EN4200

School: NCSSM Durham
Dept: Humanities
Subject: English
Credits: 1
Prerequisite(s): Completion of AS4051/AS4052 American Studies I/II OR completion of AS4051 and approval of the Dean of Humanities during Spring Administrative Adjustment. Juniors may not request this course until Spring Administrative Adjustment.
Corequisite(s): none
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods

EN4200 African Studies: Pre-colonial Africa

In this course, we reflect on the realities and representations of Africa's pre-colonial past before the advent of European political domination around 1880. We consider how Africans, Europeans, and the African diaspora have attributed meaning to the place called Africa. We examine how power, trade, and production have intersected with human lives on a global stage. We discuss how humans have tried to make sense of their life situations in relation to Africa and how the diverse peoples of the continent have communicated their particular contexts.

     EN4210

School: NCSSM Durham
Dept: Humanities
Subject: English
Credits: 1
Prerequisite(s): Completion of AS4051/AS4052 American Studies I/II OR completion of AS4051 and approval of the Dean of Humanities during Spring Administrative Adjustment. Juniors may not request this course until Spring Administrative Adjustment.
Corequisite(s): none
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods

EN4210 African Studies: Modern Africa

In this course, we explore Africa's recent events, predicaments, and accomplishments. We learn how late nineteenth-century colonialism, anti-colonial resistance, nationalism, independence, modernization, post-colonialism, and neo-colonialism have affected and shaped modern Africa. One way to try to understand the reality of modern Africa is to see multiple aspects of that reality through the eyes of Africans themselves as well as through the eyes of outside observers. We thus turn to writers, scholars, and filmmakers to gain a critical understanding of Africa's historical and contemporary events and experiences.

     EN4211

School: NCSSM Durham
Dept: Humanities
Subject: English
Credits: 1
Prerequisite(s): Completion of AS4051/AS4052 American Studies I/II and OR completion of AS4051 and approval of the Dean of Humanities during Spring Administrative Adjustment. Juniors may not request this course until Spring Administrative Adjustment.
Corequisite(s): None
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods

EN4211 East Asian Studies I

This interdisciplinary course ranges from the ancient civilizations and foundational ethical structures of East Asia to the Mongol invasions and their aftermath. Drawing from the fields of archaeology, history, literature, and cultural studies, students trace the development of early China, Japan, and Korea. Students examine texts from early religious and literary traditions, including Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Shinto. Texts may include Buddhist sutras, Confucius' Analects, Laozi's Dao de Jing, T'ang poetry, Lady Shonagon's Pillow Book, Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Lady Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, and the Tale of the Heike. The class consists of a creative mix of lectures, discussions, and verbal and written analyses of moving and still images. Students continue to develop their writing skills by writing academic and interpretive essays on interdisciplinary topics as well as creative works that emulate East Asian genres. Students also collaborate on projects in which they produce their own artwork (such as digital and terrestrial gardens, curated museum exhibits, and revisions and additions to literary masterpieces) to demonstrate their understanding of East Asian cultures and accomplishments.

     EN4212

School: NCSSM Durham
Dept: Humanities
Subject: English
Credits: 1
Prerequisite(s): Completion of AS4051/AS4052 American Studies I/II and OR completion of AS4051 and approval of the Dean of Humanities during Spring Administrative Adjustment. Juniors may not request this course until Spring Administrative Adjustment.
Corequisite(s): None
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods

EN4212 East Asian Studies II

This interdisciplinary course begins with the Ming dynasty in China and the Ashikaga Shogunate in Japan. A major focus of this course is the experience of East Asian societies as they confront internal challenges and Western colonizers. Primary texts include Zen parables, Kenko's “Essays in Idleness,” Basho's poetry, Journey to the West, Dream of the Red Chamber, and Outlaws of the Marsh. The second part of the course presents a radically changed and dynamic landscape. We explore the upheavals of the early twentieth century, including the world wars and revolutionary restructuring of East Asian politics and societies. We explore the significance of modernism and postmodernism in contemporary Asian cultural expressions with an emphasis on the cartoon visions found in manga and anime. Texts may include Kawabata's Snow Country or Tanizaki's Naomi, manga and anime, writings of Mao Zedong, CCP propaganda posters, Ai Wei Wei's art, kung fu and samurai film clips, and Zhang Yimou’s To Live. The class consists of a creative mix of lectures, discussions, and verbal and written analyses of moving and still images. Students continue to develop their writing skills by writing academic and interpretive essays on interdisciplinary topics as well as creative works that emulate East Asian genres. Students also collaborate on projects where they produce their own artwork (such as kung fu and samurai film scripts reflecting East Asian geopolitical realities, visual depictions of futuristic dystopias drawing from techno-Orientalist stereotypes, etc.) to demonstrate their understanding of East Asian cultures and accomplishments.

     EN4215

School: NCSSM Durham
Dept: Humanities
Subject: English
Prerequisite(s): Completion of AS4051/AS4052 American Studies I/II and OR completion of AS4051 and approval of the Dean of Humanities during Spring Administrative Adjustment. Juniors may not request this course until Spring Administrative Adjustment.
Corequisite(s): None
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods

EN4215 Asian American Studies

Asian American and Pacific Islander people are playing an ever-increasing role in shaping American society. These diverse peoples are complexly connected to more than fifty cultures and societies, including but not limited to the Pacific Islands and South, Southeast, Western, and East Asia. This interdisciplinary course addresses key themes in Asian American history and considers many different kinds of Asian American texts, including novels, poetry, plays, short stories, film, pop culture, primary historical texts, and interdisciplinary scholarship. Through these texts and more, students will explore how Asian Americans navigate the challenges, privileges, and possibilities that they experience at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, indigeneity, and new forms of belonging and identity in a global age. In the face of stereotypes, racism, violence, militarization, and multiple forms of colonialism and empire, how do Asian Americans nevertheless affirm their identities, enjoy their lives, and act with integrity and agency?

     EN4241

School: NCSSM Durham
Dept: Humanities
Subject: English
Credits: 1
Prerequisite(s): Completion of AS4051/AS4052 American Studies I/II or AS4051W/AS4052W Writing and American Studies I/II OR completion of AS4051 or AS4051W and approval of the Registrar during Spring Administrative Adjustment. Juniors may not request this course until Spring Administrative Adjustment.
Corequisite(s): None
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods

EN4241 Western European Cultural Studies I

This course begins with the idea of the individual as it emerges in the literature, philosophy religion, and art of Ancient Greece, Rome, and Late Antiquity. It continues with ideas about identity in medieval Christendom, and traces the emergence of national literatures, new forms of architecture, and the first nation-states in the High Middle Ages and early Renaissance. It ends with Dante’s Inferno and with Petrarch, the poet whose preoccupation with his own celebrity points the way to the humanism of the Renaissance and the concept of self-fashioning that is the hallmark of modernity. We see the Greeks invent history as an entity distinct from both myth and chronicle, and learn how ideas about history evolve along with ideas about the self, that mysterious and vexing entity that is still our preoccupation today. Throughout the term, we read forward and backward in the Western tradition, exploring both contemporary and historical debates about the nature of history, personal identity, and the uses of literature and art, not only in ancient and medieval writers, but in modern thinkers from Marx to Nietzsche, Adorno, Althusser, and Deleuze. We delve into Homer’s epic accounts of the Trojan War and its aftermath. We see the epic transformed by the Roman poet Virgil, and the metamorphosis of the epic into an individual drama of salvation in Dante. We read tragedies by Euripides where individuals engineer disasters from which no recovery is possible, and we discuss Plato's quest for the ideal education, ideal love, and the ideal society. In political theory, we read Aristotle's analysis of political communities and the good life, and Marsilius of Padua’s medieval treatise on the direct descent of political power from God to human beings. In history, we not only read Thucydides' tragic history of the fate of the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War, we also encounter the Enlightenment ideal of writing scientific history and those who question whether that is possible or even desirable. We look at the cityscapes of Alexander’s empire, and we see how they became the model for Rome and its imitators. We read the first autobiography, written by St. Augustine in the fourth century, and the first Christian theory of history, which is also by Augustine. Throughout the course, we ask questions about the uniqueness of Western man's continuing fascination with the life of the mind and reason, and we think about why the idea of the alienated individual develops as it does in the West. In the process, we make connections between long-vanished worlds and our time. Grades are based on a series of essays, as students discuss and write their way to knowledge.

     EN4242

School: NCSSM Durham
Dept: Humanities
Subject: English
Credits: 1
Prerequisite(s): Completion of AS4051/AS4052 American Studies I/II and OR completion of AS4051 and approval of the Dean of Humanities during Spring Administrative Adjustment. Juniors may not request this course until Spring Administrative Adjustment.
Corequisite(s): None
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods

EN4242 Western European Cultural Studies II

This course explores the emergence of the modern world, the modern self, and the modern state, along with revolutions in politics, literature, philosophy, and the visual arts that lead to a culture of alienation in which individual selves increasingly feel themselves to be alone, even in the midst of oceans of humanity in cities of dizzying size. We begin with phenomenon of self-fashioning, not only in characters like Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, who barters his soul for knowledge, or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who finds himself imprisoned in the private spaces of his mind, but with self-fashioning in religion with the Reformations of the sixteenth century and in revolutionary changes in the visual arts and architecture. Readings from Montaigne, Galileo, and others point the way toward a subjectively constituted, demystified world. Topics include the emergence of secular philosophy in Descartes and Locke; the origins of modern theories of the social contract in Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; and Romanticism, with its emphasis on the world of feeling. We encounter the alienating world of industrial culture, and new theories about nature and history in Marx and Darwin. We examine Modernism in all its forms—in psychology, in narrative, in the visual arts and architecture, in social planning, and in cinema. We also examine the impact of world wars, globalism, the newest versions of cultural imperialism, and the modern world's obsessions with self and self-revelation, and the attendant culture of celebrity. Readings include Rousseau, the English Romantics, Darwin, Marx, Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Freud, Thomas Mann, Heidegger, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett as well as contemporary writers as various as Patti Smith and Donna Tartt. Grades are based on a series of essays and on class participation. In WECS, we use the essay as a tool of thought as we write and discuss our way to knowledge.

     EN4300

School: NCSSM Durham
Dept: Humanities
Subject: English
Credits: 1
Prerequisite(s): Completion of AS4051/AS4052 American Studies I/II and OR completion of AS4051 and approval of the Dean of Humanities during Spring Administrative Adjustment. Juniors may not request this course until Spring Administrative Adjustment.
Corequisite(s): None
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods,Three periods per week and a lab

EN4300 Creative Writing

     EN4310

School: NCSSM Durham
Dept: Humanities
Subject: English
Prerequisite(s): Completion of AS4051/AS4052 American Studies I/II and OR completion of AS4051 and approval of the Dean of Humanities during Spring Administrative Adjustment. Juniors may not request this course until Spring Administrative Adjustment.
Corequisite(s): None
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods

EN4310 Contemporary African-American Literature

In 2011, Ken Warren declared that "African-American literature" was dead, arguing that its usefulness only extended as a response to Jim Crow and was, for all intents and purposes, no longer necessary. This course in contemporary African-American literature, inherently a diasporic study, explores this question as an exclusive study of African-American literature and literary critique. This body of literature, marked by the first Black presidency as well as the Black Lives Matter movement, offers a rich canon of texts that grapple with the meaning of Black life and Black artistic production in the late 20th- and 21st-century context. The course asks students to participate in literary analyses and engage with major theoretical frameworks including, but not limited to, Black Feminism, Neo-Colonialism, and Afro-Futurism. In addition, students consider the historical, social, and political processes that impact the literature they read. Activities include in-class presentations, video essays, and analytical writing assignments.

     EN4330

School: NCSSM Durham
Dept: Humanities
Subject: English
Prerequisite(s): Completion of AS4051/AS4052 American Studies I/II and OR completion of AS4051 and approval of the Dean of Humanities during Spring Administrative Adjustment. Juniors may not request this course until Spring Administrative Adjustment.
Corequisite(s): None
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods

EN4330: Ecocriticism

In her 2010 poem, "What Can I Say," Mary Oliver wrote, “Take your busy heart to the art museum and the / chamber of commerce / but take it also to the forest.” Five years later, Oxford University Press removed from its Junior Dictionary 50 words related to nature. Words such as “acorn," “clover,” and “heron” were replaced by “blog," “broadband," and “cut and paste." In our precarious time of climate change, disconnection from nature, and environmental violence, perhaps we should all contemplate and be in forests more, so that we may consider the power of an acorn. Using literary and historical texts as the primary guides, this course will explore a variety of relationships between humans and the natural world. Students will engage with poems, essays, novels, and other primary and secondary texts to consider how we conceive, construct, and fulfill our relationships to the natural world and how heritage and culture impact humans' relationships with the environment. We will also explore the history and politics of environmental protection and sustainability within several crucial frames, including those of race, class, and gender. We will examine impacts of colonization on land management policies and the reemergence of Indigenous practices with land, water, and food systems management. The course will include regular experiential learning opportunities in nearby natural spaces.

     EN4400

School: NCSSM Durham
Dept: Humanities
Subject: English
Credits: 1
Prerequisite(s): Completion of AS4051/AS4052 American Studies I/II and OR completion of AS4051 and approval of the Dean of Humanities during Spring Administrative Adjustment. Juniors may not request this course until Spring Administrative Adjustment.
Corequisite(s): None
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods

EN4400 AI in Science Fiction

Science fiction doesn’t predict the future, but it can help shape it. Good science fiction, in the words of Philip K. Dick, takes a new idea and makes it “intellectually stimulating to the reader. . . . It unlocks the reader’s mind so that that mind, like the author’s, begins to create. Thus science fiction is creative and it inspires creativity.” In this course, we will follow a series of writers and filmmakers as they attempt to unlock our minds and open them to the potentialities and problems of artificial general intelligence. As scientists around the world work to enhance machine learning capabilities and as figures ranging from Elon Musk to Henry Kissinger warn of the dangers of AI, this course will look to science fiction as a laboratory of ideas, one in which creative minds ask us to consider a number of different ways that AI is and could transform our society. Students will thus be asked, and generate their own answers to, a variety of questions that will accompany the development of general intelligence. Such questions include: How will researchers know when they have actually created a general intelligence? Will it be sentient? If so, what rules and laws should govern our treatment of AI, or AI’s treatment of humanity? What’s the difference between a human and algorithm trained to perfectly mimic that human’s speech patterns? Can AI make art? And do androids dream of electric sheep? In this class, we will explore the answers our most imaginative artists have come up with to those questions.

     EN4410

School: NCSSM Durham
Dept: Humanities
Subject: English
Credits: 1
Prerequisite(s): Completion of AS4051/AS4052 American Studies I/II and OR completion of AS4051 and approval of the Dean of Humanities during Spring Administrative Adjustment. Juniors may not request this course until Spring Administrative Adjustment.
Corequisite(s): None
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods

EN4410 British Literature and Culture

This course explores selected works from Britain’s rich literary history, including works by Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantic poets, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett (among other visual artists, filmmakers, and musicians). These readings will allow us to think about how changing perceptions of the self, history, truth, women, sexuality, politics, social existence, and the natural world are registered in artworks spanning from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Our course begins with an emphasis on Shakespeare’s major comedies and tragedies, and from here we consider how Shakespeare’s innovative approach for representing human nature was adapted and transformed by the artists who succeeded him. We pay special attention throughout the course to selected historical and social developments throughout British history and how they influenced (and were influenced by) the arts: the development of Renaissance humanism, the rise of Enlightenment rationalism, and the transformation of Britain into a modern, industrialized nation are a few of the trends that we study in parallel with the arts.

     EN4420

School: NCSSM Durham
Dept: Humanities
Subject: English
Credits: 1
Prerequisite(s): Completion of AS4051/AS4052 American Studies I/II and OR completion of AS4051 and approval of the Dean of Humanities during Spring Administrative Adjustment. Juniors may not request this course until Spring Administrative Adjustment.
Corequisite(s): None
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods

EN4420 Classical Myth: Epic and Tragedy

The creation of the world. The rise of Zeus. The birth of Athena. The abduction of Persephone. The fall of Troy. The wanderings and homecoming of Odysseus. For nearly three thousand years, these stories of gods and mortals have gripped the imaginations of listeners and readers. In this course, we explore major myths of the ancient Greeks and Romans, with a special emphasis on how these oral tales were committed to writing in epic poems and tragic plays. Throughout the course, we seek to understand these myths in the geographical, historical, and cultural contexts in which they were created. We read ancient Greek and Roman texts in English translation, including works by Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Vergil, and Ovid. Ancient works of art and architecture, including vase paintings and sculpture, form a rich complement to these written sources. We also explore major theories of myth interpretation—from approaches taken by the ancient Greeks themselves to those developed by modern-day theorists—and apply these theories to the myths we encounter. Finally, we explore how later artists, writers, and filmmakers have appropriated, interpreted, and transformed these ancient stories into new forms—often for very different purposes than those served by the myths in the ancient world. Although most of the assessments are essay-based, we also take these ancient myths into our own imaginations in a deep and powerful way and transform them into our own original creations—poems, narratives, dramatic scenes, visual art, and other forms. Our journey together culminates in a public performance of these metamorphoses.

     EN4430

School: NCSSM Durham
Dept: Humanities
Subject: English
Credits: 1
Prerequisite(s): Completion of AS4051/AS4052 American Studies I/II and OR completion of AS4051 and approval of the Dean of Humanities during Spring Administrative Adjustment. Juniors may not request this course until Spring Administrative Adjustment.
Corequisite(s): None
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods

EN4430 Modern World Fiction

Beginning with experimental novels of the late nineteenth-century and focusing on French, Spanish, German, Czech, English, American, Cuban, Colombian, African, and Japanese writers, this comparative literature course examines the extraordinary flowering of twentieth-century fiction—with its open-ended form and experimental styles—against a backdrop of what Stephen Kern has called a transformed “culture of time and space.” In our effort to understand this rich body of literature, we explore the relationships between movements in philosophy and the visual arts—including photography and film—and the changing shapes of fiction. Readings may include short stories by Jorge Luis Borges and Michel Tournier; novels such as Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Miguel de Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, Mártir, Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gide's The Immoralist, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Donna Tartt's Secret History. Through a series of analytical essays, students explore questions about authors and their audiences and the relationship between literary texts and contexts. In the process, students strengthen their own voices and explore the connections between literary and cultural identity.

     EN4440

School: NCSSM Durham
Dept: Humanities
Subject: English
Credits: 1
Prerequisite(s): Completion of AS4051/AS4052 American Studies I/II and OR completion of AS4051 and approval of the Dean of Humanities during Spring Administrative Adjustment. Juniors may not request this course until Spring Administrative Adjustment.
Corequisite(s): None
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods

EN4440 Philosophy and Literature in the Twentieth Century

This course explores twentieth-century philosophy, literature, the visual arts, and the thematic ties that bind them together. After the mid-1840s, in both texts and images, painters, literary artists, and philosophers increasingly present the self as inherently unstable, reality as a construction, history as a fiction, and the universe as random and chaotic. We read Kierkegaard, who believed that escape from despair lay in taking a “leap” into an “absolute beginning,” and Nietzsche, who embraced an ecstatic vision of the self as a product of will and desire. Heidegger, Sartre, Althusser, Baudrillard, and Deleuze provide other perspectives on the self as a freely constructed project. In painting, we trace the retreat from the Real in artists like Picasso and Matisse, and the longing to reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary in Magritte—a desire that is pervasive in the novels of Virginia Woolf. Literary texts may include Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, Marguerite Duras' Hiroshima Mon Amour, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Samuel Beckett's Company, along with readings in Sartre, Woolf, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Gertrude Stein, and Donna Tartt. Films include Ingmar Bergman's Kierkegaardian Winter Light and Woody Allen's Dostoevskian Crimes and Misdemeanors. Classes are conducted as seminars, with group discussions, background lectures, and presentations. Grades are based on a series of comparative essays and on class participation.

     EN4470

School: NCSSM Durham
Dept: Humanities
Subject: English
Credits: 1
Prerequisite(s): Completion of AS4051/AS4052 American Studies I/II and OR completion of AS4051 and approval of the Dean of Humanities during Spring Administrative Adjustment. Juniors may not request this course until Spring Administrative Adjustment.
Corequisite(s): None
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods

EN4470 STEM and the Stage

If “it's wanting to know that makes us matter,” as Tom Stoppard suggests in Arcadia, then it's little wonder that the endeavors of STEM fields to understand the mysteries of our universe have proven such fertile ground for dramatists. In this page-to-stage course, we examine how theatrical art wrestles with the implications and repercussions of STEM discoveries to explore larger questions of our humanity, purpose, and meaning. In addition to plays that include Life of Galileo, Copenhagen, and Arcadia, we consider a range of historical, literary, and scholarly texts that inform and contextualize these works. Through close reading, we strengthen our communication skills by analyzing and critiquing the way an author orients a lay audience to complex STEM concepts and connects them to larger thematic ideas. In a broader sense, our chief concern is to investigate how the efforts of science, mathematics, and the humanities to explain our world intersect, inform, and challenge one another—how in mapping the stars, we might also map our hearts and minds. Creative, stage-related projects and formal academic writing assignments provide substantial opportunities for students to experiment with their own ideas and demonstrate their learning throughout the course.

     EN4600

School: NCSSM Durham
Dept: Humanities
Subject: English
Credits: 1
Prerequisite(s): Completion of AS4051 American Studies I
Corequisite(s): None
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods

EN4600 Research Experience in the Humanities

This interdisciplinary course introduces students to the rigorous pleasures of research in the humanities. Through work in and out of class, including visits by guest lecturers and trips to local archives and museums, students learn the basic skills of research, including the identification of a compelling intellectual interest and the transformation of that interest into a question that at once requires and excites research of the highest quality. Students then answer this question, in a provisional way, by work that leads first to the statement of a thesis (the answer to the question), then to the initial development of that statement in a shorter paper of ten to twelve pages. Successful completion of the course may also lead to summer research, internships, or apprenticeships with local scholars. Following this course, optional enrollment in EN4610 Research in the Humanities offers selected students the opportunity for more substantial work in their chosen fields of scholarship.

     EN4610

School: NCSSM Durham
Dept: Humanities
Subject: English
Credits: 1
Prerequisite(s): Completion of EN4600, AS4051/AS4052 American Studies I/II or Summer Research in the Humanities with the Dean's approval.
Corequisite(s): None
Graduation Requirements Met: One English credit
Schedule Requirements Met: One of five courses required each semester
Meeting Times: Three periods and a lab OR two 100-min. evening periods

EN4610 Research in the Humanities

Research in Humanities encourages writing and reading that is at once critical and necessarily creative, for by these acts of interdisciplinary scholarship, students seek to construct new objects of knowledge—a knowledge commensurate with their experience of the world, informed and indeed altered by the works and words of others. This course is necessarily interdisciplinary, because it is, among other things, a critique of the division of labor within institutions of knowledge. In other words, even as it seeks to understand how disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and literature constitute their objects of study (the human, the mind, society, etc.), it also attends carefully to the limits of disciplinary formation, to the ways in which the “human” or “nature” escape the classificatory systems within which they are defined and to which they are confined. Research in Humanities is organized around theories and practices of research in the humanities and the sciences. The study of theory is necessary because these researches should be critical and historical, interrogating both their subject’s conditions of possibility and the contemporary situation of their study. Each week, members of the seminar will consider different theoretical approaches to reading and writing about diverse texts. These approaches include, but are not limited to, political criticism, cultural and ethnic studies, feminism, gender and sexuality, historicism, and colonial and post-colonial critique. As for practice, students will learn how to conduct research and how to construct an effective thesis statement that will govern an argument developed and sustained throughout a paper of twenty- to twenty-five pages. The proper use of evidence, as well as considerations of evidentiary significance, will also be fundamental to the course’s concerns. Students will then transform their research into articles for scholarly publication, including Fifth World, NCSSM’s journal of interdisciplinary research in the humanities. They will serve on the editorial board for Fifth World, evaluating submissions, offering suggestions for revisions, and ensuring the timely delivery of the completed journal to the publisher.