This is an author spotlight on Kathleen Baldwin. Baldwin is a historical fiction author.

This course explores how we use story to articulate ethical norms. The syllabus consists of short fiction, novels, plays, feature films and some non-fiction. Major topics include leadership and authority, professionalism, the nature of ethical standards, social enterprise, and questions of gender, cultural and individual identity, and work / life balance. Materials vary from year to year, but past readings have included work by Robert Bolt, Michael Frayn, Timothy Mo, Wole Soyinka, H. D. Thoreau, and others; films have included Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hotel Rwanda, The Descendants, Motorcycle Diaries, Three Kings, and others. Draws on various professions and national cultures, and is run as a series of moderated discussions, with students centrally engaged in the teaching process.

This class explores the creation (and creativity) of the modern scientific and cultural world through study of western Europe in the 17th century, the age of Descartes and Newton, Shakespeare, Milton and Ford. It compares period thinking to present-day debates about the scientific method, art, religion, and society. This team-taught, interdisciplinary subject draws on a wide range of literary, dramatic, historical, and scientific texts and images, and involves theatrical experimentation as well as reading, writing, researching and conversing.
The primary theme of the class is to explore how England in the mid-seventeenth century became “a world turned upside down” by the new ideas and upheavals in religion, politics, and philosophy, ideas that would shape our modern world. Paying special attention to the “theatricality” of the new models and perspectives afforded by scientific experimentation, the class will read plays by Shakespeare, Tate, Brecht, Ford, Churchill, and Kushner, as well as primary and secondary texts from a wide range of disciplines. Students will also compose and perform in scenes based on that material.

This unit is developed for an 8th grade English class using Monster by Walter Mosley as the core text. The overarching inspiration can be used for all grade levels along with the knowledge of ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences) scores, and recent studies related to trauma informed care in education. The unit meets national Common Core language arts standards along with New Haven social emotional standards. Through the study of poetry, scenes and literature, students will be doing self reflective analysis of themselves and literary texts with the hope that a message of resilience can be developed. Writing will be a tool for academic and social/emotional self improvement. The activities range from creating a found poem, writing a scene, and creating a narrative.

This text is intended to be used in undergraduate literature courses as a supplement to help enhance students' interactions with literature and to guide their undertanding source material they may encounter in their studies. 

This seminar offers a course of readings in lyric poetry. It aims to enhance the student’s capacity to understand the nature of poetic language and the enjoyment of poetic texts by treating poems as messages to be deciphered.
The seminar will briefly touch upon the history of theories of figurative language since Aristotle and it will attend to the development of those theories during the last thirty years, noting the manner in which they tended to consider figures of speech distinct from normative or literal expression, and it will devote particular attention to the rise of theories that quarrel with this distinction.
The seminar also aims to communicate a rough sense of the history of English-speaking poetry since the early modern period. Some attention will be paid as well to the use of metaphor in science.

This course introduces the practice and theory of literary criticism. The seminar focuses on topics such as the history of critical methods and techniques, and the continuity of certain subjects in literary history. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication is a major component of the course. Other components include theory and use of figurative language and reading poetry.

Alienation, overcrowding, sensory overload, homelessness, criminality, violence, loneliness, sprawl, blight. How have the realities of city living influenced literature’s formal and thematic techniques? How useful is it to think of literature as its own kind of “map” of urban space? Are cities too grand, heterogeneous, and shifting to be captured by writers? In this seminar we will seek answers to these questions in key city literature, and in theoretical works that endeavor to understand the culture of cities.

How does one writer use another writer’s work? Does it matter if one author has been dead 300 years? What difference does it make if she’s a groundbreaking twentieth-century feminist and the writer she values has come to epitomize the English literary tradition? How can a novelist borrow from plays and poems? By reading Virginia Woolf’s major novels and essays in juxtaposition with some of the Shakespeare plays that (depending on one’s interpretation) haunt, enrich, and/or shape her writing, we will try to answer these questions and raise others. Readings in literary criticism, women’s studies, and other literary texts will complement our focus on the relationship–across time, media, and gender–between Shakespeare and Woolf. As a seminar, we will work to become more astute readers of literature within its historical, artistic, and political contexts, and consider how literature both reflects and contributes to these societal frameworks. Central texts will include Shakespeare’s Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale, and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Between the Acts. This subject is an advanced seminar in both the Literature and the Women’s Studies Program.

Literary Studies for a Sustainable Future: An Introductory Course with Social Justice and Ecocriticism Intersections is a university literature textbook that offers a sampling of the vast array of storytelling and literary traditions from around the world. Led by course outcomes, the book’s readings, activities, and assignments aim to establish a 21st century framework. Novice literary scholars establish correlations between local and regional literature with those from distant lands on relevant concerns and topics, like those outlined by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Through songs and folklore, film clips, poetry, myth, storytelling, and satirical theater, its chapters feature key literary texts and terms to present literature as vital community-sustaining cultural expressions. Learners witness the roles literature has in climate, ecology, and social justice challenges.

The study of English literature has numerous benefits. When studying poetry, students learn about syllables, sounds, and how to choose between words that have similar meanings yet differ in nuance. Taking a glance at prose gives students a look at what some great historical authors had to say and how the way these authors expressed themselves lent significance to their messages.

This short textbook was written for an English for Academic Purposes class for high school students in Japan. It could easily be used in a quarter or trimester. Nothing is dependent on the country. One term is a short time for such a vast field. Yet, if our students develop some appreciation for English literature, it will surely be a benefit to them. Hemingway once wrote, “There are many kinds of stories in this book. I hope that you will find some that you like.”

Our subject is the ethics of leadership, an examination of the principles appealed to by executive authority when questions arise about its sources and its legitimacy. Most treatments of this subject resort to case-studies in order to illustrate the application of ethical principles to business situations, but our primary emphasis will be upon classic works of imaginative literature, which convey more directly than case-studies the ethical pressures of decision-making. Readings will include works by Shakespeare, Sophocles, Shaw, E.M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Henrik Ibsen, among others. Topics to be discussed include the sources of authority, the management of consensus, the ideal of vocation, the ethics of deception, the morality of expediency, the requirements of hierarchy, the virtues and vices of loyalty, the relevance of ethical principles in extreme situations.

The aim of this subject is to acquaint the student with some important works of systematic ethical philosophy and to bring to bear the viewpoint of those works on the study of classic works of literature. This subject will trace the history of ethical speculation in systematic philosophy by identifying four major positions: two from the ancient world and the two most important traditions of ethical philosophy since the renaissance. The two ancient positions will be represented by Plato and Aristotle, the two modern positions by Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. We will try to understand these four positions as engaged in a rivalry with one another, and we will also engage with the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, which offers a bridge between ancient and modern conceptions and provides a source for the rivalry between the viewpoints of Kant and Mill. Further, we will be mindful that the modern positions are subject to criticism today by new currents of philosophical speculation, some of which argue for a return to the positions of Plato and Aristotle.

Lecture series looking at key concepts in studying Literature; including lectures on the concept of unreliable narrators to theory of comparative literature. This series was filmed in the English Faculty in Trinity Term 2012

Access historic documents related to literature and poetry including selected Walt Whitman notebooks, digitized rare books, and presentations on a variety of literary figures ranging from Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley to Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Louisa May Alcott's novel, Little Women. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

This video segment from Between the Lions features a catchy song that celebrates an important function of literacy: access to information. It also shows the wide world of print, and all of the knowledge that can be gained from it.

Emmy award-winning poet, Lucille Clifton, introduces and reads her poem, 'Turning,' about trying to be your own person and taking responsibility for your life.