This course explores African Islam as a set of interconnected cultural continuums, religio-political movements, & interpretive identities. Lectures will cover significant moments in the burgeoning of African Muslim thought and identities through an array of literary sources. Students will examine writings from different spheres of African Islam on the continent & in African diasporas, from the 6th to the 21st century with literature from the centers in East, North, West, & Sub-Saharan Africa, students will engage with African Muslim diasporic writings from the Near East, the Indian Subcontinent, the Atlantic World, & the Americas.

This course trains students in the practice of translating Arabic texts from a wide variety of genres into English. Attention will be given to both theoretical and practical problems of translation for research and professional ends.

Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 20-25 page sample of the author's work. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format. Weekly readings will focus on the comparison of pre-existing translations as well as commentaries on the art and practice of literary translation.

Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 20-25 page sample of the author's work. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format. Weekly readings will focus on the comparison of pre-existing translations as well as commentaries on the art and practice of literary translation.

Focusing on René Char's wartime "notebook" of prose poetry from the French Resistance, Feuillets d'Hypnos (Leaves of Hypnos), this course joins a study of the Resistance to a poet's literary creation and its ongoing "afterlife" around the globe. History, archival research (traditional and digital), the practice of literary translation, and a trip to France that begins in Paris and follows Char's footsteps as poet and Resistance leader on the Maquis will all be part of our exploration. The poet's widow and editor will accompany us in France. We conclude with a presentation of the "notebook" in multiple languages by seminar participants.

This course introduces DEAF+WORLD, a world where people speak with their hands and hear with their eyes. It is for students who are interested in learning basic American Sign Language (ASL). Students will acquire basic vocabulary and grammar through interactive activities in order to develop conversational skills in ASL. Students also will practice using body language to effectively communicate with Deaf people while having minimal signing skills. In addition, the basics of Deaf culture and Deaf American history will be discussed.

The course covers the linguistic, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, and sociolinguistic aspects of bilingualism. We examine language acquisition in monolingual and bilingual children, the notion of "critical age" for language acquisition, definitions and measurements of bilingualism, and the verbal behavior of bilinguals such as code-switching. We consider the effects of bilingualism on other cognitive domains, including memory, and examine neurolinguistic evidence comparing the brains of monolinguals and bilinguals. Societal and governmental attitudes toward bilingualism in countries like India and the U.S. are contrasted.

This course builds upon the foundation in Classical Sanskrit grammar and vocabulary established during 1st and 2nd year Sanskrit, and also builds knowledge of Sanskrit poetry and South Asian culture through reading selections from Sanskrit poetic works and traditional theoretical treaties on poetics. It is primarily a reading course, focusing on passages from poems by Kalidasa, Murari, Bhavabhuti, Bhartrhari and other classical poets in combination with readings from Dandin's theoretical work on poetry the Kavyadarsa. This course provides students a comprehensive introduction to the Sanskrit poetic literature of different periods.

This course is an introduction to the practice of literary translation from Spanish to English, with a focus on fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. After a series of translation exercises, each student will select an author and work to be translated as the central project for the class, and will embark on the process of revising successive drafts. Close reading of the Spanish texts is required, as is a deep engagement with the translations of fellow students. Subjects of discussion will include style, context, the conventions of contemporary translation, and the re translation of classics.

Translation is at the heart of the humanities, and it arises in every discipline in the social sciences and beyond, but it is not easy to say what it is. This course looks at the role of translation in the past and in the world of today, in fields as varied as anthropology, the media, law, international relations and the circulation and study of literature. It aims to help students grasp the basic intellectual and philosophical problems raised by the transfer of meanings from one language to another (including in machine translation) and to acquaint them with the functions, structures and effects of translation in intercultural communication.

This course will provide an in-depth understanding of Machine Translation from computational and linguistic perspectives, spanning classical to Generative AI paradigms. We will discuss techniques for automated processing of human language (morphological, syntactic and semantic analysis, tagging, and language generation) with in-class programming exercises. We will cover latest techniques for scalable language technologies in production-scale applications. Projects will involve implementing components of speech/text technologies, identifying limitations, developing improvements, or any other topic relevant to human language processing.

Academic work in disciplines across the humanities and humanistic social sciences are fueled in part by practices of translation, and many disciplines are moving toward a consideration of translation as scholarship in its own right. Yet few graduate students are trained in practices of translation, either within their discipline or as an interdisciplinary mode of intellectual engagement. This graduate translation workshop aims to help students from various departments hone a practice of translation that can stand on its own as a scholarly endeavor, while also deepening and enriching the other forms of research & writing in which they engage.