This course explores what we do with language and other modes of expression and how these modes shape our communicative capacities. Why do we gossip? How do we decide what communication is appropriate face-to-face or via text or email? What informs our beliefs about civility and obscenity? How do we decide what credible speech is? What happens when a culturally rooted expressive form (say, a dance) is taken up by people elsewhere for other aesthetic and political ends? We will explore such questions by studying theories and ethnographies of a range of phenomena: love-letters, gossip, poetry, asylum appeals, spoken word, and more.

The origins and nature of English vocabulary, from Proto-Indo-European prehistory to current slang via Beowulf. Emphasis on linguistic tools and methodology. Topics include the Greek and Latin elements of English, the wonders and complexities of reading and translating ancient texts, the study of language families.

What happens when we mix Shakespeare with modern Spanish-language theater? This course places issues of migration and legacies of imperialism in conversation with Shakespeare and Shakespearean adaptations, appropriations, confrontations, and allusive riffs in the present day. By looking at both early modern and 21st-century texts that engage with patterns of mobility and migration from the U.S/Mexico borderlands to U.S. diasporas, as well as the many afterlives of Shakespeare in the present, we will explore the possibilities and risks of a bilingual activist literature of migration that draws from early modern dramatic precedent.

This course probes the intersection of world literature and translation in relation to conditions of multilingualism, circulation, and the consolidation/contestation of national literary traditions. In reading key texts from the debates around the concept and practice of world literature, we ask whether its universalizing drive can be reconciled with literary/scholarly investments in locality and specificity. How, moreover, do world literature and translation intersect with questions of empire, race, and non-national formations, especially diaspora? Throughout the semester, we consider the implications for our own work as scholars.

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.

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 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.

This course will provide an in-depth understanding of Machine Translation from computational and linguistic perspectives, spanning classical to neural modeling paradigms. We will discuss techniques for automated processing of human language (morphological analysis, tagging, syntactic and semantic analysis, and language generation) with in-class exercises. Linguistic variation and its impact on computational models will be discussed. Term projects will involve implementing components of speech/text technologies and applications, identifying their limitations, and developing improvements, or any topic relevant to human language processing.

This course will explore the crucial connections between migration, language, and translation. Drawing on texts from a range of genres and disciplines - from memoir and fiction to scholarly work in translation studies, migration studies, political science, anthropology, and sociology - we will focus on how language and translation affect the lives of those who move through and settle in other cultures, and how, in turn, human mobility affects language and modes of belonging.