Graduate Course Catalog

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Course Catalog (Graduate)

HYBRID WORKSHOP (CW5005)

The Hybrid Workshop is one of the most important aspects of graduate studies, where students bring together their varied interests to create a multigenre, interdisciplinary text. Connections to the visual and performative are welcome. The Hybrid Workshop is meant to facilitate connections between students seminar courses and the themes of these workshops. Instead of focusing on works of a particular genre for an entire semester, students gain a historical understanding of the evolution of hybrid texts, paying particular attention to works from the beginning of the 20th century. They also learn the importance of presenting their work as a chapbook and/or writing that engages the visual arts. The Hybrid Workshop is as much about creative practice as it is about the articulation of the process and learnings behind that practice. Through a series of self-relfective essays students will also learn ways in which they can connect their practice to their critical thinking and readings.

EMILY DICKINSON: LIFE AND AFTERLIFE (CW5011)

The course is based on gaining a deeper understanding of Emily Dickinson and her life, particularly in relation to American literature, history, and the visual arts. In doing so, students will use several different modes of expression and articulation to present their thoughts on Emily Dickinson. There will be written responses to specific aspects of her work, creative exercises based on her life as well as principles at work in her work-the latter will be particularly helpful in understanding her work. Students will have the opportunity to explore video and visual arts as modes of thinking critically and creatively. Each week, one student will be responsible for presenting a curation of poems on a particular theme.

INDIA LITERARY PRACTICUM (CW5012)

The India Literary Practicum offers students a truly multilingual and international approach to creative writing, translation, and publishing. In
this three-week iteration of the Fieldwork Module, students will travel to India for a deep immersion in two different literary and artistic communities. Convening first in France, students will travel to India for two weeks and two days. They will spend time in Odisha and Bangalore, where they will gather inspiration for creative work and get to know more about the field of publishing in both international and regional context. Creative writing exercises will be interspersed with talks and meetings with editors, translators, and agents. Students will read contemporary Indian poetry and prose and interact with communities working in different languages and cities. They will maintain a creative journal of their work, participate in discussions, and write a hybrid, self-reflective essay at the end of the semester.
Offered during the summer and possible during the winter break as well, this course welcomes students from other AMICAL and ECOLAS institutions.

MFA MODULE (CW5020)

Topics for these intensive, practical modules change every semester. May be taken twice for credit.

ULYSSES, MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM, AND NOW (CW5073)

James Joyce’s _Ulysses_, cataloguing life in Dublin in 1904, is one of the great modernist novels, aligning artistic creativity with the opening of new political and social possibilities. Through slow attentive reading of Joyce’s novel, and extensive creative experiment taking Ulysses as a model, students will explore ways in which variations in literary style intensify relations to local spaces and global forces, and encode responses to the difficulties and opportunities of late capitalism.

TOPICS IN CREATIVE WRITING (CW5091)

Topics vary by semester

THESIS (CW5095)

This course marks the culmination of a student's graduate studies in creative writing. Offered in the last semester of the final year of their studies, this course will guide students as they put together their book-length MFA thesis under the supervision of their mentor. The course will conclude with a final presentation that is open to the public.

PLANETARY AND ENVIRONMENTAL DATA SCIENCE (DS5010)

Environmental systems are controlled by multiple factors coming from outer space, atmosphere, ocean, earth systems. We want to understand many existential questions that are related to environmental systems. What is happening with our current environmental system? Is there an alternative system that we can live on? How can we learn from other planetary
systems? How can we prevent ourselves from being destroyed or becoming extinct? To answer these questions, Environmental Scientists and Data Scientists will face the challenge of making decisions based on their understanding of the environmental systems and the abundant availability of data. We will explore remote sensing techniques, spectroscopy imaging, planetary atmosphere, astrochemistry, habitability, among other things. The course encourages students to think critically and reason quantitatively about an environmental problem rather than just focusing on getting a specific answer. Students will learn to read scientific articles, to synthesize data and to use statistical models to provide answers with estimates of uncertainty that are critical for decision makers. The course will also focus on visualizing data, communicating results in a way that allows stakeholders to make decisions and the public audience to understand. This course will have hands-on practical work with real data, R or Python, statistical and/or machine learning software packages. This course is an integrated course that combines knowledge that students acquired in different sub-fields disciplines: science, computer science, and writing. This course is therefore crucial for students to conduct a throughout (?) research project from starting with finding data source to writing up their finding. For graduate students, research skills such as data science project design and implementation will be emphasized.

HUMAN RIGHTS AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES (DS5039)

This course joins two seemingly disparate disciplines – law and science – in an attempt to understand more fully the dense, multidimensional nature of the digital revolution and how we are going to live with it. Human Rights and Digital Technology is designed as an interdisciplinary primer, a guide to examining the critical issues that shape our use of digital technology.

DATA SCIENCE I: METHODS AND CONTEXT (DS5060)

This project-based course introduces data science by looking at the whole cycle of activities involved in data science projects. Students will learn how to think about problems with rigor and creativity, ethically applying data science skills to address those problems. The course project will address the theoretical, mathematical and computational challenges involved in data science.