This course is designed as a capstone course offering students an opportunity to integrate and reflect upon what they have learned in the major while focusing on current topics and critical debates in English studies. Students are expected to be able to build on courses they have taken before and should consult individual colloquium co-ordinators before registering for the course. There will be no formal lectures but weekly meetings for the discussion of texts and issues, led by students. Assessment will be based on contributions to colloquium discussions and a final essay.
Wednesdays, 12:30 - 14:20
The English language began as a set of obscure dialects on a small island at the edge of the world. Today, it is spoken by almost two billion people, and functions as the lingua franca of a vast global network.
The story of the growth and spread of English is also the story of politics, power, religion, gender, technology, commerce, music and literature, the oppressor and the oppressed. This senior examines the history of English, and the technologies that have shaped and facilitated its development.
The course of study begins with modern varieties of English, and traces the language back through the centuries. How has English changed? How can we recognize and interpret the English of a given place or time? And what do the words we use reveal about ourselves?
Wednesdays, 12:30 - 14:20
This course is an attempt to trace the spectralization of Hong Kong’s now destroyed and largely forgotten colonial playhouses in present-day Hong Kong. Several of the city’s playhouses were converted at the end of the twentieth century into soaring, glittering, futuristic malls – the temples of neoliberal globalism. What however were Hong Kong’s now destroyed theatres like during their heyday? Who and what was performed there? What impact did these performances have on the local population? How have these performances disappeared or been displaced in the urban landscape?
Through primary source research in digitized newspaper archives, oral history work, and readings of a few key critical texts, students will chart how performative practices are displaced, overlaid or erased in geographic spaces across time. Students will thus ‘crowd-source’ a history of Hong Kong performance by developing narratives on specific colonial theatres, their long-term influence and the reasons behind their disappearance.