39 courses with the subject ENGL, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
ENGL 3101002/00499 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm Alexandra 4.00 17/18
404 Barnard Hall Watson ENGL BC3102 ACADEMIC WRITING INTENSIVE. 4.00 points. instructor's permission required. Academic Writing Intensive is a small, intensive writing course for Barnard students in their second or third year who would benefit from extra writing support. Students attend a weekly seminar, work closely with the instructor on each writing assignment, and meet with an attached Writing Fellow every other week. Readings and assignments focus on transferable writing, revision, and critical thinking skills students can apply to any discipline. Students from across the disciplines are welcome. This course is only offered P/D/F. To be considered for the course, please send a recent writing sample to vcondill@barnard.edu, ideally from your First-Year Writing or First-Year Seminar course, or any other writing-intensive humanities or social sciences course at Barnard (no lab reports please) Fall 2025: ENGL BC3102 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollme
ENGL 3103004/00848 W 11:00am - 12:50pm Monica Cohen 3.00 10/15
912 Milstein Center ENGL BC3104 THE ART OF THE ESSAY. 3.00 points. students. Students who are on the electronic waiting list or who are nt interested in the class but are not yet registered MUST attend the first day of class. Essay writing above the first-year level. Reading and writing various types of essays to develop one's natural writing voice and craft nt thoughtful, sophisticated and personal essays Spring 2026: ENGL BC3104 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
101a Barnard Hall ENGL BC3106 FICTION # PERSONAL NARRATIVE. 3.00 points. and instructions are available here: http://english.barnard.edu/forms- procedures/forms. Students cannot add this course to their schedules until after they are admitted. Writing sample required to apply to the course. Please send a writing sample of up to 5 pages of prose (double spaced) to awatson@barnard.edu. Spring 2026: Fiction and Personal Narrative: Crafting the Narrative "I" In this workshop, we will practice taking creative risks, writing fiction and nonfiction. We will examine four key craft areas: voice, characterization, imagery, and arrangement, both in contemporary published writing and in the writing of the people in this class. In small and large group workshops, we will consider each writer’s work with care and attention to the writer’s vision. By discussing each work-in-progress on its own terms, we will help our fellow writers deepen the meaning and impact of their work. Through risk-taking, and building a creative community, we will also grow and deepen our personal relationships to craft. Model readings will be contemporary short stories or personal essays, mostly written in the first person, including work by Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Tony Tulathimutte, K-Ming Chang, Cleyvis Natera, Melissa Febos, Ling Ma, and Deesha
ENGL 3110002/00669 Th 2:10pm - 4:00pm Miranda Field 3.00 5/12
404 Barnard Hall ENGL BC3113 PLAYWRITING I. 3.00 points. to apply: required cover sheet and instructions are available here: http://english.barnard.edu/forms-procedures/forms. Students cannot add this course to their schedules until after they are admitted. Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative- writing-courses. What is the difference between a play and a film? No two playwrights will have the same response, but all must address the question. This is a class that revels in that distinction, encouraging students to explore the idiosyncrasy, strangeness, and power of the form. For half the semester, students will be writing in response to prompts that are designed to teach fundamental principles of the form. In addition to writing their own work, every week students will choose two plays from a collection of 150 to read and comment briefly on. During the second half of the semester, students develop a longer work, to be submitted as either a completed one act or a partial draft with notes for a full-length work. Classes are spent reading and discussing students’ work. No previous experience in playwriting is necessary Fall 2025: ENGL BC3113 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3118001/00112 W 6:10pm - 8:00pm Monica Sok 3.00 11/12
403 Barnard Hall ENGL BC3125 ADVANCED POETRY WRITING II. 3.00 points. and instructions are available here: http://english.barnard.edu/forms- procedures/forms. Students cannot add this course to their schedules until after they are admitted. Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative- writing-courses. In this workshop, we will explore poetry writing as the pursuit and expression of a liberatory language– the language of our highest attention and freedom– shared between reader and writer, and consider the metaphysics and motivations for making meaning and making it our own. In addition to workshops, we will alternate between classes centered on formal and thematic explorations with others focusing on contemplative practices and our writing process. Readings will range diversely through eras and modes including works, among others, by Sun Buer, Audre Lorde, Hannah Emerson, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, and Mónica de la Torre ENGL BC3134 CREATIVE NON-FICTION. 3.00 points. Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative- writing-courses. Spring 2026: Drawing Cartoons and Comics In this class, New Yorker cartoonist and graphic novelist Liana Finck will teach you the basics of making single-panel cartoons, writing and drawing comics, and generally expressing yourself in a mixture of words and pictures. You will learn to diagram your problems, craft jokes, and tell stories visually. You’ll get an overview of useful materials, programs and machines, and how to use all these things with a light enough touch that you can still focus on your art. You will get comfortable with processes for generating ideas and editing your work. We will read some graphic novels, look at lots of cartoons, and dip a toe into the history of colloquial visual storytelling. You will finish the semester with a large body of small-scale work, one serious longer piece, and a better understanding of your voice and what you have to say. My hope is that you’ll leave the class confident in your ability to work visually, and with a regular practice if you want one Fall 2025: ENGL BC3134 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3130002/01002 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm Margaret 3.00 26/39
409 Barnard Hall Ellsberg AFEN BC3134 UNHEARD VOICES: AFRICAN WOMEN. 4.00 points. How does one talk of women in Africa without thinking of Africa as a mythic unity? We will consider the political, racial, social and other contexts in which African women write and are written about in the context of their located lives in Africa and in the African Diaspora. s
ENGL 3134001/00158 W 11:00am - 12:50pm Liana Finck 3.00 10/12
407 Barnard Hall ENTH BC3144 Black Theatre. 4 points. Exploration of Black Theater, specifically African-American performance traditions, as an intervening agent in racial, cultural, and national identity. African-American theatre artists to be examined include Amiri Baraka, Kia Corthron, W.E.B. Du Bois, Angelina Grimke, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, Adrian Piper, and August Wilson. Fulfills one (of two) required courses in dramatic literature for Theatre/Drama and Theatre Arts major. ENWS BC3144 Minority Women Writers in the United States. 3 points. BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Not offered during 2024-2025 academic year. Literature of the 20th-century minority women writers in the United States, with emphasis on works by Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Native American women. The historical and cultural as well as the literary framework. ENGL BC3190 Global Literature in English. 3 points. BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Cultures in Comparison (CUL)., BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Not offered during 2024-2025 academic year. Selective survey of fiction from the ex-colonies, focusing on the colonial encounter, cultural and political decolonization, and belonging and migration in the age of postcolonial imperialism. Areas covered include Africa (Achebe, Aidoo, Armah, Ngugi); the Arab World (Mahfouz, Munif, Salih, Souief); South Asia (Mistry, Rushdie, Suleri); the Carribean (Kincaid); and New Zealand (Hulme).
ENGL 3155001/00178 M W 11:40am - 12:55pm Eugene 3.00 15/35
202 Milbank Hall Petracca ENGL BC3158 Medieval Literature: Literatures of Medieval Britain. 3 points. BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Reason and Value (REA)., BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Not offered during 2024-2025 academic year. It's easy to forget that medieval literature wasn't always old and "quaint" as it seems to many of us today. For writers and artists of that era, they were modern, too. But they also imagined their own past and (like many of us) they often had a nostalgic yearning for that lost time. This course will explore a number of forms of medieval literature, mostly British but also some continental, as it explores versions of its past, and especially the ultimately tragic story of King Arthur. We will read across many medieval genres, including some little known today, like lives of saints. But the course will focus on narratives of quest: heroic, psychological, and erotic. We will also explore some of the often beautiful medieval manuscripts in which these texts were often copied. We will read most Middle English texts in the original language; we'll study French and Latin texts in translation. ENGL BC3163 SHAKESPEARE I. 3.00 points. A critical and historical introduction to Shakespeares comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. Please note that you do not need to take ENGL BC3163: Shakespeare I and ENGL BC3164: Shakespeare II in sequence; you may take them in any order Fall 2025: ENGL BC3163 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollm
ENGL 3159002/00657 M 2:10pm - 4:00pm Atefeh Akbari 4.00 13/13
101a Barnard Hall Shahmirzadi ENGL 3159 003/00839 T 11:00am - 12:50pm Eugene 4.00 13/14 223 Milbank Hall Petracca ENGL BC3160 THE ENGLISH COLLOQUIUM. 4.00 points. Enlightenment colloquium we will look at English and European imaginative and intellectual life during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this period, writers tried in new ways to reconcile the tensions between reason and religion. Categories of thought that underlie our world today were taking shape: secularity, progress, the public and the private, individual rights, religious tolerance. Writers articulated principles of equality in an era of slavery. Literary forms like the novel, which emerges into prominence during this period, express in irreducibly complex ways these and other changes. In this intensive course, we will study from multiple angles a variety of authors that may include Hobbes, Dryden, Locke, Spinoza, Lafayette, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Voltaire, Fielding, Johnson, Diderot, Sterne, and Wollstonecraft, among others Spring 2026: ENGL BC3160 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollme
Enrollment limited to Barnard English majors. In the
ENGL 3160004/00199 Th 2:10pm - 4:00pm Andrew Lynn 4.00 12/12
403 Barnard Hall Barnard College Catalogue 2025-2026 327 ENGL BC3162 DONNE, THE METAPHYSICALS, AND HIS LEGACY. 3.00 points. John Donne is the most famous “Metaphysical Poet” of the 17th century. The term “metaphysical” to refer to his poetry was first used by Samuel Johnson in the 18th century. It was popularized in the 20th century by T. S. Eliot, who lamented what he called a “dissociation of sensibility” that set in during the 17th century, whereas (Eliot said) “a thought to Donne was an experience,” as if mind was not simply a separate thing from embodied experience. Donne’s poetry has long been admired, indeed loved, embraced by later readers, writers, and artists—not just in England and America but in different parts of the world. He has left a rich legacy, and what Judith Scherer Herz calls his “voiceprint” on diverse later writers. In my experience, students always want to spend more time on Donne. In this course, we will do that, reading his poetry with attention but also his prose Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, written in 1623 during the plague when he came close to dying. The Devotions found a new life during the AIDs crisis, and then again during our Covid pandemic. The line from the Devotions nt that begins “No man is an island” has been part of our culture for a century, though many have no idea where it comes from. In this course, we will engage in “attentive,” patient reading of his texts, entering in them, trying to figuring them out, much as Donne sought to figure out lived experience in richly metaphorical writing. Though Donne is at the center of the course, we will also read a selection of poems by other 17th-century Metaphysical poets—George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Katherine Philips, Andrew Marvell—and Sir Thomas Browne’s prose Hydriotaphia: Or Urn Burial, occasioned by the excavation of ancient burial urns discovered in Norwich. Browne tries to figure out the identity of these urns, then moves to a fascinating survey of the burial practices of different cultures over a long period of time, and then concludes with a profound meditation on memory, legacy, and our desire for immortality, perpetuating our earthly connections. Donne left an impression on so many writers such as Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and Seamus Heaney; Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich; Djuna Barnes (her novel Nightwood, a lesbian classic), Robert Lowell and Anthony Hecht, the Bengali Rabinadrath Tagore; Joseph Brodsky, Yehudah Amichai and Leonard Cohen; Linda Gregerson, and Kimberly Johnson. So many possibilities for anyone interested in exploring beyond the limits of syllabus. Donne’s poetry has had (and continues to have) a transhistorical and transcultural currency. This course begins to opening up possibilities, as we think about how and why we read imaginative literature from the past nt ENGL BC3163 SHAKESPEARE I. 3.00 points. A critical and historical introduction to Shakespeares comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. Please note that you do not need to take ENGL BC3163: Shakespeare I and ENGL BC3164: Shakespeare II in sequence; you may take them in any order Fall 2025: ENGL BC3163 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3163001/00022 M W 8:40am - 9:55am Peter Platt 3.00 20/60
323 Milbank Hall Barnard College Catalogue 2025-2026 481 ENGL BC3164 SHAKESPEARE II. 3.00 points. introduction to selected comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances by Shakespeare. Please note that you do not need to take ENGL BC3163: Shakespeare I and ENGL BC3164: Shakespeare II in sequence; you may take them in any order Spring 2026: ENGL BC3164 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
Enrollment limited to 60 students. Enrollment limited to 60 students. Critical and historical
ENGL 3164001/00099 M W 8:40am - 9:55am Peter Platt 3.00 12/60
323 Milbank Hall ENGL BC3165 The Elizabethan Renaissance: The Complete Nondramatic Poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare. 3 points. In this course, we will read the complete nondramatic poetry of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, working closely through sonnets, epyllia (mini epics), and translations. How do Marlowe and Shakespeare put into play inherited and new ideas about history, gender, sexuality, politics, law, God, race, matter, print, and literary form (especially the sonnet)? ent ent
ENGL 3166001/00151 M W 10:10am - 11:25am Achsah 3 25/30
409 Barnard Hall Guibbory ENGL BC3167 MILTON. 3.00 points. How and why might we read Milton now? And how do his writings and thinking intersect with issues in our present moment? We will read his influential epic Paradise Lost after reading selections of Milton's earlier poetry and prose (attack against censorship, defenses of divorce, individual conscience, toleration, complicated issues of political and religious liberty). He wrote about these matters as he was involved in the English Civil war, an advocate of liberty (we will consider what kind, for whom?) and revolution, which Americans would embrace as inspiration and to justify the American Revolution. We will critically read Milton’s literary and political texts within the contexts of religious, political, and cultural history of early modern England and Europe but also colonial and revolutionary America—asking difficult questions, and with a sense of how Milton’s writing connects to present issues of our time Fall 2025: ENGL BC3167 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3167001/00507 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm Achsah 3.00 17/40
403 Barnard Hall Guibbory ENGL BC3169 Renaissance Drama. 3 points. This class will examine English drama at the moment when it arose as a major art form. In Renaissance London, astonishingly complex plays emerged that reflected the diverse urban life of the city, as well as the layered and often contradictory inner life of the individual. This poetically rich theater was less concerned with presenting answers, and more with staging questions—about gender, race, religion, literary tradition, love, sex, authority, and class. In this course, we will try to tap into this theater’s cosmopolitan, enlivened poetics by studying not only Shakespeare, but also the various other major authors who constituted this literary world: Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, and the female playwright Aphra Behn. ENGL BC3246 WRITING THE MEDIEVAL SELF. 3.00 points. The late Middle Ages and early Renaissance saw an explosion in the use of the first-person singular "I" by European writers of narrative texts. Although these narratives – among them dream visions, philosophical allegories, spiritual autobiographies, and straight-up novels – do not always correspond to modern ideas about autobiography, they nonetheless demonstrate a growing interest in such "autobiographical" topics as personal identity, sexual difference, mental illness, and disability, even as they experiment with a variety of literary forms and raise fundamental questions about the relationship between truth and writing. Writers will include Augustine, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Christine de Pisan, Thomas Hoccleve, Julian of Norwich and Teresa de Cartagena, among others. No foreign language experience is required for this course, but knowledge of Latin or Romance languages may be useful lment
302 Barnard Hall ENGL BC3174 The Age of Johnson. 3 points. The works of Johnson, Boswell, and their contemporaries in historic context; rise of the novel (Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne); poets from Pope to Blake and Wordsworth; women writers from Carter to Collier to Wollstonecraft; working class writers; topics include slavery and abolition in literature, the democratization of culture, and the transition to romanticism. ENGL BC3176 The Romantic Era. 3 points. Romantic writers in their intellectual, historical, and political context, with reference to contemporary movements in philosophy, music, and the plastic arts. Authors include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P.B. Shelley, and Keats. An emphasis on close reading of the poetry.
ENGL 3177001/00508 T Th 8:40am - 9:55am Jayne 3.00 31/40
302 Barnard Hall Hildebrand ENGL BC3178 Victorian Poetry and Criticism. 3 points. Poetry, art, and aesthetics in an industrial society, with emphasis on the role of women as artists and objects. Poems by Tennyson, Arnold, Christina and D.G. Rossetti, Swinburne, and Elizabeth and Robert Browning; criticism by Ruskin, Arnold, and Wilde; paintings by the Pre- Raphaelites and Whistler; photographs by J.M. Cameron. ENGL BC3179 AMERICAN LITERATURE TO 1800. 3.00 points. This course surveys American literature written before 1800. While we will devote some attention to the literary traditions that preceded British colonization, most of our readings will be of texts written in English between 1620 and 1800. These texts--histories, autobiographies, poems, plays, and novels--illuminate the complexity of this period of American culture. They tell stories of pilgrimage, colonization, and genocide; private piety and public life; manuscript and print publication; the growth of national identity (political, cultural, and literary); Puritanism, Quakerism, and Deism; race and gender; slavery and the beginnings of a movement towards its abolition. We will consider, as we read, the ways that these stories overlap and interconnect, and the ways that they shape texts of different periods and genres Fall 2025: ENGL BC3179 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollme
ENGL 3179001/00510 M W 11:40am - 12:55pm Lisa Gordis 3.00 10/35
409 Barnard Hall ENGL BC3180 AMERICAN LITERATURE 1800-1870. 3.00 points. Texts from the late Republican period through the Civil War explore a range of intersecting literary, political, philosophical, and theological issues, including the literary implications of American independence, the status of Native Americans, the nature of the self, slavery and abolition, gender and woman's sphere, and the Civil War. Writers include Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, and Emily Dickinson Spring 2026: ENGL BC3180 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3180001/00157 M W 8:40am - 9:55am Victor Zarour 3.00 29/35
409 Barnard Hall Zarzar ENGL BC3181 AMERICAN LITERATURE 1871-1945. 3.00 points. This interdisciplinary course situates late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature within the context of historical and cultural change. Students read works by Whitman, Twain, James, Griggs, Wharton, Faulkner, and Hurston alongside political and cultural materials including Supreme Court decisions, geometric treatises, composite photography and taxidermy ENGL BC3183 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1945. 3.00 points. In the wake of World War II, the so-called American Century rises out nt of the ashes of fascism, haunted by the specter of bombs blurring the boundary between victory and defeat. An ideological civil war ensues, punctuated by literary resistance to grand narratives and their discontents. Authors include Ellison, O’Connor, Ginsberg, Bishop, Pynchon, Robinson, Merrill, Morrison, Didion, and Wallace Fall 2025: ENGL BC3183 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3183001/00511 M W 1:10pm - 2:25pm Maura Spiegel 3.00 26/30
409 Barnard Hall ENGL BC3185 MODRN BRITISH # AMERCAN POETRY. 3.00 points. Poetry written in English during the past century, discussed in the context of modernism, postmodernism, literary theory, and changing social and technological developments. Students will participate in shaping the syllabus and leading class discussion. Authors may include Yeats, Williams, Eliot, Moore, Bishop, Rich, Ginsberg, Stevens, O Hara, Plath, Brooks, Jordan, Walcott, Alexie, and many others Fall 2025: ENGL BC3185 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3188001/00996 M W 1:10pm - 2:25pm Mary Cregan 3 10/35
223 Milbank Hall ENGL BC3189 POSTMODERNISM. 3.00 points. This course examines how postmodernism’s profound distrust of language and narrative transforms the form and function of literature. Writers include James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Auster, John Ashbery, J.M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Lyn Hejinian. Spring 2026: ENGL BC3189 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrol
ENGL 3189001/00156 T Th 10:10am - 11:25am Kristi-Lynn 3.00 26/40
203 Diana Center Cassaro ENGL BC3192 ESTRANGEMNT/EXILE GLOB NOVELS. 4.00 points. “...but she had no worldly wisdom; her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life; she would fail to defend her most manifest rights, to consult her most legitimate advantage. An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world.” Charlotte Brontë on her late sister the novelist Emily Brontë. This course examines the development of literary fiction in response to history. Through a diverse selection of books—novels, novellas, and verse—spanning nearly 2400 years, we will investigate the seemingly contradictory condition of the author as both outsider and insider. We will look at how writers from various backgrounds have addressed social and political alienation, national and personal crisis, through narrative. The uniqueness of the texts lies not just in how implicated they are in history, but in their resistance against generalization and intolerance. Two areas of critical concern govern the selection: Romanticism brings to focus responses to estrangement and injustice; and Modernism is seen as individual expression to alienation and exile. However, implicit also is the desire to complicate the distinction between those two schools. What unites these concerns, however, is how our writers’ artistic commitment, as both witnesses and participants, creates an opportunity for literature to reveal more than the author intends and, on the other hand, more than what power desires. Barnard College Catalogue 2025-2026 331 ENGL BC3193 CRITICAL WRITING. 4.00 points. Open to all students.This course teaches clear writing and provides exposure to a range of interpretative strategies. Frequent short papers. Required of all English majors before the end of the junior year. Sophomores are encouraged to take it in the spring semester even before officially declaring their major. Transfer students should plan to take it in the fall semester Fall 2025: ENGL BC3193 lment Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3195001/00841 T Th 10:10am - 11:25am Kristi-Lynn 3.00 23/4
203 Diana Center Cassaro AFEN BC3196 HARLEM RENAISSANCE LITERATURE. 4.00 points. Home to Harlem focuses on the relationship between art, activism and social justice during the Harlem/ New Negro Renaissance. Exploring the cultural contexts and aesthetic debates that animated Harlem in 1920s to 1930s, the course discusses the politics of literary and theatrical production, while exploring the fashioning and performance of New Negro identity through fiction, poetry, essays, and artwork. Topics considered include: role of Africa/slavery/the south in New Negro expression, patronage, passing, primitivism/popular culture, black dialect as literary language, and the problematics of creating a “racial” art in/for a community comprised of differences in gender, class, sexuality, and geographical origin Spring 2026: AFEN BC3196 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enro
ENGL 3242001/00024 M W 11:40am - 12:55pm Ken Chen 3.00 22/50
Ll001 Milstein Center ENGL BC3243 ABSENT MOTHERS, WICKED STEPMOTHERS. 4.00 points. Why are stepmothers and stepdaughters inevitable enemies in folk and fairy tales? Why are fathers blameless and biological mothers absent (and usually dead)? And how do these narratives, so deeply woven into our own media and language, affect our sense of our own lived reality? In this course, we’ll untangle the complicated web of relationships between mothers, daughters, and stepmothers in folk and fairy tales, from ancient Rome to current cinema. We’ll read analytic psychology, feminist literary theory, cultural history, and other critical perspectives to help us analyze the absent mother, virginal daughter, hapless father, and evil stepmother tropes across time and space, so we can defamiliarize these familiar figures and develop a deeper understanding of how and why they dominate the popular imagination. This is an upper-level course, with priority for juniors and seniors Fall 2025: ENGL BC3243 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3243001/00636 W 2:10pm - 4:00pm Wendy Schor- 4.00 17/16
406 Barnard Hall Haim ENGL BC3244 PROUST: SWANN’S WAY. 4.00 points. This class is organised around one book, Swann’s Way, volume one of Marcel Proust’s magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time, a work that is central to the history of the novel. Due to the length and complexity of the six volumes that make up In Search of Lost Time, it is not a novel that benefits from a schematic reading. It calls, instead, on our attention to be paid in an unusually close manner. It is a novel that is committed to the details, to close observation and the expansive and meditative nature of the life of the mind. Therefore, as well as being about Proust’s work, the class is also concerned with questions of attention. As Adorno argued, In Search of Lost Time is a book that is “against the brutal untruth of a subsuming form forced on from above…” Students will get a chance to read Swann’s Way—a book that is just under 500 pages long—in great depth over the course of the semester. And because the adjective “Proustian”, it could be argued, has come to refer to works that have both succeeded as well as preceded Proust himself, students will be introduced to works by authors who might have influenced Proust — such as: Baudelaire, Balzac, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, John Ruskin and Ralph Waldo Emerson — as well as examples of writers who had been inspired by Proust’s work — such as: Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Javier Marias, Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald. Creative and analytic close reading will be the primary tool of analysis ENGL BC3246 WRITING THE MEDIEVAL SELF. 3.00 points. The late Middle Ages and early Renaissance saw an explosion lment in the use of the first-person singular "I" by European writers of narrative texts. Although these narratives – among them dream visions, philosophical allegories, spiritual autobiographies, and straight-up novels – do not always correspond to modern ideas about autobiography, they nonetheless demonstrate a growing interest in such "autobiographical" topics as personal identity, sexual difference, mental illness, and disability, even as they experiment with a variety of literary forms and raise fundamental questions about the relationship between truth and writing. Writers will include Augustine, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Christine de Pisan, Thomas Hoccleve, Julian of Norwich and Teresa de Cartagena, among others. No foreign language experience is required for this course, but knowledge of Latin or Romance languages may be useful
ENGL 3418001/00093 M W 11:40am - 12:55pm Jennifer 3.00 31/60
504 Diana Center Boylan ENRE BC3810 LITERARY APPROACHES TO BIBLE. 4.00 points. Interpretive strategies for reading the Bible as a work with literary dimensions. Considerations of poetic and rhetorical structures, narrative techniques, and feminist exegesis will be included. Topics for investigation include the influence of the Bible on literature Spring 2026: ENRE BC3810 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollm
ENGL 3873001/11761 T 10:10am - 12:00pm David Yerkes 4.00 16/18
612 Philosophy Hall ENGL UN3920 MEDIEVAL ENGLISH TEXTS. 4.00 points. The class will read the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the original Middle English language of its unique surviving copy of circa 1400, and will discuss both the poem's language and the poem's literary meritThe class will read the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the original Middle English language of its unique surviving copy of circa 1400, and will discuss both the poem's language and the poem's literary merit Fall 2025: ENGL UN3920 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3920001/11762 M 4:10pm - 6:00pm David Yerkes 4.00 20/20
602 Lewisohn Hall ENGL GU4263 Literature of the 17th C. 3 points. This lecture course surveys the non-dramatic literature of seventeenth- century England, with particular attention to its prose writings. The course will focus on topics including the new politics of the Jacobean court; the tensions leading to the civil wars; the so-called “scientific revolution” and its discontents; and the challenges of the Restoration, including plague and fire. Authors studied will include Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, John Donne, Aemelia Lanyer, George Herbert, Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish. Abraham Cowley, and Katherine Philips. ENGL GU4458 Young Romance. 3.00 points. The literary mode we call “romance” has been enormously popular and influential from its origins in Hellenistic antiquity to current science fiction, and at all levels of textual ambition from popular culture to canonical literature. Within this mass of material, one constant element is romance’s encounter with boundaries. This course will explore such boundary moments in texts from the 5th to the 20th centuries: boundaries and transgressions of desire (romances of marriage and adultery), of time (the reimagining of antiquity), of national foundation, of geography (settings in a fantasy east), of gender, and of class, indeed the boundary of the human and the monstrous ment
502 Diana Center ENGL BC3993 SENIOR SEMINAR IN FILM AND LITERATURE. 4.00 points. Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors with a Film Studies concentration and Barnard senior Film Studies majors. To see the current course description, visit the English Department website: https://english.barnard.edu/english/senior-seminars Spring 2026: ENGL BC3993 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
405 Barnard Hall ENGL BC3997 SENIOR SEMINAR IN ENGLISH. 4.00 points. Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. To see the current course description for each section, visit the English Department website: https://english.barnard.edu/english/senior-seminars Fall 2025: ENGL BC3997 Course Section/Call Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 4975001/13050 T 10:10am - 12:00pm Jean Howard 4.00 13/18
317 Hamilton Hall Barnard College Catalogue 2025-2026 459 RELI GU4999 GLOBAL INDIGENOUS RELIGIOUS HISTORIES. 4.00 points. Nomads, natives, peasants, hill people, aboriginals, hunter-gatherers, First Nations—these are just a handful of the terms in use to define indigenous peoples globally. The names these groups use to describe themselves, as well as the varying religious practices, attitudes, and beliefs among these populations are far more numerous and complex. For much of recorded history however, colonial centers of power have defined indigenous peoples racially and often in terms of lacking religion; as pagan, barbarian, non-modern, and without history or civilization. Despite this conundrum of identity and classification, indigenous religious traditions often have well-documented and observable pasts. This course considers the challenges associated with studying indigenous religious history, as well as the changing social, political, and legal dimensions of religious practice among native groups over time and in relationship to the state. Organized thematically and geographically, we will engage with classic works of ethnohistory, environmental history, indigenous studies, anthropology, and religious studies as well as primary sources that include legal documentation, military records, personal testimony, and oral narrative SIPA IA6700 Inside the Situation Room. 3.00 Points. geopolitical competition, it is more important than ever for future policymakers to understand why and how foreign policy decisions are made. Inside the Situation Room, co-taught by Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo, employs insights from diverse academic fields—including political psychology, domestic politics, and international relations—and the direct experience of high-level principals in the room to understand the key factors which underpin a nation’s most crucial decisions. This course allows students to engage with a range of case studies and examine decision-making in a variety of historical and contemporary contexts, from the search for Osama bin Laden, to the “red line” in Syria, to negotiating with Iran. Students will be taught how to analyze and understand the complex interplay between individual psychology, domestic politics, public opinion, bureaucracy, the international environment, and other factors which feed into decisions about foreign policy—from crisis diplomacy to the use of force, signaling and perception, intelligence and its analysis, the deployment of other instruments of statecraft, and more. Through this course, students will think carefully and analytically about how leaders and other actors view the world, how they arrive at their decisions, and how various social, political, and psychological factors shape the policies they devise to promote their interests abroad. For more information, visit: https://www.sipa.columbia.edu/situationroom Term Section Call Number Instructor Times/Location Fall 2025 001 15427 Keren Yarhi-Milo W 1:10pm - 2:50pm
