Self Pulls a Switcheroo: Bates English Courses Replace Gracie’s Visit to the Doctor

Self was browsing the web — hubby deep into Phoenix-San Antonio playoff, but since self likes Steve Nash and Shaq, she’d rather not watch — when she decided to determine the identity of the professor at Bates who teaches her in a course called “Asian American Writers.”

And here is her name: L. Shankar.

And, in the course of self’s investigations, she discovered that the English Department at Bates has exceedingly interesting courses! Here are just a few examples:

Monsters, Magicians, and Medievalism
Arthurian Literature
Asian American Women Writers
Tolkien’s Middle Ages
The Brontes
Frankenstein’s Creatures
Music and Metaphor: The Sounds in African American Literature
African and Diasporic Ecological Literature
Shakespeare: Race and Gender
Dickens Revised
The Literatures of Women of the African Diaspora

And here are the courses in the Department of Women and Gender Studies:

The Politics of Pleasure and Desire: Women’s Independent and Third Cinema and Video from the African Diaspora
Women and Russia
African American Women’s History and Social Transformation
Voice and Gender
Blood, Genes, and American Culture
The Decorated Body
The Body, Liberation, and Medieval Mysticism
Goddesses and Goddess Worship in India
Performance, Race, and the Body
Race and U.S. Women’s Movements

If self were 25 years younger and inured to the cold, she would enroll in Bates, just for the opportunity to take any or all of these courses!