Summer 2023
ENGL 5900S/ENGL 4609A: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Janne Cleveland
Topic: Performing Activism on Social Media
This seminar course will examine how social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok become spaces of performance within the context of activism and protest. We will consider how these platforms take on a theatrical dimension, and what the implications are for both the actors and spectators of these activist actions.
ENGL 5900T/ENGL 4301A: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with HIST 4101A)
Prof. Paul Nelles
Topic: Travel & Mobility in the Early Modern World
This seminar explores the experience of travel and mobility circa 1500–1750. The early modern period experienced an unprecedented level of mobility, both within Europe and globally. People moved across space and across distance for all sorts of reasons: the faithful pilgrimaged to holy sites; merchants journeyed to buy and sell material goods; the sick moved for health; diplomats travelled to spy and negotiate; missionaries crossed oceans to save souls; non-Europeans experienced coerced migration in the form of African slavery and the colonial enclosure of indigenous peoples. The seminar considers the social and cultural context of early modern mobility at the local, transnational, and global levels. We also explore the technologies of travel – how did people move from place to place? where did they stay? what did they eat and drink? what mechanisms, practices, and sites facilitated movement in the early modern period?
The seminar seeks to re-create the material and cultural world of early modern travel. We explore how linguistic and cultural difference were experienced, how travellers made sense of unfamiliar places, social customs, and cultural practices, and the ‘things’ that also moved on journeys. The class pays close attention to the sources that constitute early modern ‘travel writing:’ travel journals, letters, diaries, ship’s logs, missionary reports, and the like.
ENGL 5901S/ENGL 4115A: Culture and the Text
Prof. Robin Norris
Topic: Leaves of Leaves: Plant Literacy and Literature
Plants have been important throughout human history for both reasons of survival and culture. Although plants have been fundamental to mythologies around the globe, today plant literacy is at an all-time low. This class has multiple intersecting goals: to explore plants in literature and culture; to increase students’ plant literacy; to explore the concept of literacy; and to re-evaluate how plant literacy influences our experience of literary texts. One abiding question will be the distinction between nature and the garden. This is an experiential learning course that requires field work to develop plant literacy, and assignments will be designed to bolster the experiential learning aspects of the course.
ENGL 5120S/ENGL 4115B: Book Arts Workshop
Prof. Robin Norris
This experiential learning course immerses students in the practical arts and histories of book production, with its roots in the early Middle Ages. Students will engage in a range of activities representative of the pillars of the book arts, including bookbinding, calligraphy, decoration, and typesetting/printing. Activities may include transcription of manuscript and inscribed texts, reproduction of early medieval bookhand, creating and printing woodcuts and/or linocuts, typesetting and letterpress printing, hand sewing of paper gatherings to create pamphlets or multiple section books, and exploration of manuscripts and early printed books from Carleton’s Archives and Special Collections. The class will be held in the MacOdrum Library Book Arts Lab, where students will work collaboratively with Master Printer Larry Thompson, Professor Norris, and their classmates.