Romance Studies (ROMS)

ROMS 1102 - FWS: The Craft of Storytelling (3 Credits)  
We tell stories for many reasons: to entertain; to seduce; to complain; to think. This course draws upon the literatures and cultures of the romance languages to explore the role of narrative in our construction and understanding of the world.
Distribution Requirements: (WRT-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023  
ROMS 1108 - FWS:Cultural Identities; Cultural Differences (3 Credits)  
What is a culture, and how do we know one when we see it? This course draws upon the histories and texts of French, Spanish, Italian, and/or Portuguese speaking worlds to discuss issues of identity, difference, politics, place, and community.
Distribution Requirements: (WRT-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023  
ROMS 1109 - FWS: Image and Imagination (3 Credits)  
What kind of information do images - in photography, painting, and/or film - convey? What kind of impact do they have on the minds and the bodies of their audiences? This course foregrounds the role of visual culture in the societies where Spanish, French, Portuguese, and/or Italian is spoken, and it asks students to dwell upon how visual material interacts with spoken and written language.
Distribution Requirements: (WRT-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023  
ROMS 1113 - FWS: Thinking and Thought (3 Credits)  
Some of the most important and intriguing thinkers, from the Middle Ages to postmodernity, have done their thinking in the romance languages. This course explores a body of work that would be called philosophical by some, theoretical by others, and that, beyond these names, struggles to articulate fundamental concepts, problems, discourses, and situations.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023  
ROMS 1114 - FWS: Semiotics (3 Credits)  
What allows us to make assumptions about people based on the way they speak or dress? How can we understand the deeper meaning of a fairy tale or an episode of The Simpsons? What does macaroni and cheese mean, and why is it not on the menu at most upscale Manhattan eateries? This seminar introduces semiotics, the study of signs and the meaning-bearing sign systems they form; sign systems that include not only human language but also literature, painting, sculpture, film, music, dance and also such aspects of popular culture as advertising, fashion, food, and television, to name just a few. The diversity of semiotic systems provides many possibilities for thinking and writing critically about the world we live in.
Distribution Requirements: (WRT-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Spring 2022, Fall 2021  
ROMS 1115 - FWS:Literature and Medicine: Europe, Africa, the Mediterranean (3 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2020  
ROMS 2021 - Humans and Climate Change (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COML 2021, EAS 2021  
This course explores the human dimension of climate change, arguably the most significant crisis ever to confront humanity. The focus of this course will be narratives--the stories we tell ourselves as humans about the past, present and future in literature, art, science writing, and philosophy. We will address issues such as deep time; energy transitions; guilt and hope; justice and the future. No prior knowledge of atmospheric science or literary studies required. The course is open to anyone interested in thinking about the wicked problem that is climate change from various perspectives.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: CPEP students.  
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2024, Spring 2018, Fall 2015, Fall 2014  
ROMS 2750 - Introduction to Humanities (3 Credits)  
These seminars offer an introduction to the humanities by exploring historical, cultural, social, and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to relevant local sites and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in these seminars will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the annual focus theme of Cornell's Society for the Humanities and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment preference given to: students accepted in the Humanities Scholars Program.  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Fall 2022  
ROMS 3010 - Sweetness: How Sugar Built the Modern World (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ASRC 3010, LATA 3015, SHUM 3010, AMST 3015  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Spring 2018  
ROMS 3210 - History of Romance Languages I (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with LING 3321  
The Romance languages are the lasting imprint of all that happened to the Latin language as it moved through time, territories, and people of many ethnicities. While the Latin of antiquity retained its prestige in high culture, the natural untutored usage of ordinary people was always free to go its own way. This course covers the following topics, selected to create a panoramic view: Formation of the general Romance seven-vowel system from Latin. Early and widespread sound changes in popular Latin. Finding and interpreting evidence for trends in popular Latin pronunciation. The comparative method and its limitations. Essential later sound changes, some of which ceate a whole new order of consonants unknown to Latin but conspicuous in Romance. Nouns and adjectives from Latin to Romance. Formation of the present indicative: the competing forces of sound change and analogical adjustment. A brief overview of Portuguese. Variants of the seven-vowel system. Salient features of Romanian. Factors that helped shape the vocabulary of Romance. Medieval diglossia. Emergence of Romance vernaculars newly recognized by their speakers as languages distinct from Latin and from each other. Close analysis of the oldest surviving document written unmistakably in Romance (842 C. E.).
Prerequisites: a 2000-level (or higher) course in any Romance language, and some familiarity with a second one or with Latin.  
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2022, Fall 2020, Fall 2018  
ROMS 3300 - The Culture of Violence: Europe 1914-1945 (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with HIST 2333  
At the end of the Great War, Europe has became the realm of a new relationship between violence, culture, and politics. From 1914 to 1945, the continent became the realm of an extraordinary entanglement of wars, revolutions and counterrevolutions, civil wars, and genocides, which could be summarized by the concept of European Civil War. This course will analyze some features of this cataclysmic time by engaging political theory, cultural and intellectual history, and by scrutinizing novels, films, and intellectual productions.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023  
ROMS 3560 - Freud and Psychoanalysis (3 Credits)  
Psychoanalysis considers the human being not as an object of treatment, but as a subject who is called upon to elaborate an unconscious knowledge about what is disrupting her life, through analysis of dreams, symptoms, bungled actions, slips of the tongue, and repetitive behaviors. Freud finds that these apparently irrational acts and behavior are ordered by the logic of the fantasy, which provides a mental representation of a traumatic childhood experience and the effects it unleashes in the mind and body-effects he called drives. As unbound energies, the drives give rise to symptoms, repetitive acts, and fantasmatic stagings that menace our health and sometimes threaten social coexistence, but that also rise to the desires, creative acts, and social projects we identify as the essence of human life. Readings will include fundamental texts on the unconscious, repression, fantasy, and the death drive, as well as case studies and speculative essays on mythology, art, religion, and group psychology. Students will be asked to keep a dream journal and to work on their unconscious formations, and will have the chance to produce creative projects as well as analytic essays.
Distribution Requirements: (ETM-AS, SSC-AS), (KCM-AG, SBA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2021, Spring 2019, Fall 2016  
ROMS 4151 - Negrismo, Negritude and Surrealism in the Caribbean (2 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ASRC 4151, COML 4364  
Exploratory Studies: (LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2018  
ROMS 4210 - Existentialism (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with GERST 4210, GOVT 4015, COML 4251  
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, ETM-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2020, Fall 2017, Spring 2016  
ROMS 4255 - Freudo-Marxism: Theory and Praxis (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with GERST 4255  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2021  
ROMS 4261 - Topics in 20th C. Philosophy (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with PHIL 4261, FGSS 4261  
Advanced seminar covering a topic in 20th century philosophy.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, KCM-AG), (ETM-AS, SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2019, Spring 2017, Spring 2013  
ROMS 4324 - Writing for the Public: Adapting Academic Work for a General Audience (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COML 4224, GERST 4224  
This workshop-style course will address the question of how to draw on academic research and expertise to write for a non-specialist audience. We will discuss the benefits of public-facing writing; how to select a publication to pitch; how to pitch an article; and how to draft and revise an article once a pitch has been accepted. These skills will be developed through practice. Students will develop real pitch ideas to use as a basis for articles that will be drafted and revised over the course of the semester. We will discuss questions such as selecting appropriate venues, adapting to a new writing style, sourcing, citation practices, and communicating with editors.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS)  
ROMS 4370 - The Holocaust and History Writing (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with GERST 4375, HIST 4237, FREN 4375  
In the last decades, Holocaust Studies witnessed an extraordinary expansion, covering different fields of scholarship, from history to literature, from philosophy to aesthetics. This course will retrace the major steps of Holocaust history writing. It will analyze the classical debates between intentionalism and functionalism, the discrepancies between the analytical approaches focused on the perpetrators and those focused on the victims, the inscription of the Holocaust into the broader context of war violence, and its comparison with the genocidal violence of colonialism. Finally, it will investigate some methodological problems concerning the place of testimony in history writing and the permanent connections, both fruitful and problematic, between history and memory. This means taking into account the entanglement of the most productive areas of Holocaust scholarship (Germany, France and the United States) as well as the relationship between the historiography of the Holocaust and other disciplines (memory studies, postcolonial studies, etc.).
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021, Spring 2018  
ROMS 4650 - Revolution: An Intellectual History (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with HIST 4655  
For more than two centuries, revolutions have marked the rhythm of modernity. In 1780, the original meaning of revolution - an astronomical rotation - was transformed in order to apprehend a social and political overthrow. This course will investigate the multiple uses of this crucial concept of political theory, from the revolutionary canon (Blanqui, Marx, Fanon...) to the classics of conservatism (Maistre, Cortes, Schmitt...), which depict contemporary history as a conflict between revolutions and counter-revolutions, socialist and fascist revolutions. We will explore the connections between history and theory, and stress the global dimension of revolutions, forged by a permanent transfer of ideas and people from one continent to another.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2017  
ROMS 4655 - Female Complaints: Gender in Early Modern Lyric and Modern Theory (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SHUM 4665, ENGL 4965, FGSS 4665, COML 4262  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021  
ROMS 4681 - Post-Conflict Justice and Resolution in Africa (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ASRC 4681, COML 4628, SHUM 4681  
This course combines literature, film, and other artistic projects in order to explore African forms of collective justice and repair, following the numerous conflicts that have shaken the continent in the 20th and 21st centuries, from anti-colonial struggles to civil wars. We will look at aesthetic productions from post-independence Algeria and Ghana, post-apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda, among others, in order to reflect on multiple questions, including: How do aesthetic works and state institutions offer competing narratives of a traumatic past, and what ways of healing can they generate? How do they negotiate between the retributive and the restorative impulses of justice? Is justice sufficient for resolution to take place? And conversely, can repair ever be achieved in the absence of justice?
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023  
ROMS 4825 - Literature and Science: Transfers in Poetics and Epistemology (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COML 4825, FREN 4825, SHUM 4025  
Part epistemology and part experimental humanities, this seminar looks at improbable encounters between the divergent regimes of thought and knowledge expressed by literature and the sciences. Our main concern is not the literary thematization of the scientific, nor is it an exploration of science fiction as a genre. Our reflexive focus is rather on the noetic and poetic transfers different modes of textuality could unfold, beyond their hiatus in terms of writing, apparatus, signification, and mental experience. Readings include scholars such as Foucault, Kuhn, Strabo, Haraway, or Hayles, and writers such as Homer, Rousseau, Shelley, or Borges. Several discrete disciplines, such as geometry, cognitive science, botany, primatology, or AI, could be analyzed. The seminar is also linked to the research activities of the Humanities Lab.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, ETM-AS), (CA-AG, KCM-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025  
ROMS 4948 - Pleasure and Neoliberalism (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COML 4948, FGSS 4948, ENGL 4948, SHUM 4948  
The comparative seminar explores pleasure and its relationship with neoliberalism. We will adopt an interdisciplinary approach and a historical trajectory, starting with the Ancient world through the contemporary. Our investigation of philosophical, literary, and filmic reflections on pleasure and neoliberalism will engage important concepts such as the market, subjectivity, race, gender, and queerness. We highlight and conceptualize how new/old media, literary, and other artistic productions facilitate the expression, the search for, and the achievement of pleasure. Through public speaking and deep attention to writing, you will refine your conceptual accounts of pleasure and neoliberalism and their mutual imbrication.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, D-AG), (GLC-AS, SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2019  
ROMS 5070 - Methodology of Romance Language Learning and Teaching (3 Credits)  
Focuses on language teaching as facilitation of learning, thus on the learner's processing of language acquisition and the promotion of reflective teaching. Pedagogical approaches will be addressed from a learner-centered perspective involving effective language learning strategies and analysis.
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
ROMS 5080 - Pedagogy Practicum (1 Credit)  
This practicum is designed to better enable the TAs to meet the needs of their students in the understanding and acquisition of the linguistic forms, notions, and functions covered in their course.
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
ROMS 6100 - Romance Studies Colloquium (2 Credits)  
Designed to give insight into how to formulate projects, conduct research, and publish one's work, the colloquium offers a venue for faculty-graduate student dialogue in a collegial, intellectual setting. Meetings are biweekly, 2-3 hours, and are open to all students and faculty in Romance Studies, but required for first year students in the program. Each meeting, two faculty members will be invited to discuss their scholarship and also a short text of their choice, to be distributed beforehand.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
ROMS 6224 - Beauty, Grief (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COML 6424, FREN 6424, ITAL 6224, SPAN 6224  
This course is for anyone drawn to beauty-and anyone who, within the beautiful, finds the trace of a loss. What do we grieve, what do we miss, when we find ourselves in the presence of beauty? And what, in every retrospective, prospective or otherwise non-present beauty, do we nonetheless crave and nonetheless mourn? What is the beauty hidden within mourning? We'll take a look at thinkers, poets, and artists from both modern and premodern culture, potentially including Anne Carson, Augustine of Hippo, Fra Angelico, Gillian Rose, Herve Guibert, Pepe Espaliu, and others, as we try to sit with dual summons of beauty and grief: beauty or grief.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024  
ROMS 6255 - Freudo-Marxism: Theory and Praxis (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with GERST 6255, GOVT 6255  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2021  
ROMS 6261 - Topics in 20th C. Philosophy (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with PHIL 6260  
Advanced seminar covering a topic in 20th century philosophy.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2019, Spring 2017, Spring 2013  
ROMS 6324 - Writing for the Public: Adapting Academic Work for a General Audience (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COML 6224, GERST 6224  
This workshop-style course will address the question of how to draw on academic research and expertise to write for a non-specialist audience. We will discuss the benefits of public-facing writing; how to select a publication to pitch; how to pitch an article; and how to draft and revise an article once a pitch has been accepted. These skills will be developed through practice. Students will develop real pitch ideas to use as a basis for articles that will be drafted and revised over the course of the semester. We will discuss questions such as selecting appropriate venues, adapting to a new writing style, sourcing, citation practices, and communicating with editors.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024  
ROMS 6420 - Exile: History, Creations, Identities (3 Credits)  
Exile is a fundamental dimension of 20th Century intellectual life. Being out of place, banished from one's own homeland, usually means loss, uprootedness and psychchological unsettlement. However, it also means unexpected forms of epistemic displacement and cultural transfer, thus becoming the realm of new ideas and aesthetic creations. Emigres look at the world with different eyes. This course will explore some moments of their production in philosophy, political theory, literature and film, by considering a very diverse corpus of works from Jewish, European and Latin American authors including Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Roberto Bolano, CLR James, Edward Said, and Victor Serge, among others.
ROMS 6650 - Revolution: An Intellectual History (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with HIST 6655  
For more than two centuries, revolutions have marked the rhythm of modernity. In 1780, the original meaning of revolution - an astronomical rotation - was transformed in order to apprehend a social and political overthrow. This course will investigate the multiple uses of this crucial concept of political theory, from the revolutionary canon (Blanqui, Marx, Fanon...) to the classics of conservatism (Maistre, Cortes, Schmitt...), which depict contemporary history as a conflict between revolutions and counter-revolutions, socialist and fascist revolutions. We will explore the connections between history and theory, and stress the global dimension of revolutions, forged by a permanent transfer of ideas and people from one continent to another.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2020, Spring 2017  
ROMS 6655 - Female Complaints: Gender in Early Modern Lyric and Modern Theory (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SHUM 6665, COML 6262  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021  
ROMS 6681 - Post-Conflict Justice and Resolution in Africa (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ASRC 6681, SHUM 6681  
This course combines literature, film, and other artistic projects in order to explore African forms of collective justice and repair, following the numerous conflicts that have shaken the continent in the 20th and 21st centuries, from anti-colonial struggles to civil wars. We will look at aesthetic productions from post-independence Algeria and Ghana, post-apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda, among others, in order to reflect on multiple questions, including: How do aesthetic works and state institutions offer competing narratives of a traumatic past, and what ways of healing can they generate? How do they negotiate between the retributive and the restorative impulses of justice? Is justice sufficient for resolution to take place? And conversely, can repair ever be achieved in the absence of justice?
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023  
ROMS 6825 - Literature and Science: Transfers in Poetics and Epistemology (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COML 6825, FREN 6825  
Part epistemology and part experimental humanities, this seminar looks at improbable encounters between the divergent regimes of thought and knowledge expressed by literature and the sciences. Our main concern is not the literary thematization of the scientific, nor is it an exploration of science fiction as a genre. Our reflexive focus is rather on the noetic and poetic transfers different modes of textuality could unfold, beyond their hiatus in terms of writing, apparatus, signification, and mental experience. Readings include scholars such as Foucault, Kuhn, Strabo, Haraway, or Hayles, and writers such as Homer, Rousseau, Shelley, or Borges. Several discrete disciplines, such as geometry, cognitive science, botany, primatology, or AI, could be analyzed. The seminar is also linked to the research activities of the Humanities Lab.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025  
ROMS 6855 - Gramsci and Cultural Politics (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with GERST 6850, GOVT 6750, COML 6850  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Fall 2015  
ROMS 6860 - Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COML 6865  
What gives contemporary poetry and poetics its resonance and value? What are its dominant features, audiences, and purposes? What does 21st-century poetry's environment look like, and how does it situate itself among other genres, discourses, disciplines, media? How would we describe its ambient noise and how does that noise shape, inform, inflect its particular concerns and motivated forms? How are we to understand its relation to the pivotal developments of our time? This seminar will explore these and related questions in a range of works from the past two decades that open onto the rich interplay of contemporary poetry and poetics with questions especially of language, aesthetics, and politics.
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Spring 2018, Spring 2014, Spring 2013  
ROMS 6948 - Pleasure and Neoliberalism (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COML 6948, GOVT 6945, FGSS 6948  
The comparative seminar explores pleasure and its relationship with neoliberalism. We will adopt an interdisciplinary approach and a historical trajectory, starting with the Ancient world through the contemporary. Our investigation of philosophical, literary, and filmic reflections on pleasure and neoliberalism will engage important concepts such as the market, subjectivity, race, gender, and queerness. We highlight and conceptualize how new/old media, literary, and other artistic productions facilitate the expression, the search for, and the achievement of pleasure. Through public speaking and deep attention to writing, you will refine your conceptual accounts of pleasure and neoliberalism and their mutual imbrication.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2021