Fall '25: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre

In the Fall 2025 course, students read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847). They focused on three themes—empire, gender, and realism—and, accordingly, the social media profiles that they later produced in groups all reflect an engagement with these three themes. You can explore the profiles by clicking the downward arrow on the sidebar, next to the tab that says "Fall '25: Jane Eyre."

In order to encourage students to read Jane Eyre with one eye toward its historical context in nineteenth-century Victorian Britain and the other toward its relevance to contemporary culture, the course placed Jane Eyre in conversation with Caribbean writer Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which is a postcolonial reinvention of Jane Eyre from the perspective of Bertha Mason; and a few episodes from the "On Eyre" season of the Hot & Bothered podcast, which grapples with how the novel's beauty and brutality speak to, but also diverge from, twenty-first century perspectives about desire, race, and womanhood. 

All of the student groups chose two characters from the novel to create social media profiles for. They could pick any character they wanted, provided that if they selected Jane, they could not then select Rochester and vice versa. This encouraged them to attend to the other characters in the novel beyond the primary love plot so that they could explore how the novel is itself a social world, bound up with connections and relationships that each have their own significance and impact on the overall story. 

All the student groups were also encouraged to choose any one of the following platforms—Facebook, Tinder, Reddit, and LinkedIn—to create the profiles for their chosen characters. Other social media platforms are available (eg. TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat), but it was important in this course to select predominantly text-based platforms so that students could practice crafting a twenty-first century "voice" for the characters that they had chosen, based on the information they had learned about them in the novel. All the student groups ended up selecting Tinder or Reddit and left Facebook and LinkedIn behind, with the explanation that Tinder and Reddit are just "way more fun."