Welcome to New York! A Literary Introduction

What makes New York City both impossible and irresistible? This course explores how writers have captured the city’s contradictions, its energy, diversity, and constant reinvention across more than a century of literature. From Walt Whitman and Emma Lazarus to Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, June Jordan, and Colson Whitehead, students will encounter New York as both subject and muse. Through close reading, discussion, and creative writing, you will develop your own voice in dialogue with the city’s literary past and present. Visits to the Museum of the City of New York, the Tenement Museum, literary Harlem, and the Nuyorican Poets Café will bring these works off the page and into the streets of the city they celebrate.

Instructor: Joshua Bartlett

Joshua Bartlett is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at High Point University, where he writes, teaches, and researches in the fields of early and nineteenth-century American literature, American poetry and poetics, and the environmental humanities. His scholarly work has appeared in publications such as Nineteenth-Century Contexts, ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Encyclopedia of American Indian Literature, and Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and he is at work on a book project entitled "Arboreal Poetics: The Language, Materiality, and Politics of Trees in American Poetry." He is also a frequent reviewer of contemporary poetry collections for outlets such as the Ploughshares blog and Tar River Poetry.

Interpreting Literature: Reading Carefully, Writing Clearly

What does it mean to “close read”? Does an author’s life, or the time and place of writing, change how we understand a text? This course introduces students to reading habits, writing practices, and interpretive approaches that deepen how we engage with novels, poems, and other cultural works. Together we will experiment with ways of developing a written voice—identifying what moves us in a text, crafting an argument, and responding to other interpretations. Our main reading, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, will anchor our explorations at the intersection of creativity and science, nature and technology, and personal ambition and societal responsibility. Students will participate in additional readings, films, and hands-on experiences and will also take part in a writing workshop at Tom’s Restaurant, visit the Shelley archives at the New York Public Library, and work with zines and diaries from Barnard’s Special Collections to connect literature, place, and creative process

Instructor: Tara Needham

Tara Emelye Needham has taught extensively in the fields of literature, writing, and critical theory at diverse institutions, including Skidmore College, Bilkent University in Ankara Türkiye, and Bard College, where she also served as Assistant Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. Tara’s poems and essays have appeared in several print and online journals and the archives of her 90’s feminist zine Cupsize are held in the Barnard Special Collections. She is currently a Ph. D candidate in Literary Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY, researching and writing on novels of the late British Empire.

Writing for TV: Discovering Your Voice in the Age of Streaming

Successfully selling a television show requires a writer to have a unique POV, engaging characters and a solid story engine. A series creator must develop two important documents to help them sell their show to television executives – the series bible and the pilot script. Through a number of creative exercises, students will learn the intricacies of the unique screenwriting formats that are the half-hour and hour-long teleplays. Together we will cover the differences between an episode arc and a seasonal one, the requirements of A/B/C story plotting, and how to write an effective show bible.

We will survey popular tv series from diverse voices, primarily focusing on women showrunners and/or series with strong female leads (including New Girl, Stranger Things, Never Have I Ever, Abbott Elementary, Ginny & Georgia, Derry Girls and more). By the end of the course, students will have a written mini series bible, a detailed pilot outline and the first act of their pilot script, which will be the springboard for creating a series that truly stands out!

Instructor: Dafina Roberts

Dafina Roberts is a writer/director/producer, who creates dramedies targeted towards Gen Y and Z audiences. Her work explores themes of power, perception, and identity in the postmodern world. 

Dafina has been a Barnard College Artemis Rising Foundation Filmmaker Fellow, a Ryan Murphy Half Initiative Directing Fellow, a Blackhouse Producer Lab Fellow  and a Kickstarter Creator-In-Residence. Previously, she created the digital series Giving Me Life (In The Land Of The Deadass), which was released via Comcast’s Xfinity. Giving Me Life also won the AT&T Audience Award for Best Episodic at the Frameline San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival.

Dafina worked as a Director of Development & Production at Nickelodeon, where she oversaw creative development and current series; helped manage the first-look deal with Nick Cannon’s Ncredible Entertainment and coordinated on shows including the Emmy-nominated Degrassi. She also co-produced the feature film, Punching At The Sun (Sundance Film Festival; Sundance Institute's Humanitas Prize nominee; Tribeca Film Festival), which has been featured in the Criterion Collection.

Reading NYC: A Century in Fiction

This course tours the great history of a great metropolis through the reading of three novels that represent different times and places in New York City, while exploring the real streets, landmarks, and communities that shaped them. First, we will visit the Fifth Avenue mansions of the late nineteenth-century Gilded Age through Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Next, we will participate in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s through Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem. Finally, we will cross the Brooklyn Bridge and think about gentrification in the late twentieth century through Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude. Along the way, we will discuss the evolution of the American novel and the intersections of class, gender, and racial experiences in urban life. These visits throughout New York will connect literature to lived experience, bringing the city’s fictional worlds into dialogue with the vibrant, changing city outside the classroom.

Instructor: David Witzling

With a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from UCLA, David Witzling has been teaching the literatures of the United States for over twenty years. He is the author of Everybody’s America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures of Postmodernism (Routledge, 2008), a study of the relationship among racial consciousness, political liberalism, and the evolution of the novel in the 1960s and ‘70s. He is currently Visiting Associate Professor of English at Manhattan University.

Screenwriting: The Art of Storytelling Through Film

This course will give you the empowering tools to recognize a creative idea in your imagination, and use the medium of screenwriting to make it come to life. You will write, workshop, or refine your voice as a screenwriter, while watching films that will inspire and challenge you. We will explore the foundations of three-act structure, beat sheets, and the Young Hero’s Journey, before interrogating how to best tell stories in our own way. Throughout this course, we will explore questions like: What makes a great opening scene you can’t turn off? How can genres like science fiction or horror enhance a story about the human experience? How do we uplift our personal experiences through memoir writing? We will study almost a dozen films, widely varied in style and approach, but almost all of them exclusively made by and starring women. By the end of the course, you will have written 3-4 short screenplays. Between watching, discussing, and writing, this course is an all-encompassing love letter to film and women’s place in it.

Instructor: Bess Frankel

Bess Frankel is a director, writer, and teaching artist based in New York City. Her work has been a finalist for the O'Neill Playwrights Conference, Playwrights Realm Fellowship, Actors’ Theatre of Louisville Heideman Award, Jewish Plays Project, the Drama League’s Beatrice Terry Residency, and twice the Columbia@Roundabout Reading Series. As an associate/assistant director, Bess has worked on Broadway, the Public Theater, the Signature Theater, the Goodman Theater, among others. She was the long-term assistant to playwright Lynn Nottage and was the Manager of New Work Development for Ms. Nottage’s production company, Market Road Films. Bess is also the Co-Director and Head of Playwriting for CreateHER, a free theatre education program for girls and non-binary high school students, and teaches Screenwriting at Barnard College’s summer high school program. Bess received a BFA in Theatre Directing from the University of Michigan (Go Blue) and an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University. Member: SDC; Dramatists Guild.

Women Coming of Age in Literature

What does it mean for a young woman to come of age on the page? This course explores how women writers have redefined the bildungsroman—the “novel of formation”—to center female experience, creativity, and struggle. Reading works from the mid-twentieth century to today, we will trace how authors depict growth, ambition, friendship, and independence against the pressures of family, culture, and society. Texts may include Jamaica Kincaid, Simone de Beauvoir, Elena Ferrante, Mary McCarthy, Sia Figiel, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, and Barnard’s own June Jordan, Edwidge Danticat, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Zora Neale Hurston. Alongside close reading and discussion, students will write their own coming-of-age narratives—personal or imagined—and experiment with how literature captures the moment when a voice becomes its own.

Instructor: Tara Needham

Tara Emelye Needham has taught extensively in the fields of literature, writing, and critical theory at diverse institutions, including Skidmore College, Bilkent University in Ankara Türkiye, and Bard College, where she also served as Assistant Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. Tara’s poems and essays have appeared in several print and online journals and the archives of her 90’s feminist zine Cupsize are held in the Barnard Special Collections. She is currently a Ph. D candidate in Literary Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY, researching and writing on novels of the late British Empire.