COLT prefix classes Spring ‘26
Core Courses
COLT 3010: The Fairy Tale in Literature and Film
Professor Elio Brancaforte (Chair, Comparative Literature)
This course examines fairy tales in the broader context of children’s literature and the construction of childhood. Students will investigate different cultural inflections of canonical stories (e.g., “Bluebeard,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Cinderella”), explore how the tales evolved as they were appropriated by a literary culture, and identify strategies for reinterpreting fairy tales and producing a new folklore of childhood.
COLT 2010: Introduction to Comparative Literature
Professor Ghazouane Arslane ( Comparative Literature, MENA)
This course offers an introduction to the discipline of Comparative Literature. Reading texts from multiple regions, traditions, genres and histories around the globe, the course provides students with a set of critical skills, concepts and approaches that will hone their comparative thinking and broaden their horizons of literary and cultural knowledge.
We will journey through a wide range of interconnected topics: literary comparison; the concepts of influence and affinity; translation studies and postcolonialism– through case studies from Arabic, British and African literatures; comparison between the arts and across literature, film and painting; discourse of world literature, and the role of exiles, migrants and refugees in the making of global literatures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Electives
COLT 3810: Desire, Ideology, Interpretation
Professor Ari Ofengenden (Jewish Studies)
This course explores the dynamic interplay between desire and ideology in literature and culture, investigating how these forces shape both the creation and interpretation of texts. Through close readings of literary works and critical theory, students will examine how desire — whether erotic, political, or existential—is mediated by ideological structures, and how these dynamics influence the ways we read and interpret texts. The course engages with key theoretical frameworks, including psychoanalysis from Freud to Object relations and Feminist Psychoanalysis, Marxism and cultural studies, to analyze texts from diverse cultural and historical contexts.
COLT 1810: Global Irish Literature and the Irish Diaspora
Professor Adam McKeown (English, MEMS)
The Irish Diaspora is global in scope, crosses multiple linguistic communities, and involves several mass immigration events that, in turn, created large Irish communities around the world and especially in the Americas, England, Australia, and Africa. While this course will serve as an introduction to Irish Literature more generally, its focus is on writers of the Irish Diaspora and on writers who became Irish (by choice or circumstance) and will also introduce students to the Irish language (Gaeilge) and contemporary works written in it.
COLT 4810: Vanity
Professor Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé (English, Comparative Literature)
In this course we will read a set of texts that deal with in different ways — directly and indirectly with issues of meaning and meaninglessness, certainties and uncertainty. Such questions we'll be exploring throughout the semester under the broad concept of vanity, and with an eye to both the word's primary senses: futility, emptiness, pointlessness, or absurdity, on the one hand, and excessive self-regard on the other. We will examine scripture, aphorisms, novels, essays, and films to consider what quests for meaning in the face of anxiety about nothingness and the inevitability of death amount to in a world of crisis — social, political, and existential — in the age of the Internet, artificial intelligence, and in a time of climate emergency.