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Fall 2026 - Class Option #3

 

ISLANDS

A pirate, a princess, and a spy land on an island. So the story begins. Or at least one possible story—on islands it’s often hard to say where fact ends and fiction begins. Islands have set the stage for some of society’s most ambitious dreams. They’ve been utopias, prisons, laboratories, and harbingers. With one foot in fantasy and one in history, they are the places where new worlds are imagined. We’ll look at representations of islands across periods, places, and genres to pose big questions. Nearly everything that has happened in the past few years has found amplified expression on an island. So, studying islands will be our way to study capitalism, slavery, revolution, colonialism, cultural encounters, nationalism, and climate change. Over the course of the quarter, we’ll look at a diverse and fascinating set of materials. We’ll go to the art museum to look at paintings by Paul Gauguin, analyze the music of Bob Marley, and read Vanessa Ogle’s history of tax havens. This is a course that takes James Bond and Moana as seriously as William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and postcolonial theory. 

Possible course readings
Shakespeare, The Tempest
Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands”
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island
Ogle, “Archipelago Capitalism”
Fleming, Dr No
Trouillot, Silencing the Past
Gaugin, paintings of Tahiti
Pontecorvo, Burn!
Nordhoff and Hall, Mutiny on the Bounty
Zeitlin (dir.), Beasts of the Southern Wild
Disney, Moana
Bob Marley, Catch a Fire and Burnin’
James, Brief History of Seven Killings
Heyerdahl, Kon-Tiki and the Kon-Tiki controversy
Cole, “(The) Bikini: Embodying the Bomb”

Instructors

Daniel Immerwahr is Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities. He teaches U.S. and global history. His most recent book, How to Hide an Empire, was a national bestseller. He is a contributor to the New Yorker and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Jacobin. He is now writing a book about fire in American history.

Jules Law a Professor in the English department, where he specializes in the Victorian novel, psychoanalysis, gender theory, and literary theory. He is the author of The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk, and Water in the Victorian Novel, and has written widely on gothic and detective literature. He is currently writing a book on Victorian virtual-reality theory.

Both Professor Immerwahr and Professor Law are Charles Deering McCormick Distinguished Faculty of Northwestern.