32 courses with the subject GNCS, 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.
GNCS 150Revolution, Evolution, and the Global Nineteenth Century1
(Same as HIST 150 ) The world as we know it largely came into being during the nineteenth century. Marked by social, political, cultural, and technological transformations, the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of modernity out of the instabilities of change. Railways crisscrossed continents; European empires expanded; agricultural laborers flocked into mushrooming urban centers; and the enslaved, the colonized, and the disenfranchised around the world fought for liberty and citizenship. In this course, we consider these and other nineteenth-century transformations in a global context by focusing on the interconnections between North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Our investigations are organized around five core areas: revolutions, emancipations, evolution and progress, popular culture, and the domestic sphere. Students analyze a variety of sources, including novels, plays, short stories, photographs, early films, paintings, periodicals and pamphlets, government documents, letters, music, and scientific works. The course is team taught with occasional guest lectures. Susan Zlotnick and Lydia Murdoch. Susan Zlotnick. Three 50-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
GNCS 152Smallpox: The Biology and History of a Disease1
(Same as BIOL 152 , HIST 152 , and STS 152 ) Smallpox was one of the deadliest diseases in history: it killed millions, often leaving survivors scarred or blinded. Its eradiation in 1980 also marks one of the great medical victories of the modern era. This course examines smallpox from both biological and historical perspectives. Students explore the workings of the virus, the effects of the disease, the popularization of inoculaton in the eighteenth century, Edward Jenner’s developmemt of the cowpox vaccine and how it protects, and efforts to enforce vaccination globally through some of the earliest state public health initiatives. We also investigate the nineteenth-century origins of the anti-vacciation movement with particular attention to its class, anti-imperial, and religious underpinnings. Lydia Murdoch. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
GNCS 209Jane Austen and Music in the Domestic Sphere0.5
(Same as MUSI 209 ) Music is a significant thematic thread running through most of Jane Austen’s novels, reflecting a lively and varied musical practice in the domestic sphere of late Georgian Britain. In this six-week course we examine musical scenes, settings, and characters in the novels, and study the role of music in the extended Austen family through the primary sources of its digitized music collection. We analyze musical works known to Jane Austen and her contemporaries, explore their role in household instruction and entertainment, and also critique musical scenes in selected film adaptations of Austen’s novels. Kathryn Libin.
Ability to read music. One course in music or British literature, or permission of the instructor. First six-week course. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Fall
GNCS 223The Gothic and the Supernatural in Japanese Literature1
(Same as ASIA 223 and JAPA 223 ) This course introduces students to Japanese supernatural stories. We interpret the hidden psyche of the Japanese people and culture that create such bizarre tales. We see not only to what extent the supernatural creatures - demons, vampires, and mountain witches - in these stories represent the “hysteria” of Japanese commoners resulting from social and cultural oppression, but also to what extent these supernatural motifs have been adopted and modified by writers of various literary periods. This course consists of four parts; female ghosts, master authors of ghost stories, Gothic fantasy and dark urban psyche. Hiromi Dollase.
One course in language, literature, culture or Asian Studies, or permission of the instructor. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
GNCS 225Early American Literature: Authoring Self, Nation, Worlds1
(Same as ANST 225 and ENGL 225 ) This course introduces students to American literatures from before European colonial settlement to the period preceding the Civil War, exploring the significance of literary authorship during an era of authoring a new nation. Through a range of genres including Native American creation stories, colonial histories of exploration, Puritan trial transcripts, personal narratives, poetry, Romantic tales, and sentimental fiction, we trace the literary strategies that writers (and other creative agents) use to claim legitimacy as authors alongside changing ideas about who counts as an author and what it means to “author” something. We also consider how authors respond and contribute to historical circumstances such as settler colonialism, Native resistance, slavery, abolitionism, the nation’s founding, and the literary market. Material texts are a key method of inquiry for this class; we focus on early physical forms in which our readings circulated. To that end, we make two visits to Special Collections, and you are asked to explore digital archives relating to several readings. Using archival artifacts, we consider the shifting forms and reception of literature, especially by authors traditionally regarded at the margins of the literary, and we consider “history” as another kind of textual production that circulates about the past. Blevin Shelnutt. This course satisfies the pre-1800 or a pre-1900 requirement for the English major. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ENGL 226 ) This course provides exposure to the diverse group of authors who wrote during the 1865-1925 period and who belong to no school. True, some were realists, naturalists, and modernists, but these terms and even general themes, such as ‘individualism’, do not apply to all. The one term that defines the period is ‘difference’ (read variously as contention, invidious comparison, change, diversity, gender dissidence). This course simulates the great rupture between nineteenth-century prose styles and those of the twentieth century, but you will be mindful of the earlier radical streak in American fiction, if I have anything to say about it! Likely authors: Henry James, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Du Bois, Hurston, Toomer, T.S. Eliot. Wendy Graham. This course satisfies the REGS or the pre-1900 requirement for the English major. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
GNCS 230The French Revolution: Local Origins and Global Impact1
(Same as HIST 230 ) The French Revolution remains one of the definitive moments in modern history. Over the course of the Revolution, recognizable themes emerged that became the hallmarks of modern society, themes such as human rights, universal suffrage, nationalism, and feminism. This course examines how many of these ideals originated in not just the Enlightenment, but also within the institutions of Old Regime France, an absolute monarchy and emerging colonial force. It looks at how the promises of revolutionary ideals affected peoples unequally both in France and its colonies, especially Saint-Domingue. How, between 1789 and 1799, did France move from being a constitutional monarchy to a republic to an oligarchy and finally, to an imperial dictatorship? We pay special attention to the connections between the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution in considering the Revolution’s global legacy. Sumita Choudhury. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ENGL 248 ) In this course, we consider how the concepts of revolution and the sublime shaped the themes and forms that were central to the Romantic imagination. As heated writings evoking the political sublime were emerging from debates about the French Revolution, young poets were transforming old forms to fathom connections between the sublime in mind and in nature. Revolution and sublime are spaces of formlessness, expansiveness and volatility, the bleeding edges where rules about how we relate to our world and each other break down. We enter these spaces together through the poems and prose of this period, and see how writers sought transformation—for themselves and their writing—through encounters with nature, dreams, intoxication, gothic landscapes, and ghosts. Our survey also marks some of the major political developments of the period, including feminist and abolitionist movements in England. We write frequently, considering how to build informative and revelatory critical arguments out of the observations and oddities each individual text calls forth. Katie Gemmill. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ENGL 249 ) Study of Victorian culture through the prose writers of the period. This course explores the strategies of nineteenth-century writers who struggled to find meaning and order in a changing world. It focuses on such issues as industrialization, the woman question, imperialism, aestheticism, and decadence, paying particular attention to the relationship between literary and social discourses. Authors may include nonfiction prose writers such as Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde as well as fiction writers such as Disraeli, Gaskell, Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Fall
GNCS 250Palestine, Christian Zionism, and the Evangelical Empire1
(Same as HIST 250 ) Zionism was not the first modern movement for a Jewish state in Palestine. In fact, by the time Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist movement in 1897, British evangelicals had already spent most of the nineteenth century urging their government to occupy Palestine and help restore “the ancient and right lords of the soil, the Jews!” Their fascination with Jews and the Holy Land fueled an ever-expanding British political, missionary, touristic, and scholarly presence in Palestine. American Protestant churches soon shared the interest of their British counterparts, sponsoring tours of “The Land of the Bible.” This Intensive traces the cultural and institutional changes that led many groups calling Ottoman Palestine home–as the land’s “rightful” inhabitants. During the first part of this Intensive, we consider recent historical scholarship along with travel guides, visual art, sermons, and a variety of other sources. For the second part of the class, the students consult with the professor and together choose an important individual, institution, or event in the approximately two-hundred-year-history of Protestant efforts to “restore” Jews to Palestine. Students then compile a bibliography, gather primary and secondary sources, and write a mentored paper based on them. During this process, students meet regularly with the professor and/or other Vassar faculty to discuss the progress of their research. The sources to be collected and analyzed may include (but need not be limited to) published sermons, videos of religious services, fine art, archaeological bulletins, reviews of plays, Bible-themed pageants, or other dramatic presentations, popular fiction, missionary groups’ fundraising brochures, proselytizing materials, and European consular records. Joshua Schreier. One 2-hour period. Course Format: INT
The specific focus of the course varies each year, and may center on a literary movement (e.g., Transcendentalism, the Beats, the Black Mountain School), a single work and its milieu (e.g., Moby-Dick and the American novel, Call It Sleep and the rise of ethnic modernism); a historical period (e.g., the Great Awakening, the Civil War), a region (e.g., Southern literature, the literature of the West), or a genre (e.g., the sentimental-domestic novel, American satire, the literature of travel/migration, American autobiography, traditions of reportage, American environmentalist writing). Blevin Shelnutt.
(Same as HIST 254 and URBS 254 ) This course examines some of the key transformations that Victorians experienced, including industrialization, the rise of a class-based society, political reform, and the women’s movement. We explore why people then, and historians since, have characterized the Victorian age as a time of progress and optimism as well as an era of anxiety and doubt. Lydia Murdoch. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27.
(Same as ENGL 255 ) Readings vary but include novels by Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.
(Same as ART 262 ) A survey of major movements and figures in European art, 1789-1848, focusing on such issues as the contemporaneity of antiquity in revolutionary history painting, the eclipse of mythological and religious art by an art of social observation and political commentary, the romantic cult of genius, imagination, and creative self-definition, and the emergence of landscape painting in an industrializing culture. Brian Lukacher.
ART 105 or ART 106, or permission of the instructor. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
GNCS 263Painters of Modern Life: Realism, Impressionism, Symbolism1
(Same as ART 263 ) A survey of major movements and figures in European art, 1848-1900, examining the realist, impressionist, and symbolist challenges to the dominant art institutions, aesthetic assumptions, and social values of the period; also addressing how a critique of modernity and a sociology of aesthetics can be seen developing through these phases of artistic experimentation. Brian Lukacher.
ART 105 or ART 106 , or permission of the instructor. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
GNCS 266Yellowbacks: The Exhibition
unit(s) (Same as ENGL 266 ) The ancestor of today’s cheap paperback novel, yellowbacks were a distinctive feature of the Victorian publishing landscape. Characterized by bold chromolithographed images on yellow strawboard covers (hence the “yellowback” name), these inexpensive reprints made literature affordable for the expanding reading audience of nineteenth-century Britain. Works by best-selling authors of the day, such as Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Charles Dickens, appeared in yellowback editions as did those by older popular writers, including Jane Austen. Travel and etiquette guides, sensation novels, and comic series were also a staple of yellowback publishing. Originally sold from stalls in the newly-opened railway stations of Victorian Britain, these one-volume editions are indelibly associated with the speed, mobility, and modernity that the railroad itself represents. In this intensive, students work with a collection of yellowbacks recently donated to Special Collections in order to prepare for a spring 2025 exhibition to be mounted in the Thompson Library. Students conduct original research on such topics as Victorian print culture, railway reading, the impact of industrialization and new technologies on publishing, the commodification of art, literacy and mass readership, popular taste and popular fiction. Students work directly with the materials in Special Collections, and their research and writing form the basis of the library’s exhibition. Susan Zlotnick.
Permission of the instructor. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: INT
GNCS 277History and the Politics of Grief1
(Same as HIST 277 ) How is the recognition of grief linked with modern ideals of rights and citizenship? In this intensive, students examine the mourning rituals—funerals, cemeteries, dress, postmortem photographs, relics, and jewelry—that proliferated and took on new meanings in nineteenth-century Britain, marking new ways of embodying and visualizing grief. Along with literary and personal expressions of loss, we explore how public commemorations of the dead gained political value in movements and moments such as factory regulation, abolition of slavery, urban reform, child welfare, and the First World War. We begin the semester with discussion of common readings and analysis of material objects from Vassar’s Loeb Art Center. Students then undertake supervised work on independent research projects (which may explore connections between the long nineteenth-century and present-day mourning practices), peer reviews, and presentations. Lydia Murdoch. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: INT
(Same as ENGL 278 ) Written in 1871-2, Middlemarch is widely considered to be George Eliot’s masterpiece and a landmark of Victorian realism. Eliot’s epic narrative explores the profound changes wrought on a provincial English town by the industrial revolution, the coming of the railroad, scientific discoveries, and democratic reforms. Middlemarch is also, as Virginia Woolf noted, “one of the few English novels written for grownup people.” At its core are three love stories, two disastrous marriages, and Eliot’s guiding principle that “there is no private life which is not determined by a wider public life.” The novel’s length makes it a difficult text to accommodate on a crowded course syllabus. But the intensive format allows students to engage with Middlemarch singly and slowly. The novel is divided into eight books, and students read a book a week over the course of the semester, with time left over for student projects, critical or creative. Susan Zlotnick. Both first and second six-week course. One 75-minute period. Course Format: INT
An interdisciplinary study written over two semesters. The Department. One unit of senior thesis, either GNCS 301- 302 (a year-long option) or GNCS 300 (a one-semester accelerated option). Yearlong course GNCS 301- 302 . One 2-hour period. Course Format: INT
An interdisciplinary study written over two semesters. The Department. One unit of senior thesis, either GNCS 301 -302 (a year-long option) or GNCS 300 (a one-semester accelerated option). Yearlong course GNCS 301 -302. One 2-hour period. Course Format: INT
GNCS 313Historic Costume Collection and Exhibition1
(Same as DRAM 313 ) This course is created to support both the research and study of clothing as artifacts. Students have the opportunity to work with objects from the Vassar College Costume Collection and another community based historical collection. Students conduct research, examine garments, learn various preservation and stabilization techniques for textile preservation, and methods for mounting historic exhibitions. The course is one unit and meets once a week. Explore the Vassar Historic Clothing Collection and its history connected to the individuals who created its garments. Throughout the semester we center on the importance of the manufacturing labor force of the late 19th and early 20th century, to make visible and tangible many silent histories of the seamstresses and tailors from that time. Students conduct research on the makers of those garments and learn about their work practices while also assessing the importance of the fabrics that were used to create each garment, examine how certain textiles were manufactured during the period, as well as study the origins of the fabric itself in order to gain understanding of how many of these materials were created and distributed during that time. Susan Hiner, Kenisha Kelly. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ANST 329 and ENGL 329 ) Exploration of the literary concepts of realism and naturalism focusing on the theory and practice of fiction between 1870 and 1910, the first period in American literary history to be called modern. The course may examine past critical debates as well as the current controversy over realism in fiction. Attention is given to such questions as what constitutes reality in fiction, as well as the relationship of realism to other literary traditions. Authors may include Henry James, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Charles Chestnutt, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and Willa Cather. This course satisfies the pre-1900 requirement for the English major. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
GNCS 351Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature1
(Same as ENGL 351 ) Study of a major author (e.g., Coleridge, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde) or a group of authors (the Brontes, the Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters) or a topical issue (representations of poverty; literary decadence; domestic angels and fallen women; transformations of myth in Romantic and Victorian literature) or a major genre (elegy, epic, autobiography). Susan Zlotnick.
(Same as ENGL 352 and WFQS 352 ) In-depth study of Romantic-era texts with the option of pursuing a select group of writers under the rubric of a specific genre, methodological approach, topic or theme. This course aims to deepen students’ expertise in one or more of the topics covered in ENGL 248 .
Open to Juniors and Seniors with two units of 200-level work in English, or with permission of the instructor. This course satisfies the pre-1900 requirement for the English major. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
GNCS 354History and the Politics of Grief1
(Same as HIST 354 ) How is the recognition of grief linked with modern ideals of rights and citizenship? In this intensive, students examine the mourning rituals—funerals, cemeteries, dress, postmortem photographs, relics, and jewelry—that proliferated and took on new meanings in nineteenth-century Britain, marking new ways of embodying and visualizing grief. Along with literary and personal expressions of loss, we explore how public commemorations of the dead gained political value in movements and moments such as factory regulation, abolition of slavery, urban reform, child welfare, and the First World War. We begin the semester with discussion of common readings and analysis of material objects from Vassar’s Loeb Art Center. Students then undertake supervised work on independent research projects (which may explore connections between the long nineteenth-century and present-day mourning practices), peer reviews, and presentations. Lydia Murdoch. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: INT
GNCS 355Childhood and Children in Nineteenth-Century Britain1
(Same as HIST 355 and WFQS 355 ) This course examines both the social constructions of childhood and the lived experiences of children in imperial and domestic Britain during the long nineteenth century. We analyze new ideals of childhood arising at the beginning of this period and explore how these ideals—of childhood innocence and dependence, for example—applied to the experiences of actual children in vastly different ways. Thus, a main theme of the course is how age categories intersect with racial, class, gender, and national identities. Topics include the relationships between children and adults, child labor, sexuality, gender, education, welfare, and the ways in which ideals of childhood upheld imperialism. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of childhood; we examine a variety of primary sources ranging from parliamentary reports and memoirs to photographs and children’s literature. Lydia Murdoch. One 2-hour period. Course Format: CLS
