Course Descriptions

EDUC 375 - Elementary and Secondary Instrumental Music Methods for Woodwinds and Brass

EDUC 376 - Practicum in Elementary and Secondary Instrumental Music Methods for Woodwinds and Brass

Credits: 1-2
Corequisite: EDUC 375.

Graded Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory. An introduction to the teacher’s role in instructional settings. Includes non-music observations in public schools and a music project in which students observe and participate as instructional aides. Class sessions focus on techniques for observing and recording classroom behavior, relationships between the teaching of reading and the teaching of music, and planning music instruction. Students must complete a placement on both the elementary and the secondary level. To meet the course requirements, students must complete 30 hours of fieldwork during the term. May be taken for a second credit if a different placement is completed. Staff.

EDUC 377 - Elementary and Secondary Instrumental Music Methods for Strings and Percussion

EDUC 378 - Practicum in Elementary and Secondary Instrumental Music Methods for Strings and Percussion.

EDUC 401 - Directed Individual Study

EDUC 402 - Directed Individual Study

EDUC 403 - Directed Individual Study

EDUC 451A - Directed Teaching Seminar: Pre-K to 12

EDUC 451E - Directed Teaching Seminar: Elementary

EDUC 451S - Directed Teaching Seminar: Middle and Secondary

EDUC 461A - Directed Teaching: Pre-K to 12

EDUC 461E - Directed Teaching: Elementary

EDUC 461S - Directed Teaching: Middle and Secondary

ENGN 160 - CADD: Computer-Aided Drafting & Design

ENGN 203 - Mechanics I: Statics

ENGN 204 - Mechanics II: Dynamics

ENGN 207 - Electrical Circuits

ENGN 208 - Electronics

ENGN 225 - Mathematical Methods for Physics and Engineering

ENGN 240 - Thermodynamics

ENGN 250 - Introduction to Engineering Design

ENGN 251 - Experimental Methods in Physics and Engineering

ENGN 255 - Numerical Methods for Engineering and Physics

ENGN 260 - Materials Science

ENGN 265 - Integrative Science Topic

ENGN 267 - Bioengineering and Bioinspired Design

ENGN 295 - Intermediate Special Topics in Engineering

Credits: 3 credits for fall or winter; 4 credits for spring.
Planned Offering: Offered when interest is expressed and departmental resources permit.

Fall 2014 topic:

ENGN 295-01: Machine Dynamics and Design (3). Prerequisite: ENGN 204. Rigid-body kinematic and kinetic analysis of common machine types to determine machine output in terms of the input driving force or input driving energy. Investigation of design procedures for common mechanisms including synthesis of motion components such as quick-return, dwell periods, or coupling motions. Students learn to generate machines that will express desired motions or complete specific tasks. Students design and create machines using graphical techniques, computer modeling, and using basic construction techniques. Sukow.

ENGN 301 - Solid Mechanics

ENGN 311 - Fluid Mechanics

ENGN 312 - Heat Transfer

ENGN 330 - Mechanical Vibrations

ENGN 351 - Solid Mechanics Laboratory

ENGN 395 - Special Topics in Engineering

ENGN 401 - Engineering Problems

ENGN 402 - Engineering Problems

ENGN 403 - Engineering Problems

ENGN 421 - Directed Individual Research

ENGN 422 - Directed Individual Research

ENGN 423 - Directed Individual Research

ENGN 473 - Senior Thesis

ENGN 493 - Honors Thesis

ENGL 201 - Advanced Expository Writing

ENGL 202 - Topics in Creative Writing: Playwriting

ENGL 203 - Topics in Creative Writing: Fiction

FDR: HA
Credits: 3 credits in Fall or Winter; 4 credits in Spring
Planned Offering: Fall, Winter, Spring

Winter 2015 topic:

ENGL 203: Topics in Creative Writing: Fiction (3). The practice of writing short fiction, with an emphasis on the short-short and flash-fiction subgenres. The course involves workshops, literary study of the short short’s history and practice and critical writing about both published and student work, culminating in a portfolio or revised stories and an essay about the modes and strategies of the short short. (HL) Smith.

ENGL 204 - Topics in Creative Writing: Poetry

ENGL 205 - Poetic Forms

ENGL 206 - Topics in Creative Writing: Nonfiction

FDR: HA
Credits: 3 in fall, winter; 4 in spring
Prerequisite: Competition of FW requirement. Limited enrollment. A course in the practice of writing nonfiction, involving workshops, literary study, and critical writing. May be repeated for degree credit if the topics are different.

Spring 2015 topic:

ENGL 206-01:  Introduction to Writing Creative Nonfiction:  Reading the Land (4).  In the classroom we juxtapose literary appreciations of nature such as Thoreau’s Walden Pond and Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek with more scientific approaches including Wessels’ Reading the Forested Landscape and the Virginia Division of Mineral Resources’ Geology of Rockbridge County, Virginia.  Written work includes a formal essay and a series of shorter assignments.  We apply what we learn in class in half- and full-day excursions which serve as the basis for two creative nonfiction essays that combine the personal with the academic (geological, historical, botanical).  Students must be physically able to hike and know how to swim to participate fully in the course.  (HA) Leland

ENGL 207 - Eco-Writing

ENGL 230 - Poetry

ENGL 231 - Drama

ENGL 232 - The Novel

ENGL 233 - Film

ENGL 234 - Children’s Literature

ENGL 235 - Fantasy

ENGL 236 - The Bible as English Literature

ENGL 237 - The Bible as Literature: Exile and Return

ENGL 240 - Arthurian Legend

ENGL 242 - Individual Shakespeare Play

FDR: HL
Credits: 4
Planned Offering: Spring

Spring 2015 topic:

ENGL 242-01:  Shakespeare:  Hamlet’s Ghosts (4).  A specter is haunting Europe—and, for that matter, the rest of the world—the specter of Hamlet.  Translated into languages from Finnish to Klingon, the play has captured the imaginations of readers and artists worldwide.  In the first part of our course, we examine Shakespeare’s play in detail, studying its sources, textual variants, performance history, and film adaptations.  Subsequently, special attention is given to the play’s literary and cultural legacy to see ways the play has been both cited and revised to comment on our modern situation.  Students write analytical and creative papers as well as perform a scene from Hamlet in groups.  A two-day workshop at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton help students prepare for their scene performances.  (HL)  Pickett
 

ENGL 243 - Performing Shakespeare

ENGL 250 - Medieval and Early Modern British Literature

ENGL 251 - British Literature in an Age of Global Expansion, 1660s-1790s

ENGL 252 - Shakespeare

ENGL 253 - Southern American Literature

ENGL 254 - Jane Austen: The Works and the Phenomenon

ENGL 255 - Superheroes

ENGL 256 - Southern Women Writers

ENGL 260 - Literary Approaches to Poverty

FDR: HL
Credits: 3
Prerequisite: Completion of FW requirement. Examines literary responses to the experience of poverty, imaginative representations of human life in straitened circumstances, and arguments about the causes and consequences of poverty that appear in literature. Critical consideration of dominant paradigms (“the country and the city,” “the deserving poor,” “the two nations,” “from rags to riches,” “the fallen woman,” “the abyss”) augments reading based in cultural contexts. Historical focus will vary according to professor’s areas of interest and expertise.

Winter 2015 topic:

ENGL 260: Literary Approaches to Poverty: Medieval Poverty and Labor (3). Is poverty an ideal state of existence or a socioeconomic plight in need of fixing? Should the poor be put to work? In the Middle Ages, poverty was both a blessed condition of being and a dire social crisis. This course explores medieval experiences of poverty: estates, piety, charity, mendicancy, labor, gender, the Great Famine, Black Death, and urbanization. Texts include saint’s lives (St. Francis of Assisi), Thomas Aquinas, Piers Plowman, Shepherds’ Plays, Sir Orfeo, patient Griselda, and the legends of Robin Hood. We pay close attention to medieval understandings of poverty and labor, as well as modern parallels. All texts are read in modern English translation. (HL) Kao.

ENGL 261 - Reading Gender

ENGL 262 - Literature, Race, and Ethnicity

ENGL 285 - Reading Lolita in Lexington

ENGL 291 - Seminar

ENGL 292 - Topics in British Literature

FDR: HL
Credits: 3 in fall or winter, 4 in spring
Planned Offering: Fall, Winter

Spring 2015 topic:

ENGL 292: Remembering the Great War (4). On the centenary of the Great War, we read the combatant-poets and memoirists, their contemporaries (modernists), and plays, films, and novels by writers of later generations. Authors include Pat Barker, Sebastian Barry, Rupert Brooke, H.D., T. S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud, Robert Graves, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, Joan Littlewood, Wilfred Owen, Jessie Pope, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg. In afternoon screenings, we will view All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Paths of Glory (1957), Gallipoli (1981), and War Horse (2011). Emphasis on the enduring images and changing tropes of the Great War. (HL) Keen.

Fall 2014 topic:

ENGL 292-01: Topics in British Literature: Seeing Gothic (3). Ruined castles, haunted houses, secret passages, apparitions, doppelgangers, vampires, monsters, murder, and madness–in short, the stuff of nightmares and the focus of this course. This class surveys the “gothic”: works dealing with the horrific, the grotesque, the uncanny, and the supernatural. We begin by examining the first appearance of gothic novels in the presumptively rational and clearheaded eighteenth century (authors include Walpole, Radcliffe, and Beckford) before turning to some notorious nineteenth-century examples of the genre (such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and stories by Edgar Allan Poe). Our ultimate aim, though, is to track how these earlier gothic works influenced twentieth-century horror cinema. To that end, we read the aforementioned texts alongside gothic films like Kubrick’s The Shining, Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, Dreyer’s Vampyr, Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu, and Aronofsky’s Black Swan. Along the way, we see that gothic texts continually blur the thin line between madness and sanity, make a place for the supernatural in an increasingly rationalized world, and force us to face the limits of human experience. (HL) Staff

ENGL 293 - Topics in American Literature

FDR: HL
Credits: 3-4
Planned Offering: Fall, Winter, Spring

Spring 2015 topic:

ENGL 293-01:  Topics in American Literature:  American Short Story (4).  This course is a study of the evolution of the short story in America from its roots, both domestic and international, tracing the main branches of its development in the 20th century.  We also explore more recent permutations of the genre, such as magical realism, new realism, and minimalism.  Having gained an appreciation for the history and variety of this distinctly modern genre, we focus our attention on the work of two American masters of the form, contemporaries and erstwhile friends who frequently read and commented on each other’s work—Hemingway and Fitzgerald.  We examine how they were influenced by their predecessors and by each other and how each helped to shape the genre.  (HL) Oliver
 

Winter 2015 topics:

ENGL 293-01: Topics in American Literature: Form and Freedom in Modern American Poetry (3). Robert Frost once said that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net. This course challenges that statement by examining the structure of free verse, from Whitman and Williams through J. Ivy, before considering all the freedom that poets like Frost, Bishop, and Wilbur found in sonnets, villanelles and sestinas. An overview of American lyric poetry from the past 150 years. (HL) Brodie.

ENGL 293-02: Topics in American Literature: Chicana/o or Mexican American Literature (3). This course explores a broad spectrum of the forms and genres of Chicana/o literature produced over the last 30 years, including the political treatise, novel, short story, and poem. Readings, videos and guest speakers discuss the historical and literary contexts of Chicana/o literature, bringing to light the multiple intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The scope of the course covers the foundational texts of Chicana/o literature beginning with Movement-inspired concepts and moving through a sampling of the new terrain being explored by feminists, cultural critics, and queer writers at the beginning of the 21st century. Typical authors featured include Rivera, Rodriguez, Cisneros, Anzaldua, Trujillo, Anaya, Viramontes. (HL) Miranda.

Fall 2014 topic:

ENGL 293-01: Topics in American Literature: Spectatorship and Sexuality (3). How might we come to understand the relationship between image, spectatorship and gender? For the past 40 years, cinema has been a principle terrain upon which feminist debates over representation and identity have emerged. Through a sampling of key films and texts, this course charts those debates. Beginning with the psychoanalytic discussions of the 1970s and ‘80s, we venture through to the postcolonial and “postmodern” responses of the late 1990s and conclude with an extended consideration of femininity in contemporary popular film. Through class discussion and written critique, students are invited to become discerning spectators of their own visual landscapes. (HL) Renault-Steele

ENGL 294 - Topics in Environmental Literature

FDR: HL
Credits: 3 in fall or winter, 4 in spring
Planned Offering: Spring

Winter 2015 topic:

ENGL 294-01:  Topics in American Literature:  American Environmental Poetry (3).  In this course we read a selection of works by American poets from the seventeenth century to the present, but the majority of our readings are from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  We ask how “nature poetry” becomes “environmental poetry,” and what the difference in terminology signifies.  We develop skills in formal and thematic analysis of poems.  We ask how we read poems from different periods both within their own historical context and within our present historical context.  Poets include Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Gary Snyder, Simon Ortiz, and Pattiann Rogers.  (HL)  Warren

ENGL 295 - Spring-Term Seminar in Literary Studies

FDR: HL
Credits: 4
Planned Offering: Spring

Spring 2015 topic:

ENGL 295: The Western Novel on the Page and on the Screen (4): A study of the western novel both in print and on celluloid. The seven novels examined will include Hombre, True Grit, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Bob Ford and The Ox-Bow Incident. Concepts discussed will include romance vs. reality, Ritual, Law and Justice, Landscape and Inscape, gender roles and humor. Each student will take reading quizzes, make a 20-minute class presentation based on a short paper, write two 2000 word papers and take a final short answer and essay exam. (HL) R.T. Smith. Spring 2015

ENGL 299 - Seminar for Prospective Majors

FDR: HL
Credits: 3
Planned Offering: Fall, Winter

Winter 2015 topics:

ENGL 299-01: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Henry David Thoreau and American Transcendentalism (3). This course focuses on the writing of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), reading them in relation to other major figures of American Transcendentalism. During Thoreau’s short lifetime, New England culture was the site of far-reaching and profound social, political, scientific, and literary innovations. We combine close attention to works like Walden and The Maine Woods with research into the lyceum lecture series, anti-slavery movements, communitarian experiments, natural history and travel narratives, and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. (HL) Warren.

ENGL 299-02: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Revenge (3). In this seminar, preparatory to more advanced study in the English Department, we sharpen our skills as close readers of texts and as clear and compelling writers about literature and film. Our topic is one of the most common themes and sources of conflict in world literature: revenge. From Greek drama (such as Medea), to the Old Testament, to English Renaissance drama (The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet), to contemporary film (Kill Bill), to world literature and film (Chushingura, The Virgin Spring), the revenge motive has propelled plots and characters and has spun off sub-genres, such as detective fiction, gangster violence, and legal drama. The course culminates in a longer paper on the topic and texts of your choice that showcase your skills in textual analysis, application of pertinent theory, and research. (HL) Dobin.

Fall 2014 Topics:

ENGL 299-01: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Detective Fiction (3). A close study of the popular sub-genre, detective fiction, culminating in the writing of a research paper. We study detective fiction from the beginnings of the form in the nineteenth century to contemporary examples, touching on the golden age of British detective fiction (“whodunits” and puzzlers), private eyes, hard-boiled detectives, police procedurals, psychological thrillers, and historical and metaphysical mysteries. Authors are selected from among the following: Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Josephine Tey, P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Paul Auster, Laurie R. King, Walter Mosley, P. B. Kerr, and Alan Bradley. Some authors and modes are represented by film adaptations rather than by novels. (HL) Keen
 

ENGL 299-02: Seminar: The Native Writes Back:American Indian Literatures and U.S. History (3). “History is written by the victors. Literature is written by the survivors.” For most of U.S. history, the voices and testimonies of Native American writers have been absent, silenced, or erased from our textbooks and cultural mythology. With few exceptions, non-natives usually told the Native American story in America. With the start of the Native American Literary Renaissance in the late 1960s, however, Indian writers have been using fiction, memoir, poetry, creative non-fiction, film-making, stand-up comedy, and music to re-write U.S. history from a Native point of view. This course examines specific events in U.S History from a Native American perspective as reflected in Native-authored texts to see how Indians present that re-visioning, how it is translated from various sources into literature, and the effectiveness it has in helping U.S. citizens re-imagine ourselves in contemporary times. (HL) Miranda.

ENGL 307 - Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry

FDR: HA
Credits: 3 in fall and winter, 4 in spring
Planned Offering: Fall

Spring 2015 topic:

ENGL 307: Fresh/ Local/ Wild: The Poetics of Food (4). Prerequisites: Three credits in 200-level English and Instructor consent. Students must submit writing samples to qualify for admission. ENGL 203 and/or 204 recommended. Limited enrollment. This class visits fresh/local/wild food venues each week, where sensory explorations focus on all aspects of foraging, creating, adapting and eating food. Coursework includes guided writing exercises based on the landscape/geography of food both in the field and classroom, with in-depth readings that help us turn topics like food politics, food insecurity, sustainable agriculture and genetically modified foods into poetry. Individual handmade chapbooks of the term’s poems serve as the final product. A service learning component is also included in the course through Campus Kitchen. (HA) Miranda. Spring 2015 and alternate years Miranda.

ENGL 308 - Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction

FDR: HA
Credits: 3 in fall and winter, 4 in spring
Planned Offering: Winter

Winter 2015 topic:

ENGL 308: Advanced Creative Writing: Literary Genre Fiction (3). Reflecting literary trends of the last decade, students explore the intersections between traditional pulp genres and narrative realism. They draft and revise stories that use elements from a range of possible genres–science fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, romance–while also developing complex characters grounded in psychological realism. (HL) Gavaler.

ENGL 309 - Advanced Creative Writing: Memoir

ENGL 311 - History of the English Language

FDR: HL
Credits: 4
Planned Offering: Spring 2015 and alternate years.

  Kao.

ENGL 312 - Gender, Love, and Marriage in the Middle Ages

ENGL 313 - Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales

ENGL 316 - The Tudors

ENGL 318 - Medieval and Renaissance Drama

ENGL 319 - Shakespeare and Company

ENGL 320 - Shakespearean Genres

ENGL 326 - 17th-Century Poetry

ENGL 330 - Milton

ENGL 333 - Studies in Restoration and Early 18th-Century Literature

ENGL 334 - Studies in Later 18th-Century Literature

ENGL 335 - 18th-Century Novels

ENGL 341 - The Romantic Imagination

ENGL 345 - Studies in the 19th-Century British Novel

ENGL 348 - Victorian Poetry: Victorian Pairs

FDR: HL
Credits: 3
Planned Offering: Winter in alternate years

  Brodie.

ENGL 350 - Postcolonial Literature

ENGL 351 - World Fiction in English

ENGL 352 - Modern Irish Literature

ENGL 353 - 20th-Century British and Irish Poetry

ENGL 354 - Contemporary British and American Drama

ENGL 355 - Studies in British Fiction Since 1900