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Burba, Audrey

Assistant Teaching Professor

Positions

Research Areas research areas

Research

research overview

  • Audrey Burba, Ph.D., is an Assistant Teaching Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of French and Italian and the Humanities Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has extensive experience teaching French and Francophone language, culture, and literature at all levels, with a focus on engaging students in literary, cultural, and critical analysis. In addition to her work in French and Francophone studies, Professor Burba’s teaching interests center on medical humanities, where she examines the literary and cultural representations of the body, with a particular emphasis on the sick feminine body, femininity, and death. Her courses explore the intersections of gender, cultural identity, and health, drawing connections between literary, cultural, and medical narratives about the body. Through both areas of her teaching, she encourages students to think deeply about how language, literature, and culture shape our understanding of the human experience.

keywords

  • medical humanities; 19th-21st century French literature and critical thought; feminist theory; history and theory of the novel; semiotics and sociology of culture; second-language acquisition and pedagogy

Teaching

courses taught

  • FREN 1020 - Beginning French 2
    Primary Instructor - Fall 2024
    Continuation of FREN 1010. Completes the presentation of most basic structures and French vocabulary. Degree credit not granted for this course and FREN 1050.
  • HUMN 1002 - Visualizing Culture: An Introduction to Humanities
    Primary Instructor - Spring 2023 / Spring 2024
    How do we see, what do we consider worth looking at, how does this shape culture? What do visual media do to/for us and how do we endow them with meaning? This class probes such questions using a range of visual media including visual art, film, music videos, and social media. With the help of theoretical, scholarly, and popular sources, students analyze examples of visual culture and articulate their responses to the issues raised.
  • HUMN 1110 - Introduction to Humanities: Literature 1
    Primary Instructor - Fall 2020 / Fall 2021
    Introduces students to works from the major Western literary periods (Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque) from the 8th c. BC to the early 17th c. AD comparatively, i.e., outside their national literary boundaries. Theorizes interdisciplinary, genre studies, periodization, comparativism, thematology, hermeneutics, criticism, etc. May be taken separately from HUMN 1120.
  • HUMN 1120 - Introduction to Humanities: Literature 2
    Primary Instructor - Spring 2018 / Fall 2019 / Spring 2020 / Spring 2021 / Spring 2022
    Introduces students to works from the major Western literary periods (Baroque, Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, Modernism) from the 17th- through the 20th-centuries comparatively, i.e., outside their national literary boundaries. Theorizes interdisciplinarity, genre studies, periodization, comparativism, thematology, hermeneutics, criticism.May be taken separately from HUMN 1110.
  • HUMN 3093 - Topics in Humanities
    Primary Instructor - Spring 2020 / Spring 2022
    Students should check with the department for specific semester offerings. May be repeated up to 12 total credit hours, provided the specific offerings vary.
  • HUMN 3200 - Fictions of Illness: Modern Medicine and the Literary Imagination
    Primary Instructor - Spring 2018 / Fall 2019 / Fall 2022 / Fall 2023 / Fall 2024
    Examines the ways in which the rise of modern medicine fueled the literary imagination with a new focus, new patterns of perception and potent metaphors. Through a study of various works of fiction, critical theory and medical history, the course traces how medical discoveries and the increasing professionalization of medicine manifested itself in modern literature.
  • HUMN 4070 - Making Meaning: Language, Myths, Dreams
    Primary Instructor - Spring 2023 / Spring 2024
    Introduces students to theories concerned with signification, communication, and meaning. The course will focus on the legacy of Ferdinand de Saussure�s study of the sign and examine how Saussure�s insights have been put to work in a variety of intellectual contexts from literary analysis to cultural anthropology, and psychoanalysis. Formerly offered as a special topics course.
  • HUMN 4720 - Architecture and the Feminine: Women on Space and Creativity
    Primary Instructor - Fall 2022 / Fall 2023 / Fall 2024
    Examines women�s depictions of space, confinement, and liberation in literature, art, and film. Women�s artistic productions have sought to conceptualize, expose, and subvert the ways that gender and power relations are inscribed into the spaces they inhabit. Students will trace the history of these visions of spaces (physical, geographical, psychological, imagined) and explore their relationship to subjectivity, power, and creativity.

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