Writing seminars
Watch a Video Introduction to ENGL 1014!
Fall 2025 Sections
01. Liars, Tricksters, and Con Artists. Gbolahan Adeola. TTh 2.30-3.45
Description coming soon!
02. Energy/Exhaustion. Shubhashree Basnyat. TTh 11.35-12.50
Description coming soon!
03. Home. Felisa Baynes-Ross. MW 11.35-12.50
Where do you call home? Is your sense of home fixed to specific places, persons, languages, or memories? Must the idea of home always suggest rootedness ? What does it mean to feel at home? In this course, we examine the affective responses elicited by various notions of home, from feelings of nostalgia and familiarity to estrangement, and we consider the ways in which generic and particular spaces enable or constrain individual agency and constitute our relation to others. Unsettling the easy boundary between the private and the public, we will seek to understand what various imaginings of home reveal about our collective and individual desires and anxieties, and we will examine the social and political forces at play in the making of home. Drawing from multiple disciplines and different modes of argument including essays, poetry, song, and film, we will study how home overlaps with spirituality, language politics, hierarchies of gender and labor, and educational opportunities, and how climate crises, pandemics, global economies, and immigration policies impact home. As we examine the debates and contests over space, we will think about who has the right to belong where and what it means—for instance—to belong at Yale. Informed by various theories and poetics of home, at the end of the course, we will revisit the places that make us.
04. Picturing Empire. Felisa Baynes-Ross. MW 2.30-3.45
How did premodern writers, artists, and cartographers in England visualize distant lands and people? What fantasies of Asia, America, and the Antilles (Caribbean) did they sell, and what economic interests, ambitions, and anxieties motivated these fictions? How do these texts recreate contests over space and boundaries? In this course, we will examine travel narratives, natural histories, proclamations, maps, botanical gardens, and topographical art to determine how Britain imagined empire, and how it used its technologies of knowledge and power to lay claim to contested spaces, propagate imperial ideology, authorize human trafficking, and codify Indigenous dispossession and genocide. We will examine medieval texts such as Mandeville Travels and the Letter of Prester John not as sites of origin, but to understand how their imperial logics repeat in paintings by artists like Agostino Brunias, and the rhetorical campaigns against Indigenous people in the Lesser Antilles in the 18th century. How do these discourses serve as testing ground not only for scientific knowledge but also to experiment with ideas about race and difference? How are they a theater for the rehearsal of mass murder? What logics, grammars, and rhetorical strategies did writers in the 18th century deploy to recruit subjects of empire and justify the violence of the plantation regime? How do these fictions and rhetorics re-form in 21st century conflicts over borders? What does imperial ambition look like now? As we enter these fraught spaces, we will practice methods and approaches that recognize Indigenous agency and humanity. We will consider, for example, how Indigenous peoples in the Lesser Antilles used maritime technologies, interisland networks, and ecologies to maintain their sovereignty. We will uncover counternarratives in and alongside colonial discourses then and now and analyze how they work as correctives to Indigenous erasure. In taking a transhistorical and multimodal approach to empire, we remain open to continuities and discontinuities between the past and the present, across different modes and geographies, to understand how history works and how and why these histories still matter.
05. Books, Friends, & Nature. Alison Coleman. MW 11.35-12.50
“If I were to name the three most precious resources of life, I should say books, friends, and nature; and the greatest of these, at least the most constant and always at hand, is nature.”
— John Burroughs, late 19th- to early 20th-century naturalist and nature writer
This seminar explores the triad of life-giving forces described by Burroughs in his 1908 book Leaf and Tendril, considering why these topics have been subjects of reflection by writers throughout history—and, from our 21st-century vantage point, what the consequences are when these resources are imperiled by threats to climate and sustainability, inequities in access, and increasingly widespread social isolation. From our home base in the newly renovated Peabody Museum of Natural History, we will venture into the natural environments of Yale’s home city and beyond, consider the ways in which friendships are formed and nurtured, and reflect on the role that books play in shaping our ideas about the world. Students will draft, workshop, and revise three academic essays of progressive length and complexity; this work will culminate in an independent research paper on a topic of contemporary urgency, based on sustained engagement with the Peabody’s collections and inspired by close study of one or more objects in the museum. Each member of the class also will develop content based on their research to contribute to an interactive museum app. Readings will include a range of scholarly articles as well as book chapters, essays, and poetry by Alexander Chee, Anne Fadiman, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Vivek Murthy, Mary Oliver, Zadie Smith, Henry David Thoreau, and others.
06. Self Care. Dylan Davidson. TTh 4.00-5.15
How should we live our inner lives? Should we strive for perfection or try to live in the moment? What is the relationship between our personal challenges and the world around us? This writing seminar will focus on practices of understanding, nurturing, managing, or improving the self. Through readings across a variety of disciplines and contexts, we will explore a variety of contemplative and self-reflective techniques including prayer, journaling, therapy, meditation, and service. We will ask what, exactly, a “self” is, whether and why we think it exists, and what it means to provide our selves with “care.” As the semester continues, we will undertake a collective investigation of the concept of mindfulness, examining its origins in Buddhist meditative practice and studying how it developed into a widespread and profitable ethos of psychological self-management. Along the way, we will develop our ability to read and analyze arguments through papers of increasing length, culminating in a research project on a self-selected topic.
07. Creatives and the Climate Crisis. Jessikah Diaz. TTh 9.00-10.15
How do art and literature communicate the climate crisis? In this course, we’ll consider how poetry, fiction, and art attempts to make sense of our ongoing relationship to urgent ecological issues, including climate change, deforestation, urbanization, resource depletion, and mass extinction. In the spirit of critic Olivia Laing, we’ll ask: What can art do in an emergency? Along with Laing, we’ll read works by John Berger, Greg Garrard, Amitav Ghosh, and Timothy Morton, while analyzing the art and literature they write about. Interrogating the roles of critics and creatives in the era of climate crisis, we’ll use their approaches to Environmental Studies to hone our ideas and critical writing throughout the course.
08. To Whom It May Concern. Kristin Guillaume. TTh 1.00-2.15
Nobody sends letters anymore… unless? This course examines the multiple valences of the epistolary form such as messages to loved ones, diary entries, and open letters. How do letters shape our everyday lives? Why do people write letters they never send? Letters open up questions about intimacy, interiority, and audience, especially as we engage with them as readers (or, perhaps more accurately, eavesdroppers). This course examines what relational practices to the self, to others, and the world around us are made possible through this print medium. We will read epistolary essays and fiction as well as actual letters — published and unpublished — to explore themes of friendship, politics, and consciousness, especially considering how the open letter has had a great impact in social movements. Put simply, what can letters do? What kinds of sociality can they cultivate? Students will engage with scholarship in Black studies, literary studies, print culture studies, and theories of the archive to think about these topics as we read from various venues including prison letters, Black feminist theory, contemporary essays, and coming-of-age narratives.
09. On Beauty. Rosemary Jones. MW 1.00-2.15
Beauty has challenged thinkers both ancient and modern to describe and account for its place in our lives. How do we “see” beauty and in what ways does beauty matter? When you look at a beautiful thing, does it stay with you, or leave quickly only to be replaced by another beautiful thing? What shapes our various definitions of beauty? How do certain stereotypes of beauty narrow our field of vision or even oppress us? Perhaps embracing a broader understanding of beauty and its role in society has the potential to enhance our humanity. In this course we will read both written and visual texts to construct arguments that explore questions of beauty and truth and the relationship between what we see, or are persuaded or pressured to see, and who we are. This course requires you be open to looking at art; while a background in art history is not required, you will be expected to visit the Yale University Art Gallery and to use your observations as evidence in your work.
The assigned readings will form the basis of our class discussions and will prove helpful as models for creating your own arguments. We will analyze and evaluate how writers identify a problem, how they generate a line of reasoning in response to that problem, how they use evidence to support their claims, and how they demonstrate a motive for their thinking. As you practice writing these elements of argument, you will learn how to write clear, compelling prose. Your major paper will be a researched argument about an aspect of beauty (your choice) and its place in the world.
10. Lost in Translation. Kamila Kaminska-Palarczyk. MW 2.30-3.45
Description coming soon!
11. Pay Attention! Stephanie Kelley. TTh 2.30-3.45
Description coming soon!
12. Superintelligence, Entrepreneurship, and Narrative. Heather Klemann. TTh 11.35-12.50
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
― Henry Ford
This course studies the anatomy of big ideas. We can offer only abstract predictions about the future of a world in which neural lace, biointelligence, and self-driving cars are commonplace. Instead, this course asserts that we have much to learn from how scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and educators argue over such predictions. What makes an idea revolutionary or contrarian in an age when so much knowledge is at our fingertips? How do we speak about that which is yet unknowable? How are narratives about superintelligence composed through the disciplines of economics, philosophy, religion, and engineering; the worlds of finance and entrepreneurship; and the concepts of evolution, futurism, and humanism? And what kinds of racial, gender, or class inequalities might superhuman intelligence reinforce or dissolve? Our course materials include peer-reviewed scholarly research, film, and business case studies of entrepreneurs in the educational technology space. Throughout the course, we will reflect on what these issues mean for developing our own strategies of reading, writing, and public speaking—what will we really need in a world with superhuman intelligence and with what can we dispense?
13. The Rise of Global Far-Right. Timothy Kreiner. TTh 2.30-3.45
Both within and without the US, we are living through a political sea change widely described – by proponents and opponents alike – as the rise of the far-right. While there is broad agreement about the revanchist nature of the politics in question, however, there is little agreement about how best to understand the sea change. Even before Elon Musk appeared to give a Nazi salute following the inauguration of Donald Trump, scholars were worrying the rise of figures such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines alongside the growth of right-wing populism in Eurasia and the Americas. Without rushing to judgment or over-generalization, how are we to understand this phenomenon? Are we living through a resurgence of fascism, as the political currents of the far-right were known in the twentieth century? Are we witnessing the birth of neofeudalism, as some scholars have proposed? Is the charisma of the authoritarian personality a recurring social pathology, as some theorists argued shortly after WWII? Or do such historical analogies obscure more than they reveal today? Taking cues from scholars such as Richard Saull and Alberto Toscano, we will approach such questions as opportunities for thinking about how the experiences of feudalism, fascism, authoritarianism, and related phenomena do or do not shed light on the present. We will also read influential accounts of the far-right past and present alongside work by figures such as F. T. Marinetti, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Karl Schmitt, Steve Bannon, Andrew Tate, and QAnon.
14. Extinctions. Maia Vitarini Lwin. MW 1.00-2.15
What are we seeing when we look at a dodo? One of the most iconic extinct animals in the world, this bird lived on the island of Mauritius until it died out in the late 17th century, shortly after Dutch colonists introduced invasive animal species to its habitat. Its most intact remains are stored over 6,000 miles away, at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Meanwhile, the Mauritian ecosystem has endured ongoing crises of plant and animal extinctions since the dodo, none of which have become nearly as famous.
A tragicomedic symbol of animal stupidity, innocence, and exoticism in the colonial and neocolonial imaginary, the dodo bird demonstrates how extinction accrues meaning throughout human and nonhuman histories. We are indisputably living through a sixth mass extinction, for which human destruction of countless ecosystems is directly responsible. But extinction is more than a scientific fact: it is also a highly culturally mediated concept through which values like gender, race, indigeneity, and individuality shape our relationships to nonhuman life. What defines a species – an individual organism, or an accumulation of evolutionary history? Why do some species become icons of extinction, and not others – for example, insects and plants that are often more essential to the health of ecosystems? Is extinction reversible? Is “de-extinction” a necessary corrective to ecological harm, or does it replicate the same species hierarchies and capitalist motives that drive mass extinctions? How can we ultimately decenter extinction as a singular historical event, moving toward alternative ways to imagine and practice our shared responsibility to the worlds we inhabit?
In this course, we’ll zoom in on individual species, but we’ll also zoom out to discuss political and economic contexts that foster popular ideas about extinction, particularly within U.S. history. We’ll also develop critical reading and writing skills for an introductory college level.
15. What’s in a Map. Eleanor Martin. TTh 1.00-2.15
Maps are all around us: on our phones, in textbooks, in newspapers, on street corners. We rely on them daily, in one way or another, to make sense of the world around us and to locate ourselves within it. Whether we give them a cursory glance or a more in-depth perusal, it can be tempting to either overlook the significance of maps, or to view them as authoritative, unbiased sources of information. But maps are socially constructed, human artifacts, and everything we see—and don’t see—reflects decisions made by a cartographer and their interlocutors.
This course explores the power of maps throughout history, from the earliest beginnings of cartography to its (ab)uses in the modern world. What are maps for? Who makes them, who reads them, and why? What does it mean for something to be mappable, or unmappable? In grappling with these questions, we will familiarize ourselves with the basic components of maps, including projection, scale, labels, modes of data visualization and collection, and aesthetic design. Each week, we will focus on a different theme, including the significance of maps within imperialism, colonialism, fictional literature, and politics, thinking critically about how maps and mapmaking intersect with the production, organization, display, and ownership of knowledge. Both during and in between our class meetings, we will engage with maps “in the wild,” around Yale’s campus, as well as in the Beinecke Library and the Yale University Art Gallery, helping us to become more conscientious and knowledgeable readers of maps in our daily lives.
16. Colonialism and Climate Crisis. Christopher McGowan. MW 9.00-10.15
This course will introduce students to several of the most pressing debates and questions surrounding the climate crisis, with special attention given to analyzing the capitalist world-system and the history of Western imperialism and colonialism. We begin with a brief survey of the recent scientific literature on climate change, then turn to 19th and early 20th-century Marxist and anti-colonial theory in order to consider the promise and peril of industrial development from a broader historical and political perspective. The main focus of our discussions, however, will be contemporary analyses of the climate crisis by scientists, social scientists, activists, and political theorists, which take up issues such as the “green transition,” resource extraction, competition, and warmaking, the unevenness of climate impacts, borders and migration, the governance of geoengineering, and the specter of civilizational collapse. In addition to our readings in science, philosophy, and political economy, we will read and discuss Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), a science fiction novel about the climate crisis that has had an outsized impact among researchers, activists, and policy makers.
17. Creative Obsessions. Carol Morse. TTh 11.35-12.50
What is the nature of creativity? Is there such a thing as “creative genius,” or are most creative endeavors achieved through hard work and practice? Can it be taught? From childhood crushes to white whales, artists, scientists, and writers have transformed ordinary obsessions into expressions of beauty and wonder. But as much as we praise the imagination and the work it produces, it can have a darker side; creative types are sometimes linked to mental instability, substance abuse, and self-delusion. This class will allow you to explore and write about the many varieties of creativity. We’ll read scholarly work from different academic disciplines, such as neuroscience, psychology, and education, as well as professional writers, artists, and musicians. What is the relationship between creativity and obsession? Creativity and addiction? Are we motivated by external validation or an inward drive to manage, or even escape, reality? Readings may include work by such writers as Gloria Anzaldua, Maurice Sendak, Richard Deming, and Albert Einstein, and we’ll watch one film exploring a creative personality (Greta Gerwig’s Little Women.)
18. Secret Lives of Children. Carol Morse. TTh 4.00-5.15
From angelic innocents to demonic brats, our perception of children runs the gamut: While some sentimentalize childhood, others minimize its significance and seek to curtail children’s autonomy and power. Yet we know that children are marvelously complex–in their imaginations, anxieties, desires, and even in the ways they experience trauma. In this course we’ll consider different models of childhood from a variety of angles–psychological, historical, literary, biological, cultural, artistic. We’ll ask such questions as: How do “secret spaces” enrich children’s imagination and sense of wonder? In what ways do children need both community and solitude, scheduled time and boredom, domestic order and wild spaces? How do young people inherit and respond to the consequences of adult decisions? What is the impact of race, gender, ethnicity, and socio-economics on developing creative identities? We’ll also consider how toys and books enhance children’s imaginations, and we’ll even analyze a few classics (Where the Wild Things Are, Calvin & Hobbes, The Giving Tree). Our readings will include works by such thinkers as varied as Langston Hughes, Jamaica Kincaid, CS Lewis, and Bruno Betthelheim, and we will watch a film or two (The Florida Project).
19. Objects That Matter. Julien Neel. MW 11.35-12.50
What is an object? Why do we love objects and collect them? Why do we hate objects and discard them? What can a single object teach us about race, gender, childhood, or mourning? In this writing course, we focus on the cultural and political importance of objects in our consumerist 20th and 21st centuries. Through a variety of disciplines like archival studies, environmental humanities, new materialism, gender studies, and critical race studies, we will see how objects shape our understanding of the material world. Like Mari Kondo in her Netflix show Tidying Up, we will first ask ourselves why do some objects spark joy. The personal significance objects can hold will be a first topic, with texts and media questioning the nature of hoarding. We will also visit the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library to engage with objects considered worth collecting. We will then pause to study the doll, a single object that can teach us so much about race, childhood, and beauty in the United States. The acts of eating and wearing objects and how they fashion bodies, gender identities, and intimacies will be the end of our exploration. Along with Liane Brandon and her feminist documentary Betty Tells Her Story, we will for example wonder how can a simple piece of clothing represent so much in the life of a mid-century American woman. Throughout the semester, we will focus on works like Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur and The Gleaners and I, or Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s Swallow, as well as excerpts of essays or articles by Roland Barthes, Jane Bennett, Robin Bernstein, Graham Harman, Maria Teresa Hart, and Scott Herring.
20. The Modern Metropolis. Pamela Newton. TTh 1.00-2.15
What makes a city great? How can we build communities on a large scale without fostering inequality and injustice? What do we most want from our cities, and what can our cities tell us about ourselves? In this course, we will investigate these and other questions through our study of texts about city life in a variety of disciplines, including sociology, history, urban ethnography, and political science, as well as through cultural artifacts, such as newspaper articles, photographs, and video clips. Keeping our own experiences in mind throughout, we will engage with these texts in order to explore the changing nature of the world’s cities, continually asking ourselves what are the greatest gifts and the greatest challenges the modern metropolis offers. Along the way, we will investigate a number of constructs within the study of cities, including city planning/design, urban renewal, public policy/infrastructure, the intersection of race and class, and the city as a conduit for personal discovery.
21. TBA. Michaela Feinberg. MW 1.00-2.15
Description coming soon!
22. Love Games. Aine Palmer. TTh 9.00-10.15
Description coming soon!
23. Disability and Desire. Eden Rea-Hedrick. TTh 11.35-12.50
What is disability? Who is disabled, and who decides who is disabled? How – if at all – does our world make room for the desires of people with disabilities? What does it mean to desire disability justice? In this course we will explore some of the many answers and provocations to these questions proposed by thinkers in the humanities and beyond. Through studying a blend of history, critical theory, and creative writing, as well as other genres, we will engage with concepts including access, able-bodiedness, inequality, intersectionality, impairment, health, bodyminds, diagnosis, (dis)ability, illness, and cure. We will consider the legal and medical histories of disability in the U.S. alongside scholarly work in disability theory, especially as it aligns with gender studies and Black studies, and we will explore literary, filmic and other representations of disability and desire in popular culture. Readings will include works by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Alison Kafer, Dennis Tyler, Sami Schalk, and Octavia Butler.
24. Censorship and the Arts. Timothy Robinson. MW 4.00-5.15
What right does any authority have to control expression? This writing seminar will treat legal and critical debates from recent times, as well as various arguments concerning politics, artistic freedom, and religion, ranging from those of Plato to contemporary cancel culture. Written assignments will comprise argumentative essays and research papers of various lengths and formats, carefully designed to introduce a variety of writing skills. For more detailed information, please refer to the online syllabus.
25. AI Through the Looking Glass. Steven Shoemaker. MW 4.00-5.15
As AI approaches, and in some ways exceeds, human-level intelligence, it offers both a portal into strange new territory and a mirror held up to our very natures. In this course, we will pursue the question of what it means to be human at a moment when the boundaries between human and nonhuman are shifting as never before. Through reading essays and book excerpts by writers like Ted Chiang, Ethan Mollick, Emily M. Bender, Martin Buber, Carrie Jenkins, and Harry Frankfurt, we’ll place discussions of the nature and purposes of AI in dialogue with philosophical treatments of the qualities that make us human, including empathy, love, and creativity. Through watching films like Her and I’m Your Man, we will imagine possible futures and explore their implications. Students will strengthen their skills and abilities as writers and critical thinkers while also experimenting with, and assessing, strategies for AI-assisted writing.
Alongside book excerpts, we are likely to read the following essays: Ted Chiang, “ChatGPT is a Blurry Jpeg of the Web”; Harry Frankfurt, “On Bullshit”; Jaron Lanier, “Your AI Lover Will Change You”; and Emily M. Bender, “Climbing Towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data.”
26. Boredom. Suvij Sudershan. TTh 2.30-3.45
Description coming soon!
27. Queerness and Class. Daniel Swain. MW 1.00-2.15
This class develops your skills in rhetoric, research and composition through an investigation of the intersections of queerness and class. Sometimes the queer community can be idealized as a space of unity and diversity. But this conceals class conflict between LGBTQIA+ peoples, and the complicity of the queer upper classes in gentrification, snobbery, and neoliberalism. At the same time, queer activists, writers and artists have developed new strategies to oppose exploitation, consumerism and white supremacy. We will attempt to reconcile these divergent perspectives through close study of trans and queer literature, memoirs of class shame and desire, activists’ speeches, and critical histories of everyday resistance.
28. Mysticism and Composition. Talin Tahajian. TTh 1.00-2.15
Description coming soon!
29. Black and Indigenous Ecologies. Rasheed Tazudeen. MW 11.35-12.50
“Red earth, blood earth, blood brother earth”
—Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1965)
Who gets to define the meaning of ecology, along with the earth we stand on, and how is this definition bound up with the legacies of colonial power, empire, slavery, and other forms of racialized oppression? And what new modes of ecological thought might emerge once we engage with the perspectives of indigenous peoples and communities of color—traditionally excluded from dominant environmentalist discourses—and their alternative ways of thinking and imagining a relation to the earth? Through readings in anthropology, geology, critical race studies, philosophy, literature, and poetry, this course explores the ecologies and counter-ecologies born of anti-imperial opposition, from 1492 to the present. Struggles for liberation, as we will examine, are never separable from struggles for land, food, water, air, and an earth in common. From Standing Rock to Sao Paulo, the Antilles to New Zealand, and Mauna Kea to Lagos, we will engage with anti-colonial and anti-racist attempts to craft an image of the earth no longer made in the ecocidal image of imperialist Western Man (or the anthropos of “Anthropocene”), and to imagine a future to be held and composed in common by all.
30. Music and Migration. Rasheed Tazudeen. MW 2.30-3.45
Description coming soon!
31. Invented Languages. Angus Warren. MW 9.00-10.15
Words constantly fail us. New species, ideas, and worlds need new names; relations break down wherever linguistic boundaries are crossed; the languages we speak can encode histories of violence and suppression. Sometimes, the emotions we feel simply refuse to be captured by our existing modes of communication. Many writers and thinkers have turned to invented languages – artificial systems of written and oral communication not endemic to any place, time, or people – for solutions to these challenges. This course explores the construction, function, and cultural legacies of these languages. Who makes them, how, and why? How do their creations confront crises of politics and identity in their own times? What determines their success or failure? And what about the numerous voices which get left out of academic discussion about invented language? Where, for instance, are the thousands of conlangers and ComiCon attendees for whom Esperanto, Klingon, or Cornish are integral facets of their identities? While glossopoeia may seem the exclusive folly of an out-of-touch and bookish elite, our exploration, grounded in a selection of key literary and scholarly texts, will reveal that invented languages have been mobilized throughout the last two centuries as potent forces for artistic expression, political dissension, and social change. Readings will include a wide range of secondary scholarship, expository essays, and popular press, as well as selections from such canonical literary authors as Burns, Melville, Carrol, Tolkien, and Borges.
32. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Lacey Jones. MW 2.30-3.45
What does Emily Dickinson mean when she calls despair a “formal feeling”? What’s the different between sadness, grief, and despondency? This course is a multidisciplinary introduction to despair. We’ll look at the ways that writers, artists, and scientists represent this state of feeling, and we’ll think together about how these ways of talking about despair shape our understandings of agency, subjectivity, and political responsibility. Is despair actually the death knoll of climate revolution? Or can our despondency be both paralyzing and productive? Does despair move us closer to life or to death? Is it an accurate or distorted way of thinking? Is it a psychiatric condition? An aesthetic one? Political? Spiritual? Together we will learn to read closely in order to ask how despair operates as both a literary and existential form. Authors may include Brooks, Dickinson, Kierkegaard, Moshfegh, and Freud.