Senior

Thesis
Before COL Juniors are done with their comps, they usually already have thought about a potential thesis or essay topic and it is recommended that they start approaching potential thesis/essay tutors as well in the spring of their Junior year.

During their senior year, each COL major is required to complete an honors thesis (two semesters) or an essay (one semester) under the guidance of a tutor. Theses may be analytical or creative works. To give you an idea of the diversity of COL theses and essays, here is a sampler of topics that have been successfully submitted as senior projects:

A Medieval Catapult (construction visible next to the COL Lounge in Butt. B)
Spanish Novels of the Late Franco Period
Sartre and the Jewish Question
Albert Camus and North Africa
Washington Heights in pictures
Mental Depression in 20th century American Literature
American Small Towns (A Documentary)
History of Chalking at Wesleyan
An Anthology of 20th century Panamanian Literature (Translation)
The Shy Courtier (a translation from Spanish, and performance)

Given the range of potential thesis/essay topics that are acceptable in the COL, we hope you will enjoy crafting yours as well as researching or creating it.

Early Modern (16-18th c. Europe) (fall)
This age is the first in which a recognizably "modern" world, as we know it, becomes nascent, one in which the unmarried "virgin" Queen Elizabeth plays power politics, a recognizably modern view of the universe emerges, science challenges the authority of religion, national identities emerge along with imperialism, and people begin thinking of themselves as individuals with complex inner lives. The colloquium invites students to consider the simultaneously strange and familiar culture of the early Modern period as it is manifested in new genres such as the novel as well as traditional but reworked and renewed forms such as the epic and tragedy. From the nostalgic wanderings of the anti-modern Don Quixote to the specter of modern racism in Othello to Mary Wollstonecraft's foundational feminist treatise to Swift's simultaneously funny and horrific satires of English imperialism and "scientific" "solutions" to unwanted populations, to the burgeoning of democracy and the declaration of Human Rights, this colloquium can be a mirror in which modernity is duskily visible.

For a sample syllabus for the SENIOR COLLOQUIUM (fall), click below:
-COL 16-18th sample syllabus 1

19th c. Europe (spring)
Portraits of Napoleon and Queen Victoria may have frozen these personalities in time, but 19th c. Europe is all about changes. So much happens over this century that it is called, rightfully so, the long century, with some historians ending it on the eve of the 1914 world war. With political, philosophical, literary, and industrial revolutions shaking European societies, European letters of the time highlight the many contradictions of 19th c. Europe: how Romantics rebelled against conformity, Reason, and organized Religion; how God died for Nietzsche but came back for Dostoyevsky, only to be questioned again by Darwin; how the 1789 declaration of Human Rights didn't end slavery for several more decades in European colonies while serfdom survived in Russia; how the late 18th c. feminist discourse of Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouge was silenced by new 19th c. mores and ever tighter corsets; how Marx challenged Bourgeois values, how democracy progressed in Europe while Europe colonized Africa. So much more happens in this century of contradictions that you simply need to take the course.

For a sample syllabus for the SENIOR COLLOQUIUM (spring), click below:
-COL 19th sample syllabus 1