With his radical intervention, Martin Luther changed the understanding of the Bible, the way Christians read the Bible, and the way people understand the church and salvation. In this course, we will discuss some of the key writings of Luther, their historic significance, and their impact in early modern times and on the formation of modern cultures since the 16th century.

“Transfer Foundations” is a course designed especially for first-semester transfer students intending to study in the Arts and Humanities. Many transfer students report that the transition from community college to UC Berkeley is one of the most challenging moments in their educational careers. This course is designed to support that transition by introducing students to key methods in the humanities. We'll explore these methods in detail and in explicit, transparent, and demystifying ways.

How does poetry address the problem of surviving unprecedented loss in the modern period while also dealing with the unacknowledged losses suffered by lives on the sexual margins, for whom the challenge of survival takes shape under the punitive social forces of law and medicine? In this seminar we will take up the case of C.P. Cavafy, an Alexandrian writing in Modern Greek during the first third of the twentieth century, and investigate how Cavafy’s innovative poetic form grapples with historical loss and gay male sexuality from the periphery of empire.

How do nonlinguistic forms of meaning making (semiosis) relate to language, and what kinds of interest do literary writers show in these non-linguistic practices in different times and places? In this seminar we will take up the case of music-making as a semiotic practice and investigate what different kinds of literary interest in music might consist of.

How is that a poetic form, genre, or modality--lyric poetry, which, in its innumerable modern versions, is often said to have started somewhere within mid-late 18th century Romanticism, and which continues exerting influence into and across 20th-21st century successive artistic movements/periods known as modernism, avant-gardism, and postmodernism, as well as today's "post-postmodernist" situations--has kept generating such interest, attention, passion, controversy?

What can literature tell us about lives shaped by war and displacement? Over the course of the semester, we will approach this question through a comparative analysis of literary texts that foreground refugee experience. We will read several novels and short stories written by Vietnamese diasporic authors, as well as texts addressing the experiences of refugees in African and global contexts. In our discussions, we will consider several interrelated topics: how do refugee writers render into narrative profound historical ruptures and geographic displacements?