Columbia University
Columbia Consortium Information
English GU4790: Advanced Old English
Professor: Leslie Carpenter
Monday 4:10-6:00 PM
This course will primarily consist in the task of translating the remarkably challenging poem Beowulf. We will be reading (smaller) portions of the vast quantity of secondary texts as we negotiate and debate issues raised by our readings and contemporary scholarship. As we work through the language of the text, comparing translations with our own, we will also be tracking concepts. Each student will be using our communal site (location tbd) for posting translations as well as for starting individual projects on word clusters / concepts.
In addition, we will be using our time together to translate and read some other material that we have not yet gone over in our first semester. We will read a Norse saga and some additional Norse materials, translate additional works in the Nowell Codex, and get our translating muscles fine tuned with some other poetic acrobatics.
Fordham University
Fordham Consortium Information
MVST 5300: Occitania: Language and Power
Professors: Thomas O’Donnell and Nicholas Paul
Friday 2:30-5:00 PM
Fordham’s Lincoln Center Campus
Occitania, the southern French homeland of the troubadours and the victim of one of Europe’s most vicious religious wars during the thirteenth-century Albigensian Crusade, has long played an outsized role in cultural history. This four-credit, team-taught course will introduce students to the language and history of medieval Occitania through the first-hand study of Occitanian texts, including documents, historical narrative, and troubadour lyric. As a seminar, we will consider the different but complementary approaches that History, Literature, and other disciplines bring to such topics as urban and rural communities; gender; sex and sexuality; lordship; textuality and performance; the Albigensian crusade and its aftermath; and Occitania’s place in the global Middle Ages.
No prior knowledge of languages other than English is assumed, and weekly instruction in Old Occitan will be provided. Students should expect to be able to translate edited Old Occitan texts, with a dictionary, by the end of the semester.
