This seminar invites advanced BA and MA students to dive into the audiovisual essay as both a creative and academic practice. Instead of writing about films, you’ll explore how moving images, sound, and editing – the stuff that films are made of – can be used to think through and communicate complex ideas. We’ll look at examples by creators like Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López, Catherine Grant, and Christian Keathley to see how video essays expand what academic work can look like. Alongside these discussions, you’ll make your own short audiovisual pieces using tools like Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve. The focus is on learning by doing: developing your ideas through experimentation, feedback, and workshop sessions. By the end, your work will be shown in peer-reviewed screenings and published online, giving you experience in both critical thinking and creative expression. Overall, the seminar brings together media philosophy, film theory, and hands-on production in a collaborative, practice-based setting.

There is no writer more central to American horror and weird fiction than H.P. Lovecraft. But how does he fare when his work is adapted into other media, from film to comics to TV and video games? The seminar explores not just the theory of adaptation and the questions that arise generally when text becomes (audio)visual: it also asks specifically after the place of H.P. Lovecraft in this situation, a writer whose work is very often considered unadaptable, whose language makes use of the possibility of descriptive paradox and plays with the unseen.

“There once was a man from Nantucket.” Thus begins what is arguably the Great(est) American Novel, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. (Of course, these are not the opening words of Melville’s novel; I stole this joke from an episode on Moby-Dick on the Better Read Than Dead podcast which does an excellent job of showing just how weird and wonderful the book is.)

This seminar is devoted exclusively to Melville’s 1851 novel; that is to say, we spend the semester reading Moby-Dick and reading it carefully. Even if you have never read the novel before, you may be familiar with Captain Ahab or the eponymous white whale from popular culture. This seminar gives you the opportunity to find out for yourselves what the hype is all about and whether it is justified.

Close personal bonds between men have been central themes in American literature since the founding of the US, and they have consistently drawn critical interest within literary and cultural studies. Scholarship has often centered on the homoerotic dimensions of close emotional connections between men or on how male bonding can be based in misogyny as well as hegemonic or toxic masculinity. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to non-erotic forms of intimacy, affection, vulnerability, and emotional openness in male relationships – or to non-misogynistic forms of intellectual connection, mutual understanding, respect, and camaraderie that can positively characterize male friendships. In this seminar, we take a closer look at figurations of male friendship across different historical epochs and across a range of genres. While informed by the insights of gender and queer studies, our focus will be on the constructive and emotionally rich dimensions of male friendships as they have been portrayed in American literature and film.

When people use the word “secular,” they generally mean the opposite of religious. For many, the secular entails adherence to science, democracy, and the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people. Indeed, it is often equated with modernity. But how should we assess secularism today? Does the rise of Christian nationalisms in the United States and Europe represent a departure from secularism or, paradoxically, its apotheosis? Is secularism our best chance to guarantee gender, sexual, and bodily autonomy for LGBTQ+ people and women or is it a dead end? This course explores such questions by interrogating the theory and history of secularism and performing close readings of literary texts from the 19th century to the present. In so doing, we map secularism’s limits and often very weird side-effects, including new ways of being religious—for the secular and religious are rarely as separate as is often assumed.

In the deeply divided United States of today, separate media spheres have become a driver of polarization. Particularly the right has created its own media environment that is capable of touting and repeating a reality of its own across multiple media formats, channels, and platforms. We will train our eyes on concrete examples, making ample use of online archives. Among our case studies will be political and evangelical talk radio, early forays into conservative television programming, the emergence of Fox News, and the explosion of right-wing content on the internet – on blogs, Youtube formats, podcasts, etc. Our goal is to understand how the ideologies, aesthetics, and infrastructures of conservative media were able to coalesce into the production of an alternative reality.

Historical memory can be understood as selective interpretations of the past that shape and frame individual and collective identities, norms, and values in the present. Memory is constantly debated and contested. Various groups and institutions vie for political and cultural authority, claiming to remember the “true” version of the past. This graduate seminar introduces students to the role that memory played in U.S. history. Looking at several selected case studies, it sheds light on how the memory of America’s military conflicts, racial minorities, and social movements shaped U.S. nationalism and related ideas about race and gender. Topics to be covered include the memory of the American Civil War, the memory of slavery, the memory of World War II, and the memory of the African American freedom struggle.