This course engages the question of how queerness can be read and understood through Shakespeare’s work, and it also addresses issues of gender, race, religion, friendship, marriage, among other topics.

This course focuses on early English plays about sea travel. It also includes primary historical sources such as travel journals to explore how theatre was inspired and shaped by the early modern maritime world.

From Thomas More’s Utopia to Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, this course shows how writers during an era of exploration and cross-cultural encounter portrayed different peoples, customs, and environments, as well as the relationship between the European self and the global “other.”

This course covers literature during and about the “Golden Age of Piracy” (1650s-1730s). Though focusing mainly on English pirates, the class also covers global pirates, both historical and fictional, across different literary genres and forms.