This course will have two main goals. First, we will read and discuss modern scholarship on asexuality, the sexual orientation often characterized by or defined as a lack of sexual attraction. We will investigate asexuality as a queer identity, and talk about how the study of asexuality has the potential to bring new perspectives to queer theory. Second, we will think about what it means to look for and read for asexuality in history. We will read sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, asking what it means to look for asexuality and aromanticism beyond the twentieth century. We will continually ask not just how to build an “asexual archive” — how to find traces of asexuality and aromanticism in the past — but also how the particular shapes of asexuality that we find in early modern texts might help us rethink modern allonormativity (the assumption that everyone experiences sexual attraction) and amatonormativity (the assumption that most people should be striving to be in romantic pairings or couples).