Upcoming Courses

COMPLIT 122: Writing World Literatures

First-Year Writing Requirement

A writing course designed to increase cultural literacies. It requires intense work on composition, argumentation, and contextualization of the creative texts from a comparative perspective. Topics and readings vary by instructor! Check out the LSA Course Guide for a full list of topics and sections this term.

COMPLIT 322: "Translating World Literatures: A Workshop for Humans"

Upper-Level Writing Requirement, Humanities Distribution

This course provides an opportunity for you to take your skills in reading a foreign language to the next level by learning to translate literary texts into English. Students will reflect on the role of the human in translation from one than one perspective, critically considering questions of machine translation, globalization, the environment, and more.

COMPLIT 350: "Narrating War in the Modern Middle East"

Humanities Distribution

This course is an exploration of war in the modern Middle East through literature and film. Topics in this course will address anticolonial movements, dispossession and displacement, and constructions of memory amid ongoing violence from the twentieth century to the present. 

COMPLIT 382.002: "What Counts? Literature and Culture as Data"

Humanities Distribution

Scholars have begun treating literature and cultural history as data: counting words across thousands of books, mapping networks of characters and correspondents, and training computers to recognize genres, styles, and translations. This course is a hands-on introduction to "digital humanities," and to the debates it has sparked about what we gain and what we lose when we read at scale.

COMPLIT 438: "Hollywood's Invention of the Americas"

Hollywood film has participated in creating a set of ideals that raise the frontier, the experience of immigration, the little guy, the small town and big city into the stuff of widely circulated cinematic myths, while at the same time exploring American malaise. This course explores this double history of Hollywood films: making myths of America, and also debunking myth by picturing brute reality.

COMPLIT 323: "Vampire Revamped: A Century of Adaptations from Page to Screen"

Upper-Level Writing Requirement, Humanities Distribution

This course introduces students to the history of a strange and seductive figure that has haunted literature for the last two centuries: the vampire. We will engage with some key works of vampire literature, including Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) and Tony Scott’s Hunger (1981) as well as their many film and television adaptations.

COMPLIT 382.001: "Children of War, Revolution, and Migration in Literature and Cinema"

Humanities Distribution

Drawing on literature and film, this course examines the figure of the child as a lens for exploring complex issues such as political resistance, social order, the nation-state, and border regimes. The course will study works from diverse cultural contexts.

COMPLIT 384: "Opening the Black Box of Machine Translation"

Humanities Distribution

In partnership with the College of Mechanical Engineering, this course explores how machine translation systems were first built, how they work now, what they do well, where they fail, and who gets to set the rules. It will also explain, in accessible terms, how modern translation systems actually work, which will involve an overview of large language models (LLMs).

COMPLIT 494: "Canon Translation Journal"

See Canon's page here!

Be an editor for a student literary magazine with the Canon Translation Journal! The journal is dedicated to promoting and publishing undergraduate translation. Students learn about a variety of careers in translation and/or practice specific translation skills and tools.