Winter 2027 Class Schedule: Department of English

Winter 2027 Class Schedule

**Meeting days and times may be subject to change.**

Click on a course title to view the description.

Course	Title	Instructor	Day/Time
English 202	Introduction to Creative Writing	Staff	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 202 Introduction to Creative Writing Course Description: This course will introduce students to the major elements and tools of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. Through exercises and projects, you’ll practice using these tools to produce original, exciting works of literary art. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to track these elements both in published texts and in the work of your classmates, and further develop how you measure aesthetic value. You’ll be encouraged to see yourself as an active member of a community of artists, and to establish a regular discipline as a working writer. Writing and reading will be due in nearly every class, and peer workshop will play an important role in learning to see your work more objectively. Teaching Methods: Discussion. Evaluation Methods: Evaluation of a final portfolio. Texts include: A course reader.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Staff	MW 11-12:20
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Shanahan	TTh 11-12:20
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Shanahan	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Staff	MW 9:30-10:50
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction Course Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Seliy	TTh 11-12:20
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction Course Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Staff	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction Course Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Staff	MW 11-12:20
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction Course Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Staff	MW 3:30-4:50
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction Course Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Bresland	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction Course Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Bresland	TTh 2-3:20
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction Course Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 210-2	British Literary Traditions, Part 2 (Historical Breadth Post 1830)	Thompson	MWF 10-10:50
English 210-2 British Literary Traditions, Part 2 (Historical Breadth Post 1830) Course Description: This course surveys major British literary works spanning the late eighteenth century through World War II and the postcolonial era. You will be introduced to the major literary developments of these two centuries over four units. We begin with Romanticism and its still revolutionary challenges to reigning systems of property, enslavement, patriarchy, and even reason itself (William Blake, William Wordsworth, Ottobah Cugoano, Mary Wollstonecraft). The class’s second unit engages the afterlife of Romantic revolution and the rise of nineteenth-century prose realism: do realistic novels and short fiction affirm Britain’s transition into an industrial world power or do they expose the inequities of urban life, alienated labor, commoditized leisure, and global empire? We’ll also read nineteenth-century poetry in unit two (Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde; Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold). The course’s third unit, New Forms, explores cataclysmic twentieth-century events and misgivings around the nation’s imperial mandate, which catalyze the rupture with realism that fuels the modernist literary movement. We’ll ponder the political resonance of such modernist formal innovations as stream of consciousness (Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and WWI and modernist poets including W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden). Our fourth unit, Against English, confronts postcolonial reworkings of the Englishness of this literary tradition’s past and future (Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott, Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, M. NourbeSe Philip). Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion. Evaluation Method: Attendance/ participation/ analytic writing.
English 214	Introduction to Film and Its Literatures	Hodge	TTh 11-12:20, plus discussion section
English 214 Introduction to Film and Its Literatures Course Description: This course introduces students to the study of cinema with an emphasis on the various “literatures” it engages, including fiction, criticism, and theory across media. It has two primary objectives: 1) to acquaint students with vocabularies and frameworks of analysis required to study cinema in terms specific to that medium; and 2) to familiarize students with a broad range of texts crucial to the study of cinema, enabling them to render persuasive interpretations. Techniques of close analysis will be the paramount skills developed in the course, hopefully leading to deeper appreciation of film and its literatures. Teaching Method: Lecture, Discussion Section. Evaluation Method: Attendance, Exams, Quizzes, Analytical Projects. Texts Include: Printed Course Reader.
English 220	The Bible as Literature	Evans	MW 11-12:20, plus discussion section
English 220 The Bible as Literature Course Description: This course will familiarize students of literature with the most influential text in Western culture from the perspective of secular literary studies. No prior knowledge of the Bible is presupposed. Among other topics, the course will explore the range of literary genres in the Bible; its narrative techniques; the historical circumstances of its composition; recurrent themes and motifs; the "typology" framing the New Testament as a reinterpretation of the Hebrew Bible; and the overall narrative as a plot with beginning, middle, and end. Since we lack time to read the Bible in full, we we will concentrate on books with the most concentrated literary influence from the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, and parts of Deuteronomy); the Prophets (Amos, Jonah, Second Isaiah, and Daniel); and the Writings (Judges, Ruth, Psalms, Song of Songs, and the saga of King David). In the New Testament, we will read selections from the Gospels and the book of Revelation. Teaching Method: Lecture, discussion. Evaluation Method: Participation, reading quizzes, in-class presentation, in-class midterm and final essay. Texts Include: Harper-Collins Study Bible NRSV, ISBN 0062969420. Other readings will be posted on Canvas.
English 265	Introduction to Postcolonial Literature: Humor and Resistance (Historical Breadth Post 1830)	Mwangi	MW 9:30-10:50
English 265 Introduction to Postcolonial Literature: Humor and Resistance (Historical Breadth Post 1830) Course Description: Colonialism was not funny—but postcolonial writers have repeatedly turned humor into one of their most effective forms of resistance. This course introduces students to postcolonial literature through comedy, irony, satire, parody, and laughter. Focusing on fiction, drama, and memoir from Africa, the Caribbean, and the postcolonial diaspora, the course examines how writers use humor to expose the absurdities of empire, undermine authority, survive violence, and critique the uneven legacies of colonial rule. Humor in this course is treated not as comic relief but as a serious political and aesthetic practice. Students will explore why power fears laughter, how satire destabilizes hierarchy, and when humor becomes double‑edged, unsettling, or offensive. Literary texts are paired with accessible theoretical readings on laughter, ridicule, mimicry, and performance by thinkers such as Plato (laughter, order, aesthetics, tragedy hierarchy), Sigmund Freud (jokes, repression, psychic release, economy), Frantz Fanon (racial laughter, masking, colonial psyche), Mikhail Bakhtin (carnival, grotesque, popular subversive laughter), Homi Bhabha (mimicry, irony, colonial ambivalence), Terry Eagleton (humor, aggression, politics, ambivalence), and feminist theorists of humor and affect such as Gloria Anzaldúa (border laughter, survival, hybridity), Hélène Cixous (feminist laughter, subversion, excess), and Sara Ahmed (affect, feminist killjoys, unruly emotions). Designed as a gateway to postcolonial studies, ENGLISH 265 emphasizes close reading, historical context, and discussion rather than specialized theoretical mastery. Students will develop skills in literary analysis while considering how humor travels across cultures, languages, and systems of power. Teaching Methods: Interactive lectures, guided class discussion, close‑reading workshops, small‑group activities, short contextual presentations, and occasional low‑stakes creative or analytical exercises. Emphasis is placed on discussion‑based learning and sustained engagement with primary texts. Evaluation Methods: Short response papers or reading reflections One midterm analytical essay One final essay or project Participation, including in‑class writing and discussion No Final Exam. Primary Literary Texts (May Change): Trevor Noah – Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. One World/Penguin Random House. ISBN‑13: 978‑0399588198 Ama Ata Aidoo – No Sweetness Here and Other Stories. The Feminist Press at CUNY. ISBN‑13: 978‑1558611191 Tsitsi Dangarembga – Nervous Conditions. Graywolf Press. ISBN‑13: 978‑1644450710 Wole Soyinka – The Trials of Brother Jero. Dramatists Play Service. ISBN‑13: 978‑0822210900 Sam Selvon – The Lonely Londoners. Penguin Modern Classics. ISBN‑13: 978‑0141188416 Dany Laferrière – How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired. Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN‑13: 978‑1553655855 NoViolet Bulawayo – We Need New Names. Back Bay Books (Little, Brown & Company). ISBN‑13: 978‑0316230841
English 277	Introduction to Latinx Literature	Rodríguez Pliego	MW 12:30-1:50, plus discussion section
English 277 Introduction to Latinx Literature Course Description: In the United States, we often talk about Latinx people using blurry labels. We discuss the Latino vote, the Hispanic population, and the Latinx community. This course explores the nuances of these labels through the stories that Latinx authors have been narrating for the past six decades. As we follow characters through conflicts and inhabit their quotidian lives, we will navigate between the specificity of a story and the complexity of a Latinx identity. Class discussions will study emotional ties to places and languages, feminist thought, and the racial and ethnic diversity within the Latinx community. We will read authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Justin Torres, Helena Maria Viramontes, and Yxta Maya Murray. A one-quarter course cannot do justice to the rich genealogy of Latinx writing. This course follows an illustrative sample of authors from the 1970s onward and focuses on short stories, poetry, and essays. It aims to provide students with a historical, political, and literary foundation for further exploration of Latinx literature. Teaching Method: Lecture. Evaluation Method: Attendance and participation, papers, creative assignment. Texts Include: We the Animals, Justin Torres, 9780547844190 God Went Like That, Yxta Maya Murray, 9780810146020
English 284	Topics in Literature and the Environment: Dinner at the End of the World: Food, Energy, and Labor in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Film	Nisenson	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 284 Topics in Literature and the Environment: Dinner at the End of the World: Food, Energy, and Labor in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Film Course Description: What, or who, will be on the dinner plate in the apocalypse? Whether due to nuclear catastrophes, zombie invasions, or biotech innovations gone awry, concerns about environmental sustainability and food production permeate the post-apocalyptic genre. This course will begin with a beloved subgenre of apocalyptic fiction—the zombie apocalypse—that imagines humans as food by contrasting Ling Ma’s novel Severance (2018) with George A. Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead (1968). We will interrogate what systems, ideologies, and historical inheritances are fueling the current environmental crisis and how these ideas influence post-apocalyptic media. The final part of this course will seek answers to the question, what will humans eat to sustain themselves in decimated worlds? Comparing Bong Joon Ho’s film Snowpiercer (2013) with The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy and Oryx and Crake (2013) by Margaret Atwood, we will analyze the aesthetic and cultural implications of the foods that authors imagine humans will consume to survive the apocalypse. Teaching Method: Seminar.
English 285	Topics in Literature and Culture: Healing, Soothing, Relaxing: Contemporary Therapeutic Cultures	Yoon	MW 3:30-4:50
English 285 Topics in Literature and Culture: Healing, Soothing, Relaxing: Contemporary Therapeutic Cultures Course Description: IFrom ASMR to the fidget spinner, how has therapy expanded beyond interactions between “therapist” and “client”? And how do the changing notions of “cure” and “care” intersect with questions of race, gender, and class? In this course, we will explore communication technologies (crisis hotlines, social media, podcasts) and consumer goods (portable audio systems, plush dolls) that promise alternative access to mental healthcare, as well as how these developments in therapeutic form have impacted art and literature. How does Tan Lin’s “vibe-y” poetry mimic our shortened attention spans, probing the racial valences of what we find “comforting” and “calming”? And how does Ed Park’s novel poke fun at the office space, where boredom and anxiety are revealed to compatible feelings? We will work together to understand the minor feelings their works both cite and elicit—healing, relaxing, soothing—and how therapeutic cultures help us understand politics more broadly today. Teaching Method: Seminar.
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Millennial and Zoomer Fictions	Jackson	MW 12:30-1:50
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Millennial and Zoomer Fictions Course Description: What makes a work of fiction categorically, recognizably “millennial”? What does, could, or ought the Gen-Z literary tradition look like? With these questions in mind, this course introduces theories and approaches to the study of cultural texts (novels, short stories, film, music, visual art). How do we get from reading to interpretation? What are the historical, social, and cultural contexts that shape a text and its meanings? How should our interpretations be informed by formations such as race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, class, and nationhood? We will practice and develop our ways of reading in a concentrated survey of post-2010s literature and media. Teaching Method(s): Lecture-discussion. Evaluation Method(s): Class participation, weekly quiz, essays (2). Texts include: Sally Rooney, Ottessa Moshfegh, Ling Ma, Bryan Washington, Chantal V. Johnson, Honor Levy, Girls and Insecure, The Sweet East, Bodies Bodies Bodies. Texts will be available at: Norris
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Frankenstein and Friends	Froula	TTh 11-12:20
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Frankenstein and Friends Course Description: When eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley opened her eyes with “a thrill of fear” at her first idea of Frankenstein, she felt that “what terrified me would terrify others.” But never did she foresee that her contribution to her friend Lord Byron’s ghost story contest on Lake Geneva that stormy summer of 1816 would launch two centuries--and counting--of vibrant reading, interpretation, and creative adaptation. What enduring questions, insights, and understandings has her story inspired in its long global reception across countries, cultures, languages, and media? How do the extraordinary conditions and influences surrounding its creation—the French Revolution, Mary’s intellectual legacies from her parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, myths of Prometheus, Genesis, and the Ancient Mariner, scientific experiments in “animal electricity” or Galvanism--shape the ways it speaks to the preoccupations of readers, thinkers, and artists in particular historical and cultural moments? As for Frankenstein’s friends: what were Mary’s friends and ghost story rivals—Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Polidori, Claire Clairmont--writing? How does the genius loci or “spirit of place”—of the sublime locales of Lake Geneva and the Alps, rich in geological, human, and cultural history—infuse their imaginative works: Byron’s and Polidori’s “vampyre” stories (Dracula’s precursors), Byron’s “Darkness,” “The Prisoner of Chillon,” Manfred, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “Mont Blanc,” Prometheus Unbound—along with letters, journals, and memoirs? As we join this openended, myriadminded conversation—historical and contemporary, scholarly and popular, critical and creative—we’ll aim to formulate and debate our own questions, deepen our literary historical understanding, practice and hone our interpretative, analytic, and writing tools and skills, and have fun. Evaluation Method: Prompt attendance, good preparation, active participation, written and oral exercises (25%); Friday Posts (15%); class presentation (15%); short analytic essay (15%); course project proposal and the project (25%); self-evaluation (5%). Texts Include: Third (3^rd) Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, ed. J. Paul Hunter (2022). Other required and supplementary readings will be available in Canvas Course Reserves, Canvas Files, Web, &c.
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Fans and Fictions: Adaptation as Critique in Literature and Film	Comerford	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Fans and Fictions: Adaptation as Critique in Literature and Film Course Description: Though we often think of fan fiction as an advent of our contemporary moment, fan fiction extends at least as far back as the eighteenth century—and much further depending on who you talk to. Fans and fictions have increasingly shaped the way we encounter literature, animating works from the past with different agendas, desires, and needs that speak to the contemporary moment. This course explores texts and the adaptations they inspire. We will think about how adaptations not only comment on and critique earlier texts, but also how they might inspire us to encounter the original text in new ways. How might we regard adaptations as standalone works, with lives and afterlives of their own? From modern reworkings of Shakespeare to critical retellings of Austen, adaptations ask us to consider how familiar stories might be leveraged to address different audiences. We will also explore some related concerns around fan fiction including fandoms and fan culture, the death of the author, and approaching work created by problematic authors. Texts Include: The Tempest, A Tempest, Pride and Prejudice, and Longbourn. Films include: Ex Machina, Pride and Prejudice (2005), and Fire Island. Weekly readings will be paired with theoretical and critical work.
English 307	Advanced Creative Writing: Plotting and Scheming	Martinez	MW 12:30-1:50
English 307 Advanced Creative Writing: Plotting and Scheming Course Description: We all read for plot to one degree or another, and we all turn to this particular aspect of narrative in quite a bit of our entertainment: we want to know what happens next. But some of us--maybe quite a few of us--struggle with plot when it comes to our own writing. This course is designed to help you think through the structure of plot in narrative form. We'll cover the history of plot, try to figure out why we like it and need, and we'll also trouble and contest this necessity. You'll learn a series of tricks, but you'll also discover which ones may work best for the type of fiction you like to write. And we'll do it all through a mix of cool theories and writers, weird diagrams and acronyms, plus a lot of our own work: we'll generate a bunch of pieces, including at least one full story, with those two essential narrative questions in mind: What happens next? And what happens after that? Teaching Method: Lecture, discussion, seminar. Evaluation Method: Attendance, participation, workshops, short stories. Texts Include: Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction (1555977596) Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (1948226138)
English 308	Advanced Nonfiction Writing: Your Mom, Your Girlfriend, & Your Goldfish: The Braided Essay	Hernández	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 308 Advanced Nonfiction Writing: Your Mom, Your Girlfriend, & Your Goldfish: The Braided Essay Course Description: In this course, we will study braided essays—a nonfiction form that allows us to weave personal narratives with research, reportage, and social observations. How do we keep our narrative voice consistent while we move among seemingly disparate topics? How do we handle setting and characterization alongside data and historical facts? How do we transform multiple threads into a cohesive final essay? Through close readings of essays, we will begin to arrive at some answers that you will employ in your own writing. Regular writing exercises in class will help you to generate material for your braided essays, and workshopping, both in small groups and as a full class, will give you a chance to share your writing with peers, generating opportunities for connections and insights into your literary productions. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Attendance, Participation, Sketches, Essays and Final Creative Portfolio.
English 310	Studies in Literary Genres: The English Country and Far Beyond (Pre 1830)	Thompson	MW 3:30-4:50
English 310 Studies in Literary Genres: The English Country and Far Beyond (Pre 1830) Course Description: If you’ve watched Saltburn or the Netflix series Bridgerton, you know that the English estate has undergone some cultural revision. No longer the opulent backdrop of period drama, the country house is the site of reckonings with the history of England’s overseas empire, traffic in captive people, and flagrantly unequal distribution of wealth and power. In this class, we will trace the ongoing force of English literary refigurations of landed property initially tied to the largesse and power of the lord of the manor. We’ll first explore the early modern country house poem, where the landed estate serves as a locus of pastoral abundance and naturalized social, architectural, and ecological order. But as we will discover, cracks appear in this vision. Moving forward, we encounter the idealized country house contested from the vantage of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels whose narrators and protagonists include servants, colonial subjects, and witnesses to family decadence financed by slavery. We’ll turn to twentieth-century texts that claim the decaying country house as source of ghostly national nostalgia. Our final unit will engage public revision (in print, monuments, and activism) of the estate as “English Heritage.” We will watch at least one episode of Bridgerton (Season 1, 2020) and the film Saltburn (2023) to assess recent popular re-representations of the landed estate. Evaluation Method: Grades will be based on three short essays and one group presentation. Texts May Include: Country house poems may include: Aemelia Lanyer, “A Description of Cookham” (1611); Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst” (1616); Thomas Carew, “To Saxham” (1640); Robert Herrick, “A Panegyric to Sir Lewis Pemberton” (1648); Andrew Marvell, “Upon Appleton House” (1651); Abraham Cowley, “On the Queen’s Repairing Somerset House” (1668); John Dryden, “To My Honoured Kinsman, John Driden, of Chesterton in the County of Huntingdon, Esquire” (1699); Anne Finch, “Upon My Lord Winchilsea’s Converting the Mount in His Garden to a Terrace” (c. 1703); Mary Leapor, “Crumble-Hall” (1751); John Agard, “Upon Revisiting Mansfield Park” (2006). Novels and short stories may include: Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall (1762); Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (1800); Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814); Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847); Arthur Canon Doyle, “The Adventure of the Five Orange Pips” (1891); Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938); Jean Rhys, The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); Isabel Colgate, The Shooting Party (1980); Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day (1989).
English 324	Studies in Medieval Literature: Pagan and Christian in Medieval Literature (Pre 1830)	Newman	MWF 1-1:50
English 324 Studies in Medieval Literature: Pagan and Christian in Medieval Literature (Pre 1830) Course Description: Medieval culture was overwhelmingly Christian, but it was heir to several pre-Christian religions. Germanic paganism brought monsters, defiant heroism, and expectation of a coming “twilight of the gods,” while Celtic paganism supplied magical objects and mysterious Otherworld visitors. Contrary to popular belief, the Church did not suppress the use of pagan sources, but medieval writers transformed the materials they inherited, producing sophisticated texts that present a Christian point of view layered above tantalizing and elusive pagan subtexts. In this multimedia class, we’ll look at (1) the Old English world of Beowulf along with a recent apocalyptic novel based on it, Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife; (2) four tales about magical shape-shifting characters: Marie de France’s Yonec and Bisclavret, The Wife of Bath’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and (3) the romance of the Holy Grail—a Celtic magical cauldron that evolved into a prized Christian relic. The class will include a performance of Beowulf in Old English, sung to the Anglo-Saxon harp; websites on key archaeological finds; and three film adaptations by Éric Rohmer, David Lowery, and the unforgettable British comedy team, Monty Python. Teaching Method: Discussion; some lectures; film viewing. Evaluation Method: Oral presentations; five very short assignments; three 5-7 page papers. Texts Include: Old English elegies, "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer" Beowulf (translations by Seamus Heaney and Maria Dahvana Headley) Maria Dahvana Headley, The Mere Wife Marie de France, "Yonec" and "Bisclavret" Chaucer, "The Wife of Bath's Tale" Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Chretien de Troyes, Perceval Robert de Boron, Merlin and the Grail Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The Holy Grail"
English 338	Studies in Renaissance Literature: Early Modern Horror (Pre 1830)	Evans	MW 2-3:20
English 338 Studies in Renaissance Literature: Early Modern Horror (Pre 1830) Course Description: This course will bring together English Renaissance literature, classical and Renaissance theories of spectatorship, and academic writing on horror as a genre. Building on canonical thinkers from Aristotle to Kristeva, we will consider how early modern theater anticipated conventions of the Gothic novel, the genre more traditionally cited as the birthplace of horror. Across three units—focused on revenge tragedy, witches, and monsters—we will consider the psychological, cultural, and civic functions of this horror or proto-horror literature. We will think critically about the potential, the inevitability, and the risks of approaching early literature through anachronistic frames of reference. Teaching Method: Two 80-minute meetings, brief lectures and discussion. Evaluation Method: Attendance & participation, reading quizzes, in-class presentations, midterm and final papers written in class. Texts Include: Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ISBN 978-1904271604 John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ISBN 978-1904271512 Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ISBN 978-1472520456 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ISBN 978-1904271413 Thomas Dekker et al, The Witch of Edmonston, ISBN 1904271529 Darryl Jones, Horror: A Very Brief Introduction, ISBN 978-0198755562
English 344	18th Century Fiction: The Multiracial Eighteenth Century (Pre 1830/Race & Ethnicity)	Comerford	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 344 18th Century Fiction: The Multiracial Eighteenth Century (Pre 1830/Race & Ethnicity) Course Description: Step aside, Bridgerton. If you’re in search of drama, intrigue, seduction, and scandal, eighteenth-century British novels can make even Bridgerton look mundane. If Bridgerton appears to reimagine Regency England as more racially diverse than it really was, the actual Britain of the eighteenth century was by no means racially homogenous, and interracial encounters and marriages as well as mixed-race figures were increasingly present in life and literature of the period. In this course, we will read novels, narratives, and short stories featuring mixed-race figures. The dramatic rise in texts representing mixed-race characters as heiresses in the latter half of the century highlight rising concerns about which interests were most important to preserve—economic ones or racial ones. As we will explore, wealthy mixed-race heiresses also often occupy a contradictory position as both a product of and beneficiary of plantation slavery and exploitation mercantile ventures. Tracking the appearance of mixed-race characters in British literature alongside the development of empire, increasing cross-racial contact, solidifying racial formations, generic conventions, and the marriage plot, we will think about how novelistic and narrative forms cohere through the simultaneous representation and suppression of mixed-race figures. How does the trajectory of the marriage plot shift for mixed-race characters? How are multiracial characters depicted as mobilizing their racial indeterminacy? What anxieties, values, and interests do these texts, largely authored by white British women, register? Throughout the class, we will interrogate how multiracial characters consistently trouble tidy narratives of racial difference as well as the genres to which they belonged. Texts Include: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688), The Female American (1767), Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (1801), and The Woman of Colour (1808). Shorter works include: Lucy Peacock, “The Creole” (1786) and Jane Austen, Sanditon (1817). Films and shows may include Belle (2013) and selected episodes of Sanditon (2019) and Bridgerton (2020).
English 353	Studies in Romantic Literature: Austen and Irony (Pre 1830)	Wolff	TTh 2-3:20
English 353 Studies in Romantic Literature: Austen and Irony (Pre 1830) Course Description: This class is a reading-intensive study of a selection of Jane Austen's novels, with strong emphasis on close reading the innovative language of her prose. Though best known for her contributions to the popular genres of romance, Austen has always been a writer's writer, meticulous in composition and renowned as a stylist. Our focus will be on the satirical edges of her work, and on understanding how irony works in her novels. We'll read some 18th century precursors and some recent criticism as help, but most of the class will be spent with Austen herself. In addition to the novels listed, we'll read from her early writings, letters, and the epistolary novella Lady Susan. Teaching Method: Short lectures and seminar discussion. Evaluation Method: Attendance & participation; quizzes; short writings assignments; midterm; longer final writing assignment. Texts Include: Jane Austen, Emma ( ‎ 0141439580) Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (0141439513) D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style (069112387X)
English 357	19th Century British Fiction: Imagining the Brontës (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality, & Embodiment)	English, Sam	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 357 19th Century British Fiction: Imagining the Brontës (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality, & Embodiment) Course Description: The year 1847 marked the publication of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey, each written under the same surname. As rumors circulated across London about Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell—were they brothers? Were they all one man?—Emily and Anne Brontë contracted tuberculosis and died. Only their sister Charlotte would live to see the world discover their true identities, which means that only she would have any say in how their works would be remembered and understood. This course interrogates the legacies of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, three sisters who transformed the English domestic novel with their genre-bending fiction about marriage, gender, race, madness, colonialism, and the wild Yorkshire moors. Beyond analyzing their most canonical novels, we will also examine a range of Brontë materials—such as biographies, retellings, pop music, and film adaptations—that illustrate the intrigue these literary siblings have garnered across time and space. How are the Brontës reanimated in recent fiction, and for what purpose? Why do we remain transfixed not only by their novels but by the girls and women they might have been? Additional texts may include Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (1990), Emily (2022), and “Wuthering Heights” (2026). Teaching Methods: Seminar discussion, short lectures. Evaluation Methods: Blue Book notebook, leading discussion, midterm essay, final essay. Texts may include: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; Agnes Gray; Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848); selected poems and juvenile fiction; Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy (1990); To Walk Invisible (2016), dir. Sally Wainwright; Carmen Maria Machado, “The Resident” (2017); Emily (2022), dir. Frances O’Connor; “Wuthering Heights” (2026), dir. Emerald Fennell.
English 359	Studies in 19th Century Literature: On Stormy Seas : Pirates, Shipwrecks and Atlantic Adventure (Post 1830/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures)	Winter	MW 12:30-1:50
English 359 Studies in 19th Century Literature: On Stormy Seas : Pirates, Shipwrecks and Atlantic Adventure (Post 1830/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures) Course Description: The nineteenth century was an age of empires—but it was also an age of oceans. Merchant ships, pirate vessels, and convict transports crisscrossed the seas, carrying goods, people, and power. In this course, we follow the routes of empire, investigating how the ocean became a stage for adventure, exploitation, and resistance. Reading Robinson Crusoe’s fictional tale of shipwreck and survival alongside Mary Prince’s account of enslavement’s harsh realities and additional selections of British and Caribbean fiction, we will consider how maritime mobility could promise both freedom and profound unfreedom. What do seafaring novels reveal about British and Caribbean identity and the ways that they were intertwined? Does hidden treasure represent imperial fantasy or the buried memory of colonial violence? With readings of pirates, smugglers and mutineers, we'll push our investigations further, questioning how these figures transform the sea into a site of revolutionary justice and community. We'll also ask how contemporary reimaginings including Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) and Black Sails (2014) romanticize or reckon with the violence at the heart of Atlantic empire? What does their persistent presence in contemporary texts and media reveal about our culture today? Pairing nineteenth-century texts with contemporary poetry by Derek Walcott and M. NourbeSe Philip and postcolonial scholarship by Nicole Aljoe and Edward Said, we’ll think and write about how representations of the sea can confront violent histories and imagine more equitable futures. Additional readings may include selections from Emmanuel Appadocca (1853), Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), Armadale (1866), and Treasure Island (1883)
English 365	Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Ecologies of Resistance (Post 1830/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures)	Mwangi	MW 12:30-1:50
English 365 Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Ecologies of Resistance (Post 1830/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures) Course Description: This course explores how postcolonial writers engage the environment not as passive backdrop but as a contested site of struggle, survival, and resistance. Students examine how colonialism and global capitalism have reshaped relationships to land, water, animals, and climate, and how literature responds to environmental violence, dispossession, and ecological crisis while imagining alternative modes of care, belonging, and sustainability. In addition to novels and memoir, the course features brief poetry interludes, engaging short works by writers such as Niyi Osundare, Kofi Awoonor, Gcina Mhlophe, and Benjamin Zephaniah, among others, foregrounding poetry as a vital form of ecological critique, protest, and cultural memory. Literary texts are paired with accessible theoretical readings in postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental humanities by thinkers such as Rob Nixon (slow violence, environmental injustice), Homi Bhabha (hybridity, colonial ambivalence), Robert J. C. Young (colonialism, decolonization, resistance), Cajetan Iheka (African ecologies, resistance aesthetics), and Elizabeth DeLoughrey (islands, oceanic ecologies, empire), alongside other scholars at the intersection of postcolonialism, ecology, and resistance. The course emphasizes close reading, historical context, and comparative analysis. Teaching Method: Interactive lectures, guided discussion, close reading workshops, small group activities, short contextual presentations, comparative analysis across genres, and occasional low stakes reflective or creative exercises. Emphasis is placed on discussion based learning and sustained engagement with primary texts. Evaluation Method: Short response papers or reading reflections, one midterm analytical essay, one final essay or project; participation, including discussion and in class writing. Texts Include: Amitav Ghosh – The Hungry Tide. Publisher: Mariner Books. ISBN 13: 978 0618869843 Indra Sinha – Animal’s People. Publisher: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 13: 978 1416523325 Jamaica Kincaid – A Small Place. Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 13: 978 0374527071 Ken Saro Wiwa – A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary. Publisher: Penguin Books. ISBN 13: 978 0140255379 Linda Hogan – Solar Storms. Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 13: 978 0393343687 Nnedi Okorafor – Lagoon. Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks. ISBN 13: 978 0062299039 Poetry Packet (Canvas) Selected poems by Niyi Osundare, David Rubadiri, Kofi Awoonor, Benjamin Zephaniah, and women poets such as Gcina Mhlophe (orality, land, communal memory), Kristina Rungano (land, political struggle), Grace Nichols (Caribbean ecologies, embodiment), Warsan Shire (displacement, environmental precarity), and Safia Elhillo (diaspora, memory, landscape), among others, engaging environmental crisis and resistance through diverse poetic forms.
English 366	Studies in African American Literature: Toni Morrison (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/US Overlay)	Jackson	MW 2-3:20
English 366 Studies in African American Literature: Toni Morrison (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/US Overlay) Course Description:
English 368	Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Reading James Joyce's Ulysses (Post 1830)	Froula	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 368 Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Reading James Joyce's Ulysses (Post 1830) Course Description: An encyclopedic epic that tracks three Dubliners’ criss-crossing adventures on 16 June 1904, James Joyce's landmark Ulysses (1922) captures a day in the life of a semicolonial city in a wealth of analytic--in his word, vivisective--detail. Proposing that Ulysses has much to teach us about how to read our own everyday worlds, we'll study the book's eighteen episodes alongside Homer’s Odyssey and other sources, notes, and commentaries. In thinking about the fictional Dubliners who populate Ulysses, we’ll consider: Joyce’s transmutation of Homer’s Odyssey into a modern epic quest; Ireland's long colonial history and its struggle to throw off British rule; characters’ conflicting dreams of a subject or sovereign Ireland; conditions of home, exile, and homecoming; psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious and the psychopathology of everyday life (Freud); scapegoat dynamics in theory and everyday practice; bodies, sensation, food, peristalsis, hunger, sex, birth, death; desire, the gaze, gender, gesture, dress, and social power; performance and theatricality, both studied and unconscious; the pain and mourning of loss; the power of love; the scalpel of wit; the social life—and political bite--of jokes, comedy, satire, humor; the socio-economic sex/gender system, including marriage and prostitution, as key to political authority in light of Joyce’s reported remark that women's emancipation is “the greatest revolution of our time in the most important relationship there is”; intersubjective dynamics, human and animal, dead and alive; history, time, memory, monuments; the burdens, powers, and pleasures of language; the play of voices: narrative voice, interior monologue, dialogue, colloquy, reported speech, telling silences, omniscient authority, poetry, news, advertising, jokes, parody, obfuscation, song, music, play script, letters, catechism, allusion, citation; noises and soundscapes from the cat’s “mrkgnao” to a screeching tram and characters’ inner, speaking, and singing voices; the worldly diction of Joyce’s beyond-English; and more. We’ll approach this challenging, maddening, amazing, exhilarating, funny, moving, deeply rewarding, often life-changing book in ways playful and critical, jocoserious and analytic; and we’ll seek revelation by reading, thinking, and discussing it together with serious purpose and imaginative freedom. Requirements and evaluation: Attendance, preparation, participation (20%); Weekly Close Readings and After-Class Comments, collected as Midterm and Final (25%); Presentation with 1-2 page handout (15%); option of two shorter or one longer paper or project (35%); Self-Evaluation (5%). Required Texts Include: Joyce, Ulysses (Modern Library, 1961 text). Please use this edition even if you own another. Don Gifford with Robert J Seidman, Ulysses Annotated (California, 1989). Homer, The Odyssey, Robert Fitzgerald's or another translation. Recommended Texts: Joyce, Dubliners. R. Ellmann, James Joyce (rev. ed., 1982). Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. K. Barry (Oxford, 1991). Supplementary readings, recordings, and films via Canvas Course Reserves and Library Media.
English 368	Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Literature as Play: Sports and The Literary Arts (Post 1830)	Yarberry	MW 11-12:20
English 368 Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Literature as Play: Sports and The Literary Arts (Post 1830) Course Description: Whether looking to popular TV shows, Heated Rivalry and Yellowjackets, or to surreal short stories featuring mutant soccer players, we find that literature shares a variety of playful connections with games and competitive sports. Both writing and athletics, for instance, are often considered leisure activities, each follow their own set of rules, and the two equally rely on different types of participation in the forms of viewer and player, reader and writer. Beyond that, no known culture exists without storytelling or games. In this course, we will ponder, deepen, and lengthen this list of similarities as we explore stories, poems, essays, films and shows that have engaged with different athletic activities from a range of perspectives across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How do different social and cultural identities affect narratives told about athletes? What literary and other media forms are best able to capture the movement, precision, viewpoints, or play of a given sport? We'll read skateboarding sonnets by an ex-pro skater turned poet, watch fictionalized worlds of boxing and queer body-building play out on screen, and check out the novel Tapping the Source, by “the godfather of ‘Surf Noir,’” before watching Keanu Reeves in the cult-classic film it inspired, Point Break. From wrestling to football, field hockey to baseball, writers have long been invested in athletics as both spectator and player, commentator and character. By reading and watching, discussing and writing, our course will uncover the athletes, real and fictional, that have kept the impulse to play alive within the literary arts and beyond.
English 380	Studies in Multiethnic American Literature: Race and the American Musical (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Race & Ethnicity)	Mann	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 380 Studies in Multiethnic American Literature: Race and the American Musical (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Race & Ethnicity) Course Description: In this seminar, students will analyze how race has worked in relation to the Broadway musical from the early days of the form through to the contemporary. Students will consider how transformations in American race relations, immigration policy, geopolitics, and social policy have influenced when and how race manifests in the genre. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Papers and projects. Texts Include: Materials online.
English 381	Literature and Medicine: Disability Lifeworlds (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures/Race & Ethnicity)	Nadiminti	MW 3:30-4:50
English 381 Literature and Medicine: Disability Lifeworlds (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures/Race & Ethnicity) Course Description: How does literature represent the social struggle of disability? This course examines how disability literatures mobilize not just identity categories, but, in fact, robust models of thought and feeling. We will read Anglophone writing from India, South Africa, Japan, and the US to ask how disability remaps collectivity care, and personhood by querying vocabularies of cripness, capacity, debility, and illness. We will examine how disability challenge assumed categories of exceptionality and capitalist productivity, while also asking significant questions about civil rights and human rights. Panning back from textual representations, the course also tracks how disability studies has evolved beyond a narrow Anglo-American focus to understand complex Global South realities. Reading disability theorists like Rosemarie Garland Thompson, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, we will think about the frictional registers of belonging and alienation represented in novels, autobiographies, novellas, and art. Texts include Ved Mehtq’s Face to Face, Georgina Kleege's Sight Unseen, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, IM Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K, Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection, and Sauo Ichikawa’s Hunchback. Teaching Method: Discussion/seminar. Evaluation Method: Assignments will comprise in-class presentations, a short close reading paper, and a final visual and tactile zine. Texts Include: Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0143135203 J.M. Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0140074482 Sauo Ichikawa, Hunchback, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0241700785
English 386	Studies in Literature & Film: The Horror Film (Post 1830)	Hodge	TTh 2-3:20
English 386 Studies in Literature & Film: The Horror Film (Post 1830) Course Description: This course introduces students to the study of the modern American horror film, beginning with Psycho in 1960 and continuing to the present. There are many possible versions of this course, and this one concentrates on a number of films widely regarded as classics of the genre in addition to more recent efforts. The course will study 1-2 feature-length films per week proceeding chronologically. Along the way we will analyze influential examples of various horror sub-genres, e.g. the slasher, found footage, body horror, supernatural possession, etc. Our prevailing concern will be with bodies – bodies represented onscreen as well as the bodies of the audience – and asking how horror cinema puts these bodies into relation. We will read essays in film theory and history to think about this question and more. The class will proceed mainly via short lecture and guided discussion. Students will pursue and develop a final research project with opportunity for analytical and creative expression. Teaching Method: Discussion, Short Lecture. Evaluation Method: Research Project, Attendance. Texts Include: Printed Course Reader.
English 389	Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment: For Love or Money: Marriage and the Market (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality, & Embodiment)	Winter	MW 3:30-4:50
English 389 Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment: For Love or Money: Marriage and the Market (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality, & Embodiment) Course Description: In recent years, the TikTok anthem, “I’m looking for a guy in finance” sparked a question that has been universally acknowledged since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Do we date and marry for love or money? From Regency drawing rooms to reality TV mansions, courtship has long functioned as a marketplace where beauty, wealth, and social status operate as currency. But how does framing romance as a competition or a transaction inform our understandings of love and who is able to acquire it? Examining a contemporary culture filled with dating app algorithms, reality dating competitions and plastic surgery transformations, this course considers how the modern “marriage market” endorses certain performances of gender, sexuality, and consumption. What are the emotional and economic costs of participating in the marriage market—and from abstaining? And how are these costs distributed along the lines of gender, race and class? While this course begins with a survey foundational literary marriage markets, our primary focus will be tracing their afterlives in twentieth- and twenty first-century culture. Throughout the course, students will engage with feminist and post-feminist theory, as well as Marxist and sociological scholarship to consider the question: Can love ever escape the logic of the market? Evaluation Method: Assignments may include an analytical case study of a recent social media trend, pertaining to romance and the self-formation. Texts Include: Fiction such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) or Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Hell-Heaven” (2008), Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians (2013), and Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person (2017). We will also consider social media, television and film including Mike Fleiss’s The Bachelor, Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster (2015) and Celine Song’s The Materialists (2025).
English 389	Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment: Queering Girlhood (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality, & Embodiment)	English, Sam	TTh 2-3:20
English 389 Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment: Queering Girlhood (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality, & Embodiment) Course Description: Sugar and spice and everything nice, bows and Barbies and bronzing drops from Sephora. Is that what girlhood is really made of? Where does girlhood get messy or monstrous, stressful or strange? Who gets to be a girl, and who is forgotten in our popular narratives about girlhood? In this course, we’ll examine representations of girlhood in 20th and 21st century Anglo-American literature, cinema, and television through the lens of queer theory. Our readings will ask us to consider girlhood as a contradictory set of experiences that can happen to people of all genders. We’ll think about what girlhood feels like to children who are all too often excluded from or only ever partially imagined within it, as well as for children who desire a girlhood that rejects them or reject the girlhood that is thrust upon them. Writing assignments such as the song analysis, where we’ll each add a song of our choice to a course playlist and explain how it enlivens our course themes, will help us challenge our own assumptions about what queerness really looks and feels like in practice. Finally, we’ll identify and complicate a wide cast of characters that emerge—to various degrees—in our cultural renditions of the many places where girlhood looks queer, such as tomboys, children who kill, effeminate sons, and toxic (and maybe homoerotic) best friends. Core texts will include Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman (1951), Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), Eve’s Bayou (1997), and episodes of Showtime’s Yellowjackets (2021—), with possible additions from Lucy Dacus, Jack Halberstam, Karen Russell, and Jenny Zhang, among others. Teaching Methods: Seminar discussion, short lectures. Evaluation Methods: Participation, two short essays, creative final project. Texts may include: Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman (1951); Toni Morrison, Sula (1973); Heavenly Creatures (1994), dir. Peter Jackson; Eve’s Bayou (1997), dir. Kasi Lemmons; Tomboy (2011), dir. Celine Sciamma; torrin a. greathouse, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (2018); short stories by Margaret Atwood, Dantiel W. Moniz, Karen Russell, and Jenny Zhang; critical theory by Kathryn Bond Stockton, Sarah Projansky, and Jack Halberstam, among others.
English 392	Situation of Writing	Curdy	MW 12:30-1:50
English 392 Situation of Writing Course Description: The situation of writing requires that we create literature, as well as the contexts in which literature is shared, appreciated, and understood. We are the inheritors, perpetuators and innovators of literary culture, and in this class, we will position our inquiries on the present and future, even as we acknowledge the enduring humanistic values of creative writing. We will begin with a discussion of ideas about shaping the literary traditions of the United States and move quickly to those who have led or lead in shaping that tradition by engaging it or walking away from it. Finally, we’ll interrogate the impact of the evolving technology of AI on both our writing and the public’s engagement with literary works. We will build on these ideas practically with a service-learning assignment and a creative work that reaches a new public, coordinates new media, or engenders community. The intention is to have a conversation that will unfold in real-time between us all, evolving into a learning experience that is both pragmatically useful and philosophically illuminating. My hope is that this class will help us to become more conscious of our motives and processes as writers; that it will allow us to more lucidly defend creative writing as an art form and a vital contribution to society; and that it will acquaint us with the productions of literary culture, including their changing technological platforms and their relationship to social structures. As part of this program, we will investigate literature and culture through the lens of social inequalities and diversities. Teaching Method: Seminar. Evaluation Method: Attendance, Participation, final portfolio and project. Texts Include: TBA
English 393-2	Theory and Practice of Poetry	Curdy	MW 3:30-4:50
English 393-2 Theory and Practice of Poetry Course Description: This selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students increasingly informed readers and self-sustaining apprentices of poetry. The Fall portion of the course begins with summer reading and intensive study in which poets learn to identify operative modes in poetry -- including description, rhetoric, story and song -- and begin connecting contemporary participants with root systems in the tradition. We support our studies with reading exercises and "imitation" assignments, in which students convert close reading into fodder for original writing. Students will write at least four papers and will write, workshop and revise four poems during the Fall term. They also will lead presentations on one chosen poet and one classmate during workshop. In the Winter term, students will continue to read and complete close reading assignments and will stretch their skills as they complete a week of "Daily Poems," thereby drawing on original energy and stamina to bring their work to the next level of accomplishment. Finally, in the Spring term, students will focus entirely on their own work, drafting, revising, workshopping and completing one long poem of at least 120 lines that combines autobiographical material with writing from research. Throughout the year, our close reading assignments hone skills in sensitive and critical thinking; our imitation poems challenge existing habits as they introduce new strategies; our Daily Poems exercise agility and confidence; and our workshops cultivate the openness and humility necessary to serious writing and lifelong learning. Through this intensive and nurturing Sequence, students become careful readers of each other's work and complete a polished portfolio of original writing. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 394-2	Theory and Practice of Fiction	Martinez	MW 3:30-4:50
English 394-2 Theory and Practice of Fiction Course Description: This first quarter of the year-long the fiction sequence is all about the short story and how it’s put together. On our continuing path toward mastery of the form, we must both read actively and write regularly (every day is best). New writing will be due just about every week, and most weeks we’ll discuss exciting and sometimes weird published short stories to figure out what the author is up to and what we can greedily steal. This reading and writing strategy challenges you to learn story structure; to broaden your stylistic range; to deepen your sense of what kinds of material can be brought into the work; to develop your skill in manipulating the basic elements of fiction for particular effects. Regular workshops of your story drafts will increase your ability to see your work more objectively, and to find constructive and insightful ways to help your classmates further their own writing goals. Bonus: A recent study showed that reading specifically fiction in the literary realism mode deepens people’s empathy more than reading in any other genre. That’s a true fact. Teaching Method: Discussion, workshop. Evaluation Method: Attendance, Participation, Short Story Drafts, Final Revision Texts Include: Published short stories. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 395-2	Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction	Webster	MW 3:30-4:50
English 395-2 Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction Course Description: An advanced year-long course in reading for writers, critical analysis of techniques of creative nonfiction, and intensive creative writing. Reading of primary works will concentrate on longer creative nonfiction works, and the creative project for the latter part of the sequence is a work of creative nonfiction of approximately 15,000 words. A guest non-fiction writer will visit in May as writer-in-residence. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Based on creative and critical work; class presentations and participation. Texts Include: Varies each quarter. Texts will be available at Norris Center Bookstore. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 397	Research Seminar: City Lit	Dimick	TTh 11-12:20
English 397 Research Seminar: City Lit Course Description: How are cities—marked by aspirations and inequalities, shaped by memories and struggles—written? How do urban environments come to life across novels, poems, and films? This course examines contemporary literature set in Tokyo, Rome, Johannesburg, Chennai, Dakkar, Kingston, Chicago, and other metropolises. As we read, we will examine urban genres like flânerie and catalogue narrative strategies used to capture the density of city life. We will ask: Who is visible in these works and who remains in the shadows? How do transportation systems, housing policies, immigration, and weather drive plots and impact characters? To increase our understanding of these cities and their literatures, supplementary readings will draw on urban studies, environmental history, and postcolonial theory. The course builds to a 15-page research paper, allowing each student to select a city and analyze its relation to a literary work. Teaching Method: Seminar Evaluation Method: Annotated bibliography, oral presentation, and fifteen-page final paper. Texts Include: Readings will likely include works by Miri Yu, Jhumpa Lahiri, Dinaw Mengestu, Garnette Cadogan, Aminata Sow Fall, and Gwendolyn Brooks.
English 398-2	Honors Seminar	Soni	F 10a-11:50a
English 398-2 Honors Seminar Course Description: This seminar is designed to guide you through the many steps required to complete a research project in English. Your own research and that of your classmates will be the focus of the seminar. You will be expected to complete weekly written assignments, each of which will contribute in some way to the research and writing required for your Senior Thesis. You will craft a proposal/abstract for the project, construct an annotated bibliography of sources essential for the thesis, produce a “State of the Field” analysis, attempt close readings relevant to your arguments, and finally, write a draft introduction and chapter for the thesis. Even if none of these pieces make it into the final thesis, regular writing is an essential part of exploring and developing your ideas. Since the seminar is focused on the independent research of you and your classmates, its success depends on the work you put into researching and revising, and the care and attention with which you engage the work of others in the seminar. A key goal of the seminar is to foster a collaborative scholarly community, in which you help each other hone your ideas, refine your writing and find new paths to explore. Research never happens in isolation. Although I will be guiding you through the steps of research, you should think of the seminar as a workshop space to explore and develop ideas, work through frustrations with your writing and solicit the advice of others. A central part of the seminar will be reading and commenting on the work of your peers, as well as receiving and incorporating constructive criticism from them. It is never easy to share work publicly, particular in its early stages when ideas seem unfinished and still in need of work. I hope we can create an environment in the seminar that is open, respectful, constructive and supportive. Being open to constructive criticism is the only way to improve your writing and advance your ideas. The skills you develop through the regular practices of writing and workshopping – precise analytic writing, giving constructive feedback, incorporating editorial advice – will improve your senior thesis. But these skills will also serve you well in many contexts beyond academia where you will be asked to undertake independent research. Teaching Method: Seminar, intensive workshopping Evaluation Method(s): Weekly writing assignments Texts include: Wayne C. Booth et el., The Craft of Research, 5th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) ---- ISBN: 9780226826677 Texts will be available at: Norris Prerequisites: Seniors only. Permission of department required. Attendance at first class mandatory. No P/N registration.
English 455	Studies in Victorian Literature: The Nahda	Johnson	Th 2-4:50
English 455 Studies in Victorian Literature: The Nahda Course Description: This course is an introduction to Arabic literary production of the long nineteenth century as it engages the “nahḍa” (awakening), understood variously as a discourse on modernity, a utopian social project, and an epistemological rupture wrought by colonialism and capitalism. With special emphasis on the genealogies, practices, and problematics of Arabic literary modernity, this course will introduce students to the major works of Arabic literature produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to the major debates, social changes, and material developments that attend the period, including (but not limited to) language reform, migration, print capitalism, imperialism, and nationalism. In short, we will try to understand how these authors, through their texts, both produced and theorized modernity for their readers in the localized contexts of Imperial influence and control on the one hand, and the global–though uneven–nineteenth-century processes of social, political, economic, and technological change. Primary texts will all be available in English translation, but those able are encouraged to follow in Arabic. A separate section can be arranged for discussing the Arabic-language versions. Teaching Method: Seminar. Evaluation Method: Short paper, seminar paper. Texts Include: Rifa’ al-Tahtawi, Imam in Paris [The Extraction of Gold from a Description of Paris] (1826). Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Leg over Leg, vols. 1-2 and 3-4 (1855). Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, What Isa Ibn Hisham Told Us (1907). Tarek El-Ariss, Ed., The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahḍa (2018). Qāsim Amīn, The Liberation of Women (1899), The New Woman (1900).
English 465	Studies in Colonial & Postcolonial Literature: The Politics of Disability	Nadiminti	T 2-4:50
English 465 Studies in Colonial & Postcolonial Literature: The Politics of Disability Course Description: How have vocabularies of disability evolved in twentieth-century narrative? Tracking how the concept develops alongside questions of citizenship, this course considers how disability is fundamentally a political claim that exceeds its status as either a medicalized or an identity category. We will examine how narrative represents disability as an embodied and embedded structural condition of power by reading twentieth- and twenty-first century novels and memoirs from India, South Africa, and the United States. Exploring key formulations in the field such as narrative prosthesis, stigma, the metaphors of illness, bodyminds, maiming, and more, this course simultaneously introduces graduate students to the interdisciplinary field of disability studies. Texts include Ved Mehta's Face to Face, J.M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K, Indra Sinha's Animal's People, Jaipreet Virdi's Hearing Happiness, and Andrew Leland's The Country of the Blind alongside recent monographs from the field.
English 471	Studies in American Literature: Sovereignties Across the Americas	Rodríguez Pliego	M 2-4:50
English 471 Studies in American Literature: Sovereignties Across the Americas Course Description: The terms “sovereignties” and “Americas” in the title of this course stand at the crossroads of old and new dialogues about their meanings. This course considers Indigenous and Native American notions of sovereignty that imagine nationhood outside of the nation-state framework. It reads these theorizations of sovereignty and nationhood alongside Latin American and Latinx anti-imperial writing. We will consider José Martí’s late nineteenth-century articulation of “Our America” alongside the rise of the Guna word “Abiayala” and its use by Indigenous activists from Latin America, and “Turtle Island” as the name that Native American creation stories give to our continent. Our discussions will trace connections between the storytelling traditions of Native American, Indigenous, and Latinx authors across the hemisphere. We will study the narrative forms that authors take up as they construct or critique nationhood: essays, short stories, novels and poetry. We will also examine how authors break down these forms by taking up communal authorship, orality, visual media, and multilingualism as narrative strategies that provide aesthetic and ideological challenges to canonical articulation of nation-state sovereignties. Teaching Method: Seminar. Evaluation Method: Attendance and participation, paper abstract, presentation, paper. Texts Include: Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, 9780140086836 Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians, 9781597146289 Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World 9781908276421
English 471	Studies in American Literature: Black Feminism and Bio-Politics	Mann	T 2-4:50
English 471 Studies in American Literature: Black Feminism and Bio-Politics Course Description: In this graduate seminar, students will read Black feminist literature and analyze it for its relationship to theories of biopolitics. Teaching Method: Seminar Evaluation Method: Papers, teaching demonstration. Texts Include: Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Norton Critical Edition) 0393614565 Zora Neal Hurston, Tell My Horse 0061695130 Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha 0883782375 Toni Morrison, Beloved 1400033411 Angela Y. Davis, An Autobiography 1642598984
English 481	Studies in Literary Theory and Criticism: Green Materialisms	Wolff	W 2-4:50
English 481 Studies in Literary Theory and Criticism: Green Materialisms Course Description: This course introduces students to a sequence of "materialisms" worked out from the (long) 18th century to the present. While readings and discussions will gravitate toward contemporary Marxist and post-Marxist ecological thought (including the afterlives of ideas like "primitive accumulation" and "metabolic rift" in recent feminist, anti-colonial, and environmental frameworks), we will also spend substantial time looking at the writings and influence of earlier thinkers whose controversial materialisms have returned to critical attention in recent decades (e.g. Spinoza, Herder). A guiding aim of the course is to assemble a fuller sense of the historical and conceptual underpinnings of first-world environmentalism; so we will ask what "matters," and to whom, in large part by putting the nature of "greenness" under scrutiny as a critical category. Readings will emphasize theory and philosophy, but please note there is a strong and central emphasis on poetry throughout, as well. Your grade for this course will be based on your attendance and regular participation, a shorter midterm essay, and a longer final essay in the form of a 10pp “conference paper.” Assignment structure and expectations will be circulated separately for each. All readings will be made available through Canvas. I will recommend editions of Spinoza's Ethics and Marx's early writings. Teaching Method: Short lectures and seminar discussions. Evaluation Method: Attendance & participation; short midterm essay; longer final essay. Texts Include: Spinoza, Ethics (any edition, Penguin Classics preferred) Marx, Early Writings (any edition, Penguin Classics preferred)
English 497	MFA Fiction Workshop	Schulman	Th 9:30a-12:20p
English 497 MFA Fiction Workshop Course Description: A craft and imagination oriented approach to fiction writing. Students will workshop each other's work with an eye towards narrative drive, emotional resonance, and grappling with something that matters. Teaching Method: Discussion based Workshop. Evaluation Method: Attendance, Handing work in on time, collegial generosity, taking chances. Texts Include: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (‎0811229076)
English 498	MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop	Hernández	T 9:30a-12:20p
English 498 MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop Course Description: TBA
English 520	Professionalization Workshop	Wisecup	Th 2-4:50
English 520 Professionalization Workshop Course Description: ENGLISH 520 is the Professionalization Seminar students are required to take once before they graduate, ideally in the third year. We’ll discuss professional norms and expectations in academic, alt-ac, and nonacademic jobs, keyed to students’ particular interests, fields, and questions. Topics may range from article submission and revision; grant writing and project management; collaboration in research groups and with extra-university partners; best practices for a sustainable writing schedule; and job market preparation. English 520 is graded P/NP and requires minimal preparation outside of class. Teaching Method: Seminar.
English 571	Teaching Creative Writing	Seliy	M 9:30a-12:20p
English 571 Teaching Creative Writing Course Description: In this course, we will engage with a wide range of possible approaches to the instruction of creative writing. To begin, we will look at the history of Creative Writing programs and the models of teaching that have traditionally guided MFA programs. We will then move on to discuss theories of learning as they apply to fine-arts courses. We will take into consideration intersectional challenges (race, gender, class, disability, etc). And we will think about the differences between teaching undergraduates and graduate students. In the second half of the course we will move into the practical work of designing creative writing courses that have a beginning, middle, and end, and also a clear set of achievable learning objectives. You will do the practical work of drafting syllabi, generating exercises, and selecting reading material for introductory courses in poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction.