Course Descriptions

EDUC 335 - Secondary Vocal Music Methods

EDUC 336 - Secondary Instrumental Music Methods

EDUC 337 - Practicum: Secondary Music

EDUC 340 - Elementary Language Arts and Social Studies Methods

EDUC 341 - Practicum: Elementary Language Arts and Social Studies Methods

EDUC 343 - Elementary Math and Science Methods

EDUC 344 - Practicum: Elementary Math and Science Methods

EDUC 345 - Elementary and Secondary Vocal Music Methods

Credits: 3

An overview of singers’ vocal development including analysis of common vocal challenges, study of pedagogical techniques in group settings, evaluation of vocal and choral literature and texts, construction of vocal interviews, and guidelines for performance at the elementary and secondary levels. Lynch.

EDUC 346 - Practicum: Elementary and Secondary Vocal Music Methods

Credits: 1-2

This fieldwork placement permits students to work in the schools with choral groups to observe and practice the instructional techniques covered in EDUC 345. Course work 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 teaching of music and the planning of music instruction. May be repeated for up to three credits total. Lynch.

EDUC 353 - Middle and Secondary Content Area Reading and Writing

EDUC 354 - Practicum: Secondary Content Area Reading and Writing

EDUC 356 - Methods for Middle and Secondary Education

EDUC 357 - Practicum: Methods for Middle and Secondary Education

EDUC 365 - Methods for World Language

EDUC 366 - Practicum: Methods for World Language

EDUC 369 - Urban Education and Poverty

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 125 - Engineering Marvels

ENGN 160 - CADD: Computer-Aided Drafting & Design

ENGN 178 - Introduction to Engineering

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 255 - Numerical Methods for Engineering and Physics

ENGN 260 - Materials Science

ENGN 267 - Bioengineering and Bioinspired Design

ENGN 295 - Intermediate Special Topics in Engineering

ENGN 301 - Solid Mechanics

ENGN 311 - Fluid Mechanics

ENGN 312 - Heat Transfer

ENGN 330 - Mechanical Vibrations

ENGN 351 - Solid Mechanics Laboratory

ENGN 361 - Fluid Mechanics Laboratory

ENGN 378 - Capstone Design

ENGN 379 - Capstone Design

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

Winter 2018, ENGL 203-01: Topics in Creative Writing: Fiction (3). Prerequisite: Completion of FW FDR. A course in the practice of writing short fiction, involving workshops, literary study, and critical writing. (HA)

Spring 2018, ENGL 203-01: Topics in Creative Writing: Fiction: Introduction to the Short Story (4). Prerequisite: Completion of FW FDR. This introduction to fiction writing mixes a traditional approach to teaching the craft of short-story writing with a residency component. You begin to sharpen your tastes and inclinations by reading and responding to short stories from significant contributors to the form. The bulk of the writing of your final short story takes place during a ten-day writing residency at Skylark Nature Preserve and Lodge outside of Lexington. It is in this setting that we collectively build a writing community free of distraction in order to facilitate a better understanding of your own writing processes. During the residency, students have structured and unstructured time to take advantage of and gain inspiration from the surrounding space. (HA) Wilson. Staff.

ENGL 204 - Topics in Creative Writing: Poetry

ENGL 205 - Poetic Forms

ENGL 206 - Topics in Creative Writing: Nonfiction

ENGL 207 - Eco-Writing

FDR: HA
Experiential Learning (EXP): Yes
Credits: 4

  Green.

ENGL 215 - Creating Comics

ENGL 230 - Poetry

ENGL 231 - Drama

ENGL 232 - The Novel

FDR: HL
Credits: 3

ENGL 233 - Introduction to 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

ENGL 250 - Medieval and Early Modern British Literature

ENGL 252 - Shakespeare

ENGL 253 - Southern American Literature

ENGL 254 - I Heart Jane: Austen’s Fan Cultures and Afterlives

ENGL 255 - Superheroes

ENGL 260 - Literary Approaches to Poverty

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: 3-4

Winter 2018, ENGL 292A-01: British Literature: Weeping Men and Fainting Women: Gender and Emotion in 18th- and 19th-Century Literature (3). David Hume famously theorized that emotion is contagious, moving quickly from person to person. Interestingly, this theory threatens to disrupt traditional gender binaries, as men are no more immune to sentiment than women are. Indeed, in 18th-century sentimental fiction men are suddenly sighing, blushing, fainting, and crying all over the page. Eventually, the hyperbole of sentimental fiction (e.g., Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling) gives way to the more moderate literature of sensibility (e.g., Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility), but one thing remains consistent: emotion is contagious and gender is no obstacle. This course looks at three phrases in the British novel: sentimental novels, the literature of sensibility, and, finally, sensation fiction (e.g., Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White), which deploys emotional contagion in the service of terror rather than virtue. We discuss theories of emotion ranging from Adam Smith and David Hume to 21st-century affect theory. Students learn research skills and conclude by writing a scholarly paper on a topic of their choosing. (HL) Walle.

Winter 2018, ENGL 292B-01: Topics in British Literature: Eco-Horror and the Global Weird (3). Storytellers have long been fascinated with the various ways the human species might die off, from fires to floods. In the present day, such scenarios seem ever more pressing as we face threats from global climate change caused by human industrial activity, viral diseases and epidemics accelerated by travel and global trade, and the abiding prospect of nuclear war. This course considers how various authors present a variety of catastrophic scenarios through the perspective of ecological horror: when the world itself turns, in one way or another, against its dominant species. Along the way, we take up not only fire and ice, but also plague, poison, plants, planetary impacts, and, of course, cyclones full of killer sharks—not to mention all manner of other weird phenomena. Authors read may include Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, H.P. Lovecraft, John Wyndham, Anna Kavan, J.G. Ballard, Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, Emily St. John Mandel, and Reza Negarastani; we also watch a handful of movies. (HL) Ferguson.

Fall 2017, ENGL 292A-01: Topics in British Literature: Literature of the British Slave Trade, 1688-2016 (3). The British slave trade lasted from the mid-1600s until 1807, but its legacy is more tenacious: more than 200 years after the abolition of the slave trade, novelists like Yaa Gyasi are still writing about the horrors and indignities of this violent institution. To study British literature, however, is often to encounter the slave trade as a shadow or a gap, something that lurks in the background of our favorite 18th- and 19th-century novels but never quite breaks through the surface. By placing novels like Mansfield Park (1814) and Jane Eyre (1847) alongside works that deal more explicitly with slavery, this course aims to disrupt that image of cozy, “civilized” England and demonstrate that British literature cannot be separated out from the Atlantic slave trade and British imperialism. (HL) Walle.

ENGL 293 - Topics in American Literature

FDR: HL
Credits: 3-4

Winter 2018, ENGL 293A-01: Topics in American Literature: Wilderness, Wildness, and Cultivation: Contemporary Environmental Literature (3). In this course, we study American fascination with ideas of wilderness, wildness, and cultivation as they manifest in contemporary literature and thought. We discuss the implications of these categories for humans as members of ecosystems as well as of “advanced societies.” Our texts are at the cutting edge of environmental writing, drawing from poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and including writers such as Camille T. Dungy, George Saunders, and Robin Wall-Kimmerer. We incorporate the work and live readings/talks of three exceptional environmental writers visiting the W&L campus this term: Ross Gay, Robert Macfarlane, and Anna Lena Phillips Bell. With the help of such authors, we test our own understandings of human roles in relation to the more-than-human world. (HL) Green.

Winter 2018, ENGL 293B-01: Topics in American Literature: Science Fiction (3). Our world—whether in its dystopian politics, climate catastrophes, or even just its driverless cars—is increasingly written of in terms once reserved for the fantastic tales of science fiction. Are we now living in a science-fictional universe? Is the genre even capable of describing where we now are, and where we go from here? In this course, we seek such answers by surveying science fiction from its beginnings to the present day. Authors read may include: Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, Hugo Gernsback, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. LeGuin, Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, William Gibson, Karen Joy Fowler, Ted Chuang, and others; through these works as well as a few short and feature-length films, TV episodes, radio dramas, podcasts, and games, we sample a range of past visions and speculate about the futures yet to come. (HL) Ferguson.

Winter 2018, ENGL 293C-01: Topics in American Literature: The American West (3). The American West is a land of striking landscapes, beautiful places to visit, such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, and stories that have had a huge impact on the USA and the world, such as Lewis and Clark, the Oregon Trail, Custer’s Last Stand, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and Cowboy and Indian adventures galore. This course studies some of these Western places, stories, art works, and movies. What has made them so appealing? How have they been used? We study works by authors such as John Steinbeck, Frederic Remington, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner, and Cormac McCarthy, plus movies with actors like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Brad Pitt to see how Western stories have played out and what is happening now in these contested spaces. (HL) Smout.

Winter 2018, ENGL 293D-01: Topics in American Literature: The Literature of the Beat Generation (3). A study of a particular movement, focusing on the ways in which cultural and historical context have influenced the composition of and response to literature in the United States. This course examines the writings of such authors as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Anne Waldman, Bob Dylan, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder, who wrote starting in the mid-1940s, continued through later decades, and became loosely known as the Beat Generation. What cultural, literary, historical, and religious influences from the U.S. and other parts of the world have shaped their work? What challenges did their boldly different writings face, and how did their reception change over time? What are their themes? Their notions of style? What have they contributed to American (and world) life and letters? The goal of this course is to lay a strong foundation from which such questions can be richly addressed and answered. (HL) Ball.

Winter 2018, ENGL 293E-01: Topics in American Literature: Introduction to Literary Editing (3). An apprenticeship in editing for one or more students with the editor of Shenandoah, Washington and Lee’s nationally prominent literary magazine. This is a course for anyone interested in editing literary journals, writing for the literary community (blogs, news releases, two book reviews, features, business correspondence) and how both print and on-line journals operate. Often a stepping stone to a publication career, the course involves an introduction to the creation, design and maintenance of WordPress web sites, as well as a survey of current magazines. The course also offers opportunities for each student to practice generating and editing his/her own texts and those of his/her peers. Each student oversees one facet of the journal (Poem of the Week, blog, submissions management, contests, social media), and each makes a presentation to the class on the nature and practices of two other current literary journals. Students work in pairs toward an understanding of the role journals play in contemporary literature and engage in peer editing. (HL) Smith.

Winter 2018, ENGL 293F-01: Topics in American Literature: The American Short Story (3). This course is a study of the evolution of the short story in America from its roots, both domestic (Poe, Irving, Hawthorne, Melville) and international (Gogol, Chekhov, Maupassant), 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 2018, ENGL 293G-01: Topics in American Literature: Tales of the Forest (3). In history and literature, the forest long loomed as the enemy of life and civilization, where monsters lurked, people wandered lost, and dark ends descended. That long tradition shifted dramatically during the 19th century with the accelerating pace of technological and economic development, widespread environmental degradation, and massive deforestation. As the founding of America’s national parks made plain, forests had suddenly become treasures to cherish and protect, refuges to seek for rejuvenation—and living guarantors of our collective survival. This course explores the forest’s evolution from sublime terror to vulnerable beauty, mainly through focusing upon poems, fairy tales, short stories, novels, and films—by a range of authors from Tacitus, Tasso, and Edmund Spenser to Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Muir, Robert Frost, J.R.R. Tolkien, Annie Proulx, and Stephen King—but with supplementary readings from major historians, environmental scientists, and forest scholars such as Alexandeer von Humboldt, G.P. Marsh, William Cronon, and Robert Pogue Harrison. (HL) Adams.

Winter 2018, ENGL 293H-01: Topics in British Literature: Race and the Zombie Apocalypse (3). This course takes a critical approach to our contemporary understanding of the figure of the zombie and its inextricable link to discourses on race and blackness in the Americas. A grounding in theories of social death allows us to explore the racial anxiety that gave birth to the genre and trace its development throughout the hemisphere. This course broadens the genre to include novels that normally would not be considered antecedents and ultimately poses the following questions: What can the figure of the zombie teach us about our evolving relationship to race? What does the recent proliferation of zombie-related television shows, movies, books, and video games say about our contemporary racial anxieties? In addition to landmark films from the genre, we consider works from, among others, Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead, Orlando Patterson, Claudia Rankine, and William Faulkner. (HL) Wilson.

Winter 2018, ENGL 293I-01: Topics in American Literature: Science Fiction (3). Our world—whether in its dystopian politics, climate catastrophes, or even just its driverless cars—is increasingly written of in terms once reserved for the fantastic tales of science fiction. Are we now living in a science-fictional universe? Is the genre even capable of describing where we now are, and where we go from here? In this course, we seek such answers by surveying science fiction from its beginnings to the present day. Authors read may include: Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, Hugo Gernsback, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. LeGuin, Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, William Gibson, Karen Joy Fowler, Ted Chuang, and others; through these works as well as a few short and feature-length films, TV episodes, radio dramas, podcasts, and games, we sample a range of past visions and speculate about the futures yet to come. (HL) Ferguson.

Spring 2018, ENGL 293-01: Topics in American Literature: Ralph Ellison and the Making of America (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FW requirement. A study of the writings of Ralph Ellison, the great African-American novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. The course examines Ellison’s published and unpublished writings, as well as biographical and critical writings about Ellison’s life and work. We pursue such questions as Ellison’s concepts regarding American literature, music, history, region, language, and politics; the troubled and complex challenges of race in American culture; and how Ellison expresses what he called the American tragi-comedy in his work. (HL) Conner.

Spring 2018, ENGL 293-02: Topics in American Literature: Business in American Literature and Film (4). Prerequisite: Completion of the FW requirement. In his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith tells a powerful story of the free market as a way to organize our political and economic lives, a story that has governed much of the world ever since. This course studies that story, considers alternate stories of human economic organization, such as those of American Indian tribes, and sees how these stories have been acted out in American business and society. We study novels, films, short stories, non-fiction essays, autobiographies, advertisements, websites, some big corporations, and some local businesses in the Lexington area. Our goal is not to attack American business but to understand its characteristic strengths and weaknesses so we can make the best choices about how to live and work happily in a free market society. (HL) Smout.

Fall 2017, ENGL 293A-01: Topics in American Literature: Literary Editing (3). An apprenticeship in editing for one or more students with the editor of Shenandoah, Washington and Lee’s nationally prominent literary magazine. This is a course for anyone interested in editing literary journals, writing for the literary community (blogs, news releases, two book reviews, features, business correspondence), and how both print and on-line journals operate. Often a stepping stone to a publication career, the course involves an introduction to the creation, design, and maintenance of WordPress web sites, as well as a survey of current magazines. The course also offers opportunities for students to practice generating and editing their own texts and those of their peers. Each student oversees one facet of the journal (Poem of the Week, blog, submissions management, contests, social media), and each makes a presentation to the class on the nature and practices of two other current literary journals. Students work in pairs toward an understanding of the role journals play in contemporary literature and engage in peer editing. (HL) Smith.

Fall 2017, ENGL 293B-01:  Topics in American Literature:  Utopia, Science Fiction, and the Idea of America(s) (3).  What value does the utopian/dystopian text hold in the development of alternative thought?  This course, grounded in science fiction and the African American and Latin American contexts, addresses this question via the thoughtful examination of a range of theoretical, fictional, and cinematic texts.  Works studied throughout the term come from, among others, Carlos Fuentes, Thomas More, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Frederick Jameson, W.E.B. DuBois, Frances Bodomo, Alfonso Cuarón, Octavia Butler, and Samuel Delany. (HL) Wilson.

ENGL 294 - Topics in World Literature

ENGL 295 - Spring-Term Seminar in Literary Studies

FDR: HL
Credits: 4

Spring 2018, ENGL 295-01: Video/Games (4). Prerequisite: Completion of FW requirement. Some have called videogames “the art form of the 21st century”; others have denied that they could ever be art at all. Whatever one’s view on their aesthetic possibilities, though, videogames have become ubiquitous, filling our spare moments, providing new and alternate identities, and sparking cultural divides. This course studies and briefly surveys the medium of the videogame, with an emphasis on developing skills in critical and cultural analysis as well as rudimentary game design. This inquiry stretches from the beginnings of the genre in analog (board or card) games and pinball, through the era of early computing and cartridge-based consoles, through to the highly sophisticated always-online formats of the present day. The course ends in the production of one analog (board or card) game, one digital story-game on the Twine platform, and one essay drawing on extensive engagement with a single game text. (HL) Ferguson.

Spring 2018, ENGL 295-02: African-American Poetry (4). Prerequisite: Completion of FW requirement. A study of African-American poetry and poetics, with an emphasis on memory and history. While we focus mainly on 20th- and 21st-century works, the presence of the past is a recurring motif in our readings and conversations. This course culminates in a digital-humanities project about race at Washington and Lee, including text and images of various kinds, but emphasizing literature as a form of history. (HL) Wheeler.

Spring 2018, ENGL 295-03: Transforming Literature: Fan Fiction, Literary Mashups, and Other Canon Fodder (4). Prerequisite: Completion of FW requirement. This course considers ways that people take works of literature, classic or otherwise, and transform them into something new. We read literary works ranging from “The Yellow Wallpaper” to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as cartoons, poems, videos and text conversations that remake, remix and transform those literary works. We think about what makes something literature, what makes something fan fiction, and what fan fiction can show us about classic works of literature. We also create our own literary transformations, analyze the role of the Internet in fan culture, and experiment with transformative technologies. (HL) Bufkin.

ENGL 299 - Seminar for Prospective Majors

FDR: HL
Credits: 3

Winter 2018, ENGL 299-01: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Weeping Men and Fainting Women: Gender and Emotion in 18th- and 19th-Century Literature (3). David Hume famously theorized that emotion is contagious, moving quickly from person to person. Interestingly, this theory threatens to disrupt traditional gender binaries, as men are no more immune to sentiment than women are. Indeed, in 18th-century sentimental fiction men are suddenly sighing, blushing, fainting, and crying all over the page. Eventually, the hyperbole of sentimental fiction (e.g., Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling) gives way to the more moderate literature of sensibility (e.g., Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility), but one thing remains consistent: emotion is contagious and gender is no obstacle. This course looks at three phrases in the British novel: sentimental novels, the literature of sensibility, and, finally, sensation fiction (e.g., Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White), which deploys emotional contagion in the service of terror rather than virtue. We discuss theories of emotion ranging from Adam Smith and David Hume to 21st-century affect theory. Students learn research skills and conclude by writing a scholarly paper on a topic of their choosing. (HL) Walle.

Winter 2018, ENGL 299-02: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Shakespeare’s Tragic Vision (3). In this gateway course to the English major, students practice the skills of nuanced reading, mature discussion, analytical writing, and scholarly research expected in upper-division English classes. This section focuses on close readings of several Shakespearean tragedies, beginning with an in-depth investigation of Hamlet. Field trips to Staunton to see Hamlet at the American Shakespeare Center and to the Lenfest Center to see Washington and Lee’s production of Romeo and Juliet enhance our study of the texts. (HL) Pickett.

Fall 2017, ENGL 299A-01: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Margaret Atwood and Human Rights Discourse (3). Discover the variety of genres (poetry, satire, novels, dystopias) written by one of the greatest living writers, Margaret Atwood. We consider the usefulness of comparative discussion of Atwood’s sources (from Homer to Shakespeare to Orwell’s 1984), and we employ a human rights framework in discussing her entertaining writings. A sequence of shorter writing assignments lead to a research paper, composed in stages. (HL) Keen.

Fall 2017, ENGL 299B-01: Seminar for Prospective Majors: The Lord of the Rings from Page to Screen (3). J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic novels and historical fantasies along with Peter Jackson’s spectacular CGI film versions have together made these texts and, more important, the narrative they tell among the most significant cultural events of the 20th and 21st centuries. This course centers upon The Lord of the Rings novels and films but frames that dual achievement by looking, first, back to Tolkien’s roots in 19th-century romance fiction and historical philology and, second, ahead to the important role played by Jackson’s film adaptations in the development of modern CGI films. In these ways this course highlights Tolkien’s larger cultural achievement, even as it provides students with a rich set of research questions and topics. (HL) Adams.

ENGL 305 - Writing Outside the Lines

ENGL 306 - Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry

ENGL 307 - Fresh/Local/Wild: The Poetics of Food

ENGL 308 - Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction

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

  Gavaler.

ENGL 309 - Advanced Creative Writing: Memoir

ENGL 311 - History of the English Language

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

FDR: HL
Credits: 3

  Kao.

ENGL 313 - Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales

ENGL 316 - The Tudors

ENGL 319 - Shakespeare and Company

ENGL 320 - Shakespearean Genres