Professor Lisa Woolfork has garnered a flurry of media attention with her popular 'Game of Thrones' course. The class, offered this summer as a four-week, discussion-based seminar, focuses on the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning HBO series and George R. R. Martin's 'A Song of Ice and Fire' novels, on which the series is based. In their discussions, students analyzed the series in light of topics including racial and cultural allegory, gender roles and power, identity formation, and fan fiction. Woolfork says, "One of the goals behind this class was to teach students how the skills that we use to study literature are very useful skills for reading literature and TV in conjunction. 'Game of Thrones' is popular, it’s interesting, but it’s also very serious. There are a lot of things in the series that are very weighty, and very meaningful, and can be illuminated through the skills of literary analysis." The course concluded with a group based creative project, in which students created their own piece of 'Game of Thrones' fiction. Media outlets including the Telegraph, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, the Huffington Post, and others have covered the course.
