English & Creative Writing Off-campus Courses
Our One Course At A Time calendar allows us to extend our classroom to exciting locations beyond campus on a regular basis. The following are the current courses that spend extended time off campus. Other courses may incorporate off-campus study for shorter periods. We're mapping new locations for literary studies and creative writing with topics courses in southern Africa, the Bahamas, Chicago, and Italy.
Theatre, Architecture, and the Arts in England
Every other year English professors lead 20-26 students on a tour through modern and historic England, with emphasis on important architectural sites and live theatre. The trip is the highlight of many Cornell careers. Read more about this off-campus course.
American Nature Writers & Modern American Literature
These potentially life-changing courses are taught at the Wilderness Field Station in northern Minnesota as part of Cornell's annual Wilderness Term. Each course includes a canoe journey into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Read more about American Nature Writers.
Medieval and Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare's Rivals
Chicago's Newberry Library holds one of the world's premier collections of literature from Shakespeare's era. Students dig into the Newberry's archives for research projects in addition to exploring Chicago's sites and culture. Read more about the Newberry Library.
Literature and Social Justice in Chicago
The city of Chicago has a harried history of inequality and a rich history of social and literary activism. Using Chicago as a backdrop, this course will question the relationship between literature and activism in the city: what it has been, what it is, and what it might be. Many of our readings will focus on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, the “Age of Reform.” Authors of this time period saw writing as a way to change the world, and texts themselves were believed to be agents of reform. The class will examine issues of race and socio-economic class, immigration, education, home, and labor. Our readings, visits, events, and speakers in Chicago will offer us additional ways to think about the complex web among writers, writing, social issues, and social change.
Caribbean Literature in the Bahamas
This course offers the unique experience of studying Caribbean literature in the Bahamas. We will read a range of genres, including poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, from a range of time periods and Caribbean islands. Our primary texts include: narratives of arrival (from Columbus to contemporary tourists); a nineteenth-century plantation journal from San Salvador island; the first national literary anthology from the Bahamas; and a contemporary novel about Haiti. Our literary texts will be complemented and complicated by the other texts we will study: historical manuscripts documenting colonialism and slavery, secondary sources on historical sites and postcolonial theory, and materials available only in the Gerace Research Centre’s library. We will also treat the landscape itself as a text, “reading” the natural world and such sites as ruins and monuments to understand the environment and history of San Salvador island. Finally, we will do some creative writing to experience how the environment influences writers.