New Courses for Spring 2025

English 429: Debt Slavery

A new upper-level course taught by Dr. David Squires

Systems of debt slavery have structured labor and property relations since antiqui-ty. Since the dismantling of the Atlantic slave trade, however, it has become the preeminent mode of consolidating power relations between international markets, national economies, and individual labor-ers. This course will investigate how liter-ary writers, historians, cultural critics, and government reports comprehend the rela-tionship between human bondage and economic systems. Specifically, we will focus on three sites of debt slavery that cross regional and cultural borders in the Atlantic world. First, we will consider the transition from slavery to sharecropping with fiction from authors such as Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, and Ernest J. Gaines. Next, we’ll take account of the lingering shadows of empire in postcoloni-al regimes with fictional accounts of trans-atlantic commodity trade, such as José E. Rivera’s The Vortex. Finally, we’ll explore neoliberal manifestations of global debt management by reading what, a genera-tion ago, Amitava Kumar termed “World Bank literature,” including a couple of borderland mysteries and a documentary film.

English 211: Prophets, Seers, and Shamans

A new general education literature course taught by Dr. Michael Shea

From poetry’s roots in ancient religious practices to contemporary novels that feature witchcraft and spirit possession, mystical experience has played an im-portant role as both content and form for literary works across history. This course will take a global perspective to consider the relationship between literature and mysticism, broadly defined. We’ll read novels featuring visionary seers, watch films about prophets and shamans, and consider poetic performances that threat-en to summon the divine. Along the way, we’ll ask such questions as: who are these mystical figures? What realities, anxieties, or ways of living do they represent? What can their visions mean, and what do they achieve in the so-called real world? What alternative ways of knowing or being do they project—communal, cultural, or spir-itual? Course texts will be drawn from across the world but will primarily come from the Americas.