Instructor Bio

Paolo Sapienza has been teaching at CCSF since 1996, so he's been around a while, but he's still young at heart.

Typically, Paolo teaches English 1B (Writing about Literature) and English 1C (Writing about Nonfiction), and sometimes a literature elective, such as a survey course or Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Paolo aims for a student-centered educational experience in which classroom dialogue is key and students have a range of choices for topics they choose to write on. Recent courses (with themes) include:

English 1B: Transformative Literature: Imagining Love, Questioning Society. In this advanced composition course, we focus on literary analysis, covering poems, fictional stories, creative nonfiction, and drama (plays).

English 1C: Personality and Emotion: Analyzing Scientific Argument. In this advanced composition course, we focus on rhetoric and persuasion by analyzing recent paradigm shifts in the understanding of how personality develops and what emotions and feelings are.

English 46B: Survey of Literature in English, Part 2, 1660-1860. Focus is on how The Age of Reason spawned the often wildly and self-consciously irrational modes of the Gothic and Romantic. Isaac Newton developed integral calculus and three fundamental laws of physics, yet he also believed in the occult and practiced alchemy. Seem absurd? Such contradictions abound in human history and particularly so in this period. As narratives become more orderly, plots more structured than ever, they also become populated with demon, succubus and lamia, with sublime natural forces, and with the mysteries of mesmerism and ventriloquism. Imagination encompasses the rational and irrational. We will read stories, essays, and poems enlivened by both and often struggling between the two. Cultural lenses will include race and empire, gender, science and technology.

 

Education: 

Amherst College, BA in English, magna cum laude.

Temple University, PhD in English Literature.