Global Arc

Covers topical issues highlighting the impact of engineering on society through entrepreneurship. Topics and course format vary from year to year.

The mission of the class is to enable students to successfully create and lead enterprises by teaching the basic skills required to be a successful entrepreneurial leader. This class compliments EGR 491 "High Tech Entrepreneurship" which focuses on 'giving birth to a company', by focusing instead on enterprise 'early child rearing'. The basic skills taught fall into three major categories: how to create and manage powerful relationships, how to know and manage yourself, in addition to understanding how organizations work as they evolve from the idea stage to become value producing, self-sustaining enterprises.

Covers topical issues highlighting Social Entrepreneurship. Topics and course format vary from year to year.

An introduction to the cross-cultural study of American literatures, with special attention to the multiple points of connection, conflict, dialogue, and exchange that characterize American writings. Texts may be drawn from a broad range of periods, regions, and cultures. One lecture, two classes.

An introduction to English literary history. Centered on four great writers--Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Pope. Two lectures, one 50-minute preceptorial.

American literature from the early colonial period to the Civil War.

This course introduces students to the range of the essay form as it has developed from the early modern period to our own. The class will be organized, for the most part, chronologically, beginning with the likes of Bacon and Hobbes, and ending with some contemporary examples of and reflections on the form. It will consider how writers as various as Sidney, Hume, Johnson, Emerson, Woolf, C.L.R. James, and Stephen Jay Gould have defined and revised The Essay. Two lectures, one 50-minute preceptorial.

Authors and theorists of contemporary fiction have turned to various modes of fictionality, speculation, and the counterfactual to address and encounter gaps in the historical record, even if not to fully recover experiences lost to time. "Historical Fiction / Fictional History" will introduce students to literary and critical methods by toggling between "historical" and "fictional" texts, and ask them to experiment creatively with their own narrative voices. This course includes a mandatory field trip on 2/26 to see "Hamilton" in New York.

Is the underworld a world unto itself, or does it only acquire meaning in relation to the world above? Or is it the other way around -- that our world acquires its deepest, most difficult meanings, in relation to the abyss? The underworlds we'll encounter--some cast in the epic tradition; others, modern underworlds of slavery, criminality, racism, prison, or concentration camp--are all recognizably versions of the world above. We'll explore the writing of underworlds as a revisionary, as well as visionary enterprise, sounding the depths for critiques (and satires) of power, authority, divinity, racism, misogyny, or simply everyday life.

An exploration of the ideas, issues, and aesthetic values that mark the development of science fiction from the 18th century to the present, with particular attention to the ways specific texts confront the philosophical questions underlying scientific inquiry and invention, travel in time and space, the creation of life, robots and robotics. The ways in which this genre reframes the basic question of what it means to be human will be the foundation of our analysis of contemporary short stories and representative novels.