Courses
Upcoming Classes
2025 Nixon Institute: June 16th-27th
Better than the Movie: Literature into Film
Ben James
8:00 - 10:50
Dive into the world of cinematic adaptations! In this course we'll explore how literary fiction and non-fiction are translated for the screen. Using Linda Cahir's Literature into Film: Theory and Practical Approaches as a scholarly guide to the diverse creative approaches filmmakers take, we will analyze four key texts and their subsequent adaptation(s).
- The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith and The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) dir Anthony Minghella... and Ripley (2024) Steven Zaillian
- Poor Things by Alasdair Gray and Poor Things (2023) dir Y. Lanthimos
- Wild by Cheryl Strayed and Wild (2014) dir Jean-Marc Vallée
- The Shining by Stephen King and The Shining (1980) dir S. Kubrick
Using the skills and techniques they've learned students will produce their own in-depth study of a canonical text of their choosing.
American Nature Writing from the Closed Frontier to Climate Fiction
Jenn Ladino
1:00 - 3:50
This course will explore how nature writing solidified as a settler genre over the last 150 years with a focus on its wilderness, frontier, and pastoral traditions, as well as the recent genre of climate change fiction or “cli-fi.” We will consider how American identity is associated with “nature,” how environmental iconography and mythology have changed over time, and how nature writing is (and isn’t) distinct from other American literary traditions. We’ll ask questions like: What are the implicit boundaries of national belonging in the idea of the U.S. as “nature’s nation”? How do Indigenous literary traditions challenge those boundaries and the genre of nature writing itself? How has nature writing evolved in the 21st century to push back against settler colonialism and the climate crisis?
Course discussions, short response papers, and annotated bibliographies will inform our readings of a range of texts including nonfiction and fiction as well as a poem or two. We’ll work toward writing seminar papers that analyze literature in relation to major themes and issues concerning nature and national identity—including solitude, borders, farming, gender, race, outdoor recreation, and the climate crisis. Primary texts will include Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, Cheryl Strayed, Wild, Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation, and CMarie Fuhrman, Salmon Weather.
Past Nixon Institute Classes
- 2024: Teaching to Retell: Fairytale, Folklore, Epic, and Myth; Narrative and Narrative Theory
- 2023: Film Television Literacy; Against Amnesia: Teaching and Learning with Literature
- 2022: Multimodal Composition Theory and Application; Reading Hemingway
- 2021: Rhetoric and Composition Pedagogy Workshop; Young Adult Literature in a Time of Upheaval
- 2020: African American Poetry; Thinking Feeling: Emotions in Literature, Teaching, and the World
- 2019: Greek and Roman Mythology; Creative Writing Pedagogy
- 2018: Literature of the American West; The Victorian Uncanny
- 2017: Fairness and Assessment; Women and Poetry
- 2016: Language, Literary Form, and Environment; Black Lives Matter
- 2015: Freeing the Verse: Teaching Poetry to High School Students; American Literary Nonfiction
- 2014: Caribbean Literature