[Sfts-students] seminars next year and DE credits

[Sherryl Vint]

hello SFCS students,

For those of you still taking classes, and who are interested in
pursuing the DE, I wanted to let you know that three classes offered next
year can count toward the DE.

ENGL 247 and ENGL 248 regularly count toward DE credit, and both will be
offered next year.

In addition, ENGL 262 will focus on futurity in its current offering, and
thus this iteration can also be counted for DE credit. I've pasted the
description below and you should also have received this from Perla.

cheers,
Sherryl


Histories of the Future: 1600-present.



How might early moderns have conceived of the future? How was the future
constructed and projected, who and what did it include and exclude, and how
might theories of futurity have produced competing narratives of
possibility and impossibility, imminence and consequence, endurance and
duration? What material practices and knowledge forms enabled (and
disabled) particular forms of “thinking ahead”?   This course will explore
theoretical and historical questions about early modern “futures” alongside
a series of cultural artifacts (from the first utopian fictions in England,
selected literatures of travel and experimentation, and chronologies of (or
including) the future, to selected case studies central to the spectacular
rise and dissemination of the “how to” book, including manuals on the arts
of prediction, prognostication, planning, and preservation, but also those
on how to be, how to feel, think, speak, pray and thus become or produce a
future version of oneself.  In doing so, we will explore forms of
anticipatory consciousness available to early modern denizens that continue
to influence our own.



Critical readings assigned will help us explore how recent approaches to
futurity within queer, critical race, post-colonial, disability and
environmental studies are opening up new paths for the analysis of—and
continuing relevance of-- futures “past.”  What were (and are) the social
and racial politics of “thinking ahead,” variously construed?  How were
(and are) emotions or affects constellated around “horizons of
expectation”?  Visitors to our seminar currently include Scott Manning
Stevens, working on indigenous chronologies, settler colonialism, and early
modernity and Debapriya Sarkar, working on the early modern history of
hypotheses and the politics of utopian literature. Readings will introduce
seminar members to exciting new work on the history of futures across the
disciplines, while also considering how the “future” operates differently
within or across disciplines as well as cultures, genres, and forms of
mediation.  Students from other departments and specializing in other time
periods are absolutely welcome and the syllabus will be informed by
specific interests of seminar members.  Each member of the seminar will
construct an “archive of the future” around an object or topic of special
interest (for those primarily interested in fields other than early or
premodern studies, this object or topic may not necessarily be “early
modern” but will pertain in some way to histories of futurity) and present
a short conference paper at the end of term.


Sherryl Vint (she/her)
Professor
Director, Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science
Editor, *Science Fiction Studies*
Editor, *Science and Popular Culture* book series
<https://www.palgrave.com/in/series/15760>
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