Dear students,
Below are some brief descriptions of classes in the English department with seats available for Fall 2025, and we thought they might interest you–enjoy!
Writing
Intro to Fiction Writing ENGWRT 0520 (27658), Tues 6-8:30 PM: Learn how to craft short fiction, and write and revise two short stories, while earning a GER in Writing.
Intro to Poetry Writing ENGWRT 0530 (29029), T/Th 8 - 9:15 AM: Let renowned poet Joy Priest teach you about the craft of writing, while earning a GER in Writing.
Writing Youth Literature ENGWRT 0540 (29030), T 6-8:30 PM: Bestselling author Jonathan Auxier will teach you the art and craft of writing YA and middle grade stories.
Topics in Poetry: The Fairy Tale and the Poem ENGWRT 1293 (31044), T/Th 11 AM-12:15PM: Through a variety of immersive writing exercises and close readings, students in this course will explore classic and contemporary fairy tales and use them as foundations for crafting original poems with poet Lisa Hase-Jackson.
The Art of the Interview ENGWRT 1360 (31045), 2:30 - 3:45 PM: Explore interviewing for nonfiction storytelling through a variety of practices, from print journalism and public radio/podcasting, to oral history and documentary. With Professor Allison Dyche, you’ll learn from masters of craft from a variety of fields, and use hands-on exercises to put theory into practice.
Media Literacy: Writing and Reading Your Way through the Digital Landscape ENGWRT 1377 (29031), 11 AM - 12:15 PM: Examine the landscape of media — from journalism to social media to advertising — and learn how it impacts the practice of journalism. With Professor Allison Dyche, you’ll learn how to distinguish between credible journalism and the rest of the noise we’re bombarded with.
Composition
Professional Writing in Global Contexts ENGCMP 1111 (22774) Wed 6 pm: This course will help advanced undergraduate students better understand what is at stake in writing for international audiences, how to research issues relating to communication (and especially the use of English) in global contexts, and how to write professional publications for particular international audiences.
Projects in Digital Composition ENGCMP 1130 (24284) Tu 6 pm: Learn how to blend elements of digital composition and user experience (UX) design while researching, building, and testing your own interactive design projects.
Advanced Topics in Composition: Feminism, Composition, and Craftwork ENGCMP 1200 (30980) T Th 4 pm: Students will combine scholarly investigation and practical experimentation with writing, computing, horticulture, fiber artistry, laboratory practices, and other forms of embodied knowledge-making to consider the entangling of work, identity, and social positioning. Earn GSWS credit!
Projects in Black Rhetoric ENGCMP 1270 (22773) T Th 4 pm: Learn about the history of African American rhetoric, its uses in rhetorics of care, empathy, and advocacy from historical fiction to the writings of Octavia Butler; students will create a project of their own design and develop skills in discourse and community building. Fulfills Diversity Gen Ed.
Grant Writing for Research ENGCMP 1402 (26214) T Th 11 am: Become familiar with grants available in your fields of interest and learn how to craft arguments that highlight the value of projects—whether your own or those of others—by using evidence and pathos.
Writing with Style ENGCMP 1510 (22044) MW 4:30 pm: Do you feel the force of great writing, but worry that you can’t control it? This course will help you build coherence and expand your writerly repertoire.
Film
Introduction to Film Genres ENGFLM 0532/ FMST 0500 Mon 9a-12:50: Take this course to learn about 3-4 genres more in depth across time and nation! How do genres work and why are they so important to the American film industry? Counts as a W course.
Teen Film ENGFLM 1481/ FMST 1610 W 1-4:50: The teenpic has been variously defined as films targeted at a teenage market and as films about teenagers (and sometimes both). We will look at subgenres such as the juvenile delinquent film, the teen musical, the teen horror film, nostalgic teen films, postmodern youth cult films, African American teen films, "girl" teenpics, and LGBTQIA+ teenpics. Counts for FMST major and Children’s Lit Certificate!
Film and Politics ENGFLM 1485 Tues 1-4:50: This course examines film production, economics and forms of representation as reflections of political attitudes. We will study a variety of narrative and non-fiction films which reveal differing political points of view, ranging from those that legitimize the dominant culture to those which criticize, if not challenge, dominant attitudes. Knock off a W requirement with this film class that counts for lots of different certificates!
Televisual Horror ENGFLM/FMST 1529 W 9 am-12:50: How has the category “family viewing” so deeply shaped horror on tv? Why is horror on tv so different than in film with monsters serving as our friends, love interests, and heroes? Learn about how the constant threat of “real” horror and violence with the Breaking News shifts how horror functions on tv and then what happens with the move to streaming platforms where the threat of the real disappears again. Counts for the Children’s Lit and TVBA certificates.
3D Media ENGFLM/FMST 1766 Th 6-9:50: Learn how to make immersive media (3D photography, spatial video, VR) and learn the history and aesthetics of immersive media, from the 19th century stereo photography craze through 3D comic books, 3D cinema, and the latest spatial video and VR trends. As immersive media is the new frontier in production, you'll shoot 3D photos (on IMAX film!) and craft final projects in the form of 3D photography, spatial video, or VR. This is a Category III hybrid Critical Theory and Production course for FMS students and counts as an elective for Digital Narrative and Interactive Design (DNID) majors. No prereqs!
Literature
Reading Poetry ENGLIT 0315 M/W 4:30 - 5:45 PM: By studying various forms of poetry, this course aims to help students break down the barriers between classic poems, contemporary poetry, and a more general lyric impulse. As the most highly condensed literary experience, poetry invites very close reading, so we will explore various techniques for making sense of poems.
Imagining Social Justice ENGLIT 0365 M/W/F 9:00 - 9:50 AM OR 11:00 - 11:50 AM: This course explores the urge towards, impediments to, and definitions of “social justice” through various forms of writing. Using fiction, non-fiction, theory, and cultural texts, the Imagining Social Justice class places students in the ongoing debates surrounding equality, equity, and justice. It investigates justice as a socially flexible concept, examines the mechanisms of equality as represented in language, and questions the threshold of success when creating a more just world.
American Literature ENGLIT 0570 M/W/F 1:00 - 1:50 PM: This course in American literature explores the characteristic features of writings from the colonial period to the present. It emphasizes the interaction between literary texts and their social contexts, and examines the emergence of a national literature.
American Literature ENGLIT 0570 M/W/F 2:00 - 2:50 PM: The stories we have told ourselves about the origins of America and its literature have greatly influenced how we understand our culture, landscape, and identity. However, our “origin stories” are often complex—full of inventions, revisions, distortions, and omissions which leave a ghostly trace. To better understand the impact of this haunted tradition, this section of “American Literature” will focus on texts within the genre of supernatural fiction, which has been a constant presence in American literary history. Washington Irving, the nation’s first professional author, made his mark with ghostly tales, followed closely by Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. As minority writers began to enter the literary canon, though, they broadened the notion of what it means to haunt or be haunted by something. For example, women and people of color (like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and August Wilson) depicted the literal or figurative specters of patriarchy and enslavement. Similarly, immigrant authors like Viet Thanh Nguyen and Isaac Bashevis Singer have used ghosts to convey the residue of trauma experienced by survivors seeking refuge in America. The stories, novels, and plays we will read this semester demonstrate how ghosts in American literature represent not just an individual haunting but (in the words of Kathleen Brogan) a “cultural haunting” that we ignore at our peril.
Introduction to Shakespeare ENGLIT 0580 T/Th 11:00 - 12:15: The plays of William Shakespeare were performed in rowdy and often riotous theaters to an audience of “groundlings”--audience members whose cheap tickets gave them access to the unpaved floor of the Globe Theater–and the more “respectable” members of society. In other words, Shakespeare’s plays were not the high-brow, elite texts they have become over the centuries. This course will demystify Shakespeare and recreate some of the way Shakespeare would have been experienced by his audience.
Introduction to Shakespeare ENGLIT 0580 T/Th 4:00 PM - 5:15 PM: This class will introduce you to Shakespeare’s plays and the world in which he wrote. Shakespeare’s plays were written during a time of incredible social change, when many of features of what we think of as our modern world were coming into being. Chattel slavery, capitalism, colonialism, racism were all developments of the period in which Shakespeare wrote. During this semester, we will consider how Shakespeare’s plays take part in this history, how they create ideas about race, gender, and religious difference that both reinforced and critiqued these institutions. Shakespeare’s plays were performed by Christian Englishmen and boys, yet many of his most famous characters – from Shylock to Cleopatra – were not Christian or English. So how did Shakespeare’s dramas stage these characters? By focusing on the stagecraft of Shakespeare’s dramas – reading them as performance documents, rather than just texts – we’ll consider how performance effects such as props, costumes, and other elements of staging mediated the audience’s understanding of people and places outside of England. In addition to introducing students to Shakespeare, this class will consider how Shakespeare’s theater had a profound influence on representations of race, gender, and religious difference that we encounter in our own contemporary moment.
Introduction to Shakespeare ENGLIT 0580 6:00 - 8:30 PM: We shall read and sometimes screen five plays from Shakespeare’s three principal dramatic genres of comedy, history, and tragedy and consider how these genres and their performances shaped the cultural experience of Early Modern theater-goers.
Women and Literature ENGLIT 0610 M/W/F 9:00 - 9:50 AM: Through our reading of various literary forms--poetry, fiction, autobiography--we will explore the aspirations and realities of women's lives. We will consider how social issues--class, race, etc.--affect women writers.
Asian American Literature ENGLIT 0613 T/Th 9:30 - 10:45 AM: This course examines themes and forms of Asian American Literature. It will consider Asian American novels, short stories, folktales, lyric poetry, nonfiction, and other literary forms in their historical contexts. The course investigates how this literature dramatizes crises including Chinese exclusion, Japanese American incarceration, Vietnamese and Korean invasions and division, as well as East Asian, Southeast, and South Asian Diasporas. It explores how these texts respond to certain ideologies such as “the melting pot” and “the American dream.” The course will cover the skills and methods appropriate to an introductory course in Literature.
The Gothic Imagination ENGLIT 0636 T/Th 4:00 - 5:15 PM: The gothic genre is dominated by haunted habitats. In fact, the name “gothic” derives from the architectural spaces in which such tales are often set: crumbling castles with labyrinthine secret passages and talking portraits, ghost-infested Victorian mansions, decaying plantations. Why should a genre born during the peak of the Enlightenment—with its devotion to rationality and progressive idealism—be so enamored of these medieval-inspired structures and irrational, terrifying plots? Beginning with the first Gothic novels published in Europe and America, Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, we will study a range of fiction and film that draws upon the trope of the haunted house. These texts pose unsettling questions about the fraught relations between genders, classes, and races that permeate our domestic enclaves. As Freud reminds us, what frightens us most is not that which is alien or unknown but that which is closest to home
Fantasy ENGLIT 0645 M/W/F 9:00 - 9:50 AM: Arthurian legends are inherently a fantasy: whether we examine a medieval pseudohistory (i.e. “fantasy as history”) or DC Comics’ Camelot 3000, we see King Arthur through a lens that is carefully constructed and presented to an audience for an intended purpose—whatever that purpose may be. In short, King Arthur was not real. He was created with purpose, as all fantasy literature is created. This course seeks to better understand the various relationships that cultures across times, continents, and literary traditions both understood Arthurian legends and engaged with or produced them, and what the intention(s) behind those repurposings was and is. The course will be presented in a largely two-part structure: 1) examining medieval Arthuriana—specifically Norman-French and Middle English sources both in translation and, in the case of Middle English, partially in the original language—and understanding why and how these textual fantasies were created and used, and 2) how medieval texts are used as sources and inspirations for more contemporary cultural adaptations and reimaginings and how these texts relate both to the Arthurian tradition and to their individual cultural epochs. As such, the course begins with an introduction to the medieval Arthurian tradition, including some key early texts, and progresses through a discussion of cultural interpretations and adaptation studies, brought together by leading critics and contemporary Arthurian fantasy writers.
Narrative and Graphic Perspectives in Medicine T/Th 4:00 - 5:15 PM: This course emphasizes the narrating and understanding of difference/diversity as central to the education of those engaged in/with the healthcare field. Students will examine how narratives of neuro-diversity; gender barriers; racial inequities in education and health services, are all crucial issues for providers and receivers of medical care. By studying literature about medicine/the health professions from diverse perspectives, students in the course will learn to “observe, parse, appreciate, critique, and creatively reimagine points of contact between individuals in healthcare sphere.” Through a series of readings including Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air; and a mixed-media biography such as Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive; Damon Tweedy’s Black Man in a White Coat; Danielle Ofri’s What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear; Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen and The Graphic Medicine Manifesto, this course will introduce students to an exciting new field that erases the boundaries between authoritative “medical discourse” and what is commonly assumed to be a non- serious genre, graphic novel/comics; between physicians and patients’ modes of accessing information and exchanging knowledge; between academic “essays” and Critical Creative Work that engages rigorously with knowledge and experience. Through this series of readings, students will consider issues such as: What kind of health practitioner do you wish to be? What models exist for asking important questions about the nature of human empathy through knowledge of Other’s stories? and how is awareness of identity and difference nurtured in the education of the healthcare providers? How can you begin to articulate or represent your own in rigorous but creative ways?
Representing Adolescence ENGLIT 0655 M/W/F 2:00 - 2:50 PM: Adolescence—the period between childhood and adulthood—is a young, modern concept, one born in the early twentieth century. Adolescents or “teenagers” are not “children” anymore but not “adults” either. What happens in that period between childhood and adulthood? How do we as a culture understand it? How do we represent it for those who will be, who are, or who have been teenagers? How have these understandings changed and developed during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? In this course, we will explore how representations of adolescence potentially shape and influence how readers may understand young people who fall within this liminal category. To do this, we will examine representations of adolescence mainly in realistic fiction of young adult literature, tracing its history alongside the history of adolescence, teenagers, and youth culture. We will discuss the extent to which young adult literature seeks to offer a category of writing for teens that views and defines them in complex terms and challenging definitions. We will analyze a wide array of themes that include voice, the outcast or outsider, identity, conformity, delinquency, romance, violence, sexuality, belonging, etc. We will challenge and evaluate the ways in which adolescence—like childhood—is a universal, period of experience. Our readings in the young adult literature category work to diversify the adolescent experience, providing differing representations and perspectives according to gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and class.
Archival Research Methods ENGLIT 0730 M/W/F 2:00 - 2:50 PM: Touch and uncover diverse histories through traditional and digital approaches to source research. Explore on-site and digital archives about book history, medicine, politics, and social action. Acquire transferable interdisciplinary skills in information literacy, data collection, and analysis.
Interactive Literature ENGLIT 1001 M/W/F 12:00 - 12:50 PM: This course examines literary texts that explicitly involve the reader as an active participant in the experience of the work, through navigation, manipulation, creation, collaboration, or other forms of interactive decision-making. We will read a range of authors, including fiction and poetry in print media, hypertext and other forms of electronic literature, digital poetry, and the interactive fiction game form. We will be attentive to the interactive strategies used by individual works, especially the relationship between the subjective experience of the reader and the goals and effects of these strategies. We will also consider these works in the context of the history of interactive literature, from print media to digital media, as well as various theoretical approaches to the issue of interactivity in a literary context. We will work to develop a critical vocabulary for the analysis and evaluation of these literary works.
Magical Nature Before the Modern World ENGLIT 1010 T/Th 2:30 - 3:45 PM: Learn how the drama and literature of the late Medieval and Early Modern period in England drew on and repurposed both Christian and pagan ideas about the natural and the supernatural. We will study traditions of Medieval folklore and worldviews in which nature was a magical force.
Milton to Minecraft ENGLIT 1011 T/Th 9:30 - 10:45 AM: Learn about worldbuilding during the English Renaissance (approx.. 1500-1800), arguably one of the most volatile periods of literary history when this very issue of the nature of the world reached some very high stakes. For example, the Copernican revolution (1543-1610) moved the Earth from the center of the universe and made it just one of many planets orbiting a stationary sun. Competitive political alliances and emergent nation states began sailing beyond known borders and landed in a “new world,” beginning settler colonialism and unsettling forms of knowledge around peoples and places. In the world of the arts, perspective drawing was developed (known in the period as perspectiva artificialis, artificial perspective), the mechanical printing press revolutionized how writing made its way to readers, and public theaters displayed the world of action onstage using the mechanics of the body and, often, machines to induce wonder and to create spectacle. Religious upheavals pushed questions of the nature of the world into the afterlife and the worlds that awaited human souls when this life ended. These are just the most famous examples of world altering and world building during the Renaissance (sometimes also named the Early Modern Period).
Chaucer ENGLIT 1115 W 6:00 - 8:30 PM: English literature does not begin with Chaucer, but in many ways it might as well. So many Anglophone authors have looked to Chaucer as “the father of English poetry” that his work wields outsize sway over later authors. In this course, we will read the large majority of Chaucer’s most mature work, The Canterbury Tales, with a view to its pivotal role in English literary history. By focusing on The Canterbury Tales, we will be led to explore the traditions Chaucer translates and adapts, his innovations, and the use to which later authors put him. Chaucer is also a window onto the later Middle Ages, and we will of necessity consider the political, social, and religious world in which The Canterbury Tales emerged. Perhaps most importantly, this course will immerse you in the dialect of Middle English that forms the linguistic DNA of your life/
Shakespeare’s Sexualities ENGLIT 1128 T/Th 4:00 - 5:15 PM: This class will consider how Shakespeare’s dramas talk about gender, sexuality, and desire. We’ll read Shakespeare’s major dramatic works alongside early modern debates about women, 16th-17th century texts about same-sex desire, and recent critical and historical arguments about queerness and gender identity. Through our readings, we’ll find that Renaissance ideas of gender often anticipate contemporary discussions about gender as performance, from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble to Ru Paul’s Drag Race. By reading for these performances of gender in Shakespeare’s drama, we’ll also consider the intersections of gender, race, and sexual identity on the early modern stage to answer the following questions: How do we talk about women in Shakespeare when there are no women performers onstage? How did Shakespeare's plays represent same-sex desire? Did having boys play women’s roles mean that Shakespeare’s romances are queer? Were there any trans or nonbinary characters in Shakespeare? Do Shakespeare’s plays reinforce or challenge gender binaries? Is there misogyny in Shakespeare’s representations of “dark ladies”? By paying close attention to the props, costumes, qualities of speech and gestures that allowed actors to perform in different genders, we’ll talk about the ways that Shakespeare’s dramas constructed arguments about gender, sexuality, and desire for popular audiences.
19th-century British Literature ENGLIT 1175 T 6:00 - 8:30 PM: Learn about major cultural, scientific, and philosophical changes and developments that happened over the course of the 19th century. Consider how the ideas about the role of the individual in culture developed. Watch modern ideas about the mind and the brain develop out of earlier speculations about “animal magnetism” and theories about the unseen in nature. Trace how ideas about nature were adapted in relationship to new scientific discoveries. And more.
American Literature to 1860 ENGLIT 1200 T/Th 1:00 - 2:15 PM: Is there a national American identity, and if so, how might exploring early American writers help us tease out the historical roadmap that’s led us to our present moment? This course investigates what early American Literature to 1860 tells us better understand the kinds of issues that shape our world today. Thus, we will explore the literary attempts at defining the national American—the one with civic responsibility to both nation and family—through various genres and movements, such as the American Revolution, the Abolitionist Movement, Transcendentalism, and Sentimentalism. Our goal will be to interrogate what these American literary endeavors, genres, and movements can reveal to us about this national American identity and how this might inform our world today. While students will read a grouping of well-known and diverse American figures, we will also explore lesser-discussed texts, especially those from Indigenous Peoples and Black American cultural rhetorics and print culture, as impactful to arguments and debates about an American national identity. In our survey of America prior to the Civil War, we explore the historical, political, social and cultural factors that affected the development of this literature. Our examination, while historical, will nevertheless shine light on American experiences that otherwise illustrate issues our current society and culture face.
20th-century African American Literature ENGLIT 1230 T/Th 2:30 - 3:45 PM: Learn about the topics, form, and function of African American Literature as they develop over the 2oth century. This course provides students with a broad framework to understand the modern history of this category of literature. It provides students with the opportunity to practice selective, in-depth analyses of formal, thematic, and argumentative movements within and between specific examples in the time period.
Speculative Fiction ENGLIT 1261 M/W/F 10:00 - 10:50 AM: Genre fiction and speculative fiction—which often overlap—are two of the most popular modes of contemporary literature, and they are also two of the most misunderstood and under-theorized. Until recently, genres such as romance, fantasy, science fiction, and utopia/dystopia were largely excluded from the literary canon and were discarded as cheap, disposable market-driven commodities—not “serious” literature. On the one hand, the success of crossover authors such as Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, and China Miéville shows that genre and speculative fictions can also be serious texts. On the other hand, critics see a problem in that process, arguing that it reifies false distinctions about serious/commercial art; instead, they have explored genre fictions that actively resist being taken “seriously.” This course will study how genres emerged across history, how they have been renovated by certain authors and marketed to various consumers. It will also plumb the history of speculative fiction as both a part of genre fiction and a separate entity that thrives on the projection and revision of imaginative or “virtual” worlds, especially in contemporary digital environments. Students will gain skills in close reading, historical and critical analysis, and literary critical writing.
Modernism ENGLIT 1325 T/Th 2:30 - 3:45 PM: Modernism flourished in the first half of the 20th century as modernity—with its emerging technologies, cataclysmic wars, and shifting global relations—seemed to necessitate new ways of representing the world. Inspired by the changes around them as well as developments in psychology and philosophy, writers of this period attempted to “make it new,” producing experimental texts that dramatically altered our understanding of aesthetic form and function. Modernist works are notoriously difficult; they attempt to shake up our assumptions about time, consciousness, and human subjectivity. As we tackle these innovative works, we will consider how and why these artists endeavored to subvert established aesthetic and social conventions. What did they hope to accomplish and why did their works take the particular forms they did? How was the experience of living in a “modern” world reflected, or perhaps defined, by these creative experiments?
Global Children’s Literature ENGLIT 1386 T/Th 9:30 - 10:45 AM: Learn about global literature that is available in the United States as well as literature published in different parts of the world for children and adolescents. We will discuss ways to integrate global literature to build intercultural understandings and perspectives. To develop a critical understanding of representations of children’s experiences that are not only contemporary phenomena but have occurred historically, we will attend to conceptual complexities regarding what constitutes “global” and what constitutes “childhoods” and their interconnections. Examining literature covering the lives of children across regions and contexts, we will reflect on historical and contemporary practices affecting children and their response to these practices. In this course, our goal is to form a community of readers in which diverse, even opposing interpretations of books are welcomed. We will focus on our responses to books by exploring our different understandings, including how perspectives on children and childhood are socially and culturally constructed.
Project Seminar ENGLIT 1900 M/W 4:30 - 5:45 PM: The conflict between family and state, or duty and law, is one of literature’s oldest themes, as demonstrated by Sophocles’s play Antigone (441 BCE). In this seminar, we will trace this theme in literature, art, film, music, philosophy, and culture at large. We will compare different English translations of Antigone against the original text, examine creative reworkings by Jean Anouilh, Anne Carson, Beth Piatote, and Adil Mansoor, among others, watch and discuss cinematic adaptations (Giorgos Tzavellas’s Antigone) and transpositions (Andrzej Wajda’s Katyń). Throughout the semester, we will also converse with relevant literary and cultural criticism from Aristotle to Judith Butler.
Senior Seminar ENGLIT 1910 M/W 4:30 - 5:45 PM: What does it mean to be modern, or to claim that something is modern? How does literature figure into the stories we tell ourselves about modernity? And how do concepts of genealogy, or what Darwin called “descent with modification,” shape how we think about time, change, the past, the future? This seminar comes at these big questions that occupy the humanities and natural sciences through test cases of imaginative fiction and the discipline of literary history. We will read some literature commonly identified as premodern—including medieval stories of magic and the supernatural—alongside more recent literature that deals with premodernity, with a special emphasis on science fiction involving time travel. No prior knowledge of philosophy, theory, or historiography is required, but students should be game for learning and thinking theoretically about big ideas. Theoretical readings will be supported with the interpretive scaffolding of the narrative podcast Genealogies of Modernity, a limited series of the Ministry of Ideas podcast.