

EDUC 392 - Multidisciplinary Methods in Adolescent Education

EDUC 399 - Senior Independent Work

ENGL 101 - The Art of Reading and Writing

ENGL 170 - Approaches to Literary Studies

ENGL 174 - Poetry and Philosophy: The Ancient Quarrel

ENGL 177 - William Carlos Williams

ENGL 203 - These American Lives: New Journalisms

ENGL 205 - Composition

ENGL 206 - Composition

ENGL 207 - Literary Nonfiction

ENGL 208 - Literary Nonfiction

ENGL 209 - Narrative Writing

ENGL 210 - Narrative Writing

ENGL 211 - Verse Writing

ENGL 212 - Verse Writing

ENGL 213 - The English Language

ENGL 214 - Process, Prose, Pedagogy

ENGL 215 - Pre-modern Drama: Text and Performance before 1800

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2013/14a: Gender Transgression on the Early Modern Stage. This course explores the dramatic representation of challenges to, and disruptions of, the gendered social order of 16th and 17th-century England. We will examine a range of figures, including shrews, witches, cross-dressers, unfaithful wives, murderous spouses, incestuous siblings, and characters whose desires cross the lines of both gender and class. While our focus will be on drama, we will also read a range of materials (legal statutes, ballads, account of trials and executions, marriage tracts), as well as contemporary theory and criticism. Ms. Dunn.

Prerequisite(s): open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair. Students applying for permission to elect 200-level work must present samples of their writing to the associate chair. Freshmen with AP credit may elect 200-level work after consultation with the department and with the permission of the instructor. First-year students who have completed ENGL 101  may elect 200-level work with permission of the instructor. Intermediate writing courses are not open to Freshmen.

Two 75-minute periods.

ENGL 216 - Modern Drama: Text and Performance after 1800

ENGL 217 - Literary Theory and Interpretation

ENGL 218 - Literature, Gender, and Sexuality

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2013/14a: Gay Male Narratives in America after 1945. An exploration of various narrative modes and genres through which modern gay male identity has both expressed and created itself. The first half of the course will focus on the evolution of the gay male literary novel, and may include works by Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, Andrew Holleran and Mark Merlis. For the second half of the course we will organize the class into affinity groups of four or five students who will investigate and present an aspect of gay narrative of their own choosing. Possibilities include: gay pulp fiction, gay porn narratives, the literature of AIDS, gay blogs, genre writing (science fiction, detective, slash, etc.), children’s and young adult literature, film adaptation and gay comics. Mr. Russell.

Prerequisite(s): open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair. Students applying for permission to elect 200-level work must present samples of their writing to the associate chair. Freshmen with AP credit may elect 200-level work after consultation with the department and with the permission of the instructor. First-year students who have completed ENGL 101  may elect 200-level work with permission of the instructor. Intermediate writing courses are not open to Freshmen.

Two 75-minute periods.

ENGL 222 - Founding of English Literature

ENGL 223 - The Founding of English Literature

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2013/14b: From the Faerie Queene to The Country Wife: Introduction to Early Modern Literature and Culture. This is a thematically organized “issues and methods” course grafted onto a chronologically structured survey course of early modern literature and culture. Its double goal is to develop skills for understanding early modern texts (both the language and the culture) as well as to familiarize students with a representative selection of works from the mid-1500s through the late 1600s. With this two-pronged approach, we will acquire an informed appreciation of the early modern period that may well serve as the basis for pursuing more specialized courses in this field. We explore a great variety of genres and media, including canonical authors such as Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, but we also attend to less well-known authors, many of them women, through whose writings we can achieve a more nuanced and complex understanding of the times. By paying special attention to correlations between literature and other discourses, as well as to issues of cultural identity and difference based on citizenship, class, ethnicity, gender, geography, nationality, race, and religion, we engage early modern literature and culture in ways that are productive to the understanding of our own culture as well. Please note that ENGL 222  is not a prerequisite for this course; it is open to all students, including freshmen. Mr. Márkus.

Prerequisite(s): open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair. Students applying for permission to elect 200-level work must present samples of their writing to the associate chair. Freshmen with AP credit may elect 200-level work after consultation with the department and with the permission of the instructor. First-year students who have completed ENGL 101  may elect 200-level work with permission of the instructor. Intermediate writing courses are not open to Freshmen.

Two 75-minute periods.

ENGL 225 - American Literature, Origins to 1865

ENGL 226 - American Literature, 1865-1925

ENGL 227 - The Harlem Renaissance and its Precursors

ENGL 228 - African American Literature, “Vicious Modernism” and Beyond

ENGL 229 - Asian-American Literature, 1946-present

ENGL 230 - Latina and Latino Literature

ENGL 231 - Native American Literature

ENGL 235 - Old English

ENGL 236 - Beowulf

ENGL 237 - Chaucer

ENGL 238 - Middle English Literature

ENGL 240 - Shakespeare

ENGL 241 - Shakespeare

ENGL 242 - Shakespeare

ENGL 245 - Pride and Prejudice: British Literature from 1640-1745

ENGL 246 - Sense and Sensibility: British Literature from 1745-1798

ENGL 247 - Eighteenth-Century British Novels

ENGL 248 - The Age of Romanticism, 1789-1832

ENGL 249 - Victorian Literature: Culture and Anarchy

ENGL 250 - Victorian Poets

ENGL 251 - Topics in Black Literatures

ENGL 252 - Writing the Diaspora: Verses/Versus

ENGL 253 - Topics in American Literature

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2013/14b: Narratives of Passing. Mr. Perez.

Prerequisite(s): open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair. Students applying for permission to elect 200-level work must present samples of their writing to the associate chair. Freshmen with AP credit may elect 200-level work after consultation with the department and with the permission of the instructor. First-year students who have completed ENGL 101  may elect 200-level work with permission of the instructor. Intermediate writing courses are not open to Freshmen.

Two 75-minute periods.

ENGL 255 - Nineteenth-Century British Novels

ENGL 256 - Modern British and Irish Novels

ENGL 257 - The Novel in English after 1945

ENGL 260 - Modern British Literature, 1901-1945

ENGL 261 - Literatures of Ireland

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2013/14a: The Twentieth Century. The course will examine Irish poetry, drama, and fiction in the twentieth century, in light of the unstable location of Irish writing in English. After an introduction to Irish orature, we’ll examine the romantic return to Irish myth as a national literary resource in the late nineteenth century. The pastoral “Celtic Revival” engendered stimulated creativity and critique from its inception, fueling Ireland’s “sensational re-entrance” into metropolitan literature, as one critic called it. The first part of the course centers on this late colonial era; the second explores the literature of post-colonial (and Northern still colonial) Ireland. Issues of language, gender, religion, class, culture, race, and national origin figure into our examinations of literary issues and the peculiar position of Ireland as a European colony and of “Irish” literature in the twentieth century as both marginal and central to the British canon. Among the authors we’ll read are Synge, Yeats, Joyce, McGuckian, Heaney, Friel, and O’Brien. This course does not fulfill the Race, Gender, and Ethnicity requirement. Ms. Kane.

Prerequisite(s): open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair. Students applying for permission to elect 200-level work must present samples of their writing to the associate chair. Freshmen with AP credit may elect 200-level work after consultation with the department and with the permission of the instructor. First-year students who have completed ENGL 101  may elect 200-level work with permission of the instructor. Intermediate writing courses are not open to Freshmen.

ENGL 262 - Postcolonial Literatures

ENGL 265 - Selected Author

Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2013/14a: The Works of Jane Austen. This seminar studies Jane Austen’s novels in depth. One of the most important of all English novelists, Austen pioneered techniques for the presentation of consciousness that changed conceptions of fictional character and brought the modern novel into being. In doing so she drew on and moved beyond the popular fiction of her time. We will consider Austen’s importance as a writer who is fully engaged with the social and cultural issues of her own time and who responded in subtle and complex ways to the new forces of social mobility, politics, the rising professional class, and the questions of women’s rights. We will read her work in chronological order, tracing the development of her style and thought from the cheeky comedy of her juvenilia to her last novel’s rich response to Romanticism, as well as her final unfinished work. In addition, we will examine the enduring popularity of Austen’s works today in film adaptations.

Topic for 2013/14b: Vladimir Nabokov. Ms. Yoon. Mr. Russell.

Prerequisite(s): open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair. Students applying for permission to elect 200-level work must present samples of their writing to the associate chair. Freshmen with AP credit may elect 200-level work after consultation with the department and with the permission of the instructor. First-year students who have completed ENGL 101  may elect 200-level work with permission of the instructor. Intermediate writing courses are not open to Freshmen.

ENGL 275 - Critical Ethnic Studies

ENGL 277 - Crossings: Literature without Borders

ENGL 282 - American Jewish Literature

ENGL 290 - Field Work

ENGL 298 - Independent Study

ENGL 300 - Senior Tutorial