| Contemporary Black Literature English 3002/BLS 3002 Prof. R. Robles Tues/Thu 2:30PM-3:45PM | This course will survey Black literature in global contexts to explore and compare poetry, prose, fiction and creative non-fiction from African diaspora writers in the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe since the end of the Second World War. It will situate texts in historical, political, and cultural contexts, such as in independence movements, colonialism, and Civil Rights, to develop interdisciplinary approaches to reading Black diaspora literatures. |
| Survey of English Literature I English 3010 Prof. A. Deutermann Mon/Wed 12:50PM – 2:05PM | Monsters, heroes, saints, and Satan: these are just some of the characters encountered in early English literature. Examining a range of different kinds of writing, from Anglo-Saxon poetry to Shakespearean drama to lyric poetry, we will ask questions about how identity is formed and contested in these works. What does it mean to be a hero? What defines an outcast? How does the formation of identity influence, and sometimes come into explosive contact with, changes in the culture at large—for example, with the birth of the nation-state, the growth of science, or the expansion of empire? |
| Survey of English Literature II English 3015 Prof. S. Hershinow Tues/Thu 10:45AM – 12:00PM | A historical study of the diversity of British and Anglophone literature from the eighteenth century to the present, this course situates a range of writing from various cultural, ethnic, and popular traditions in cultural, political, and historical contexts, including the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Imperialism, World Wars I and II, diaspora, and decolonization. Movements that may be covered include Romanticism, the gothic, aestheticism, modernism, and postmodernism; authors may include Swift, Pope, Haywood, Blake, Wordsworth, Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, Barrett Browning, Dickens, Wilde, Joyce, Yeats, Woolf, Selvon, Heaney, Ishiguro, Rushdie, and Zadie Smith. |
| Survey of American Literature I English 3020 Prof. R. Rodriguez Mon/Wed 10:45AM – 12:00PM | This course explores the development of American literature from its beginnings through the Civil War. Texts including letters, histories, autobiographies, political documents, poems, plays, and novels, illuminate the rich complexity of this period in American literary history and culture. These works reveal the often interconnected and overlapping stories of discovery and exploration; private piety and public life; the development of national identity; race; gender; slavery and the movement toward its abolition. |
| Survey of American Literature II: American Literature from the Civil War to Present English 3025 Prof T. Aubry Tues/Thu 2:30 – 3:45PM | This course surveys American Literature from the Civil War to the present. We will examine how the literature of this period reflects and respond to major historical and social developments, including industrialism, urbanism, war, economic depression, racial tension, bureaucratization, challenges to traditional sex and gender norms, and technological innovations. We will examine naturalism, realism, and modernism, as well as more recent literary trends and movements. Among the authors we will study will be Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Sui Sin Far, Edith Wharton, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, and Ada Limón. |
| Literatures of the Global South English 3030 Prof. S. Bosu Mon/Wed 4:10PM – 5:25PM | This course examines literary and visual works from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, investigating the term Global South and the debates that surround it. We will explore how writers and artists have responded to histories of colonialism, globalization, and cultural resistance, while questioning the frameworks used to describe these regions. Central to the course would be the relationship between image and text: students will analyze literature alongside photography, painting, film, and political posters to consider how visual culture shapes narrative meaning. Authors and artists may include the likes of Assia Djebar, Bessie Head, Amitav Ghosh, and Bong Joon Ho. Through close reading, visual analysis, and theoretical engagement with postcolonial theory, students will gain tools to think critically about global inequality and literary and artistic expression. |
| Latino/a Literature in the U.S. English 3059/BLS 3059 Prof. L. De La Cruz Santana Mon/Wed 12:50PM-2:05PM | This course examines significant works of literature written in English by Latinos and Latinas in the U.S. It concentrates on novels, short stories, and essays from the late 19th century to the present. Special attention is given to issues of cultural identity, social class, race, and gender, as well as bilingualism and code-switching. While focusing on the diversity of the Latino, a literary expression, this course also explores the sociopolitical contexts in which the works emerged and the commonalities and differences of the experiences of the Latin American diasporas in the U.S. |
| Elements of Poetry English 3640/H Harman Poet Wed 2:30PM – 5:25PM | This is a course in using and mastering language and the art of metaphor. Students find their own poetic voices by perceiving worldly objects and then transforming those perceptions into poetic images that reflect their own deepest emotions. While studying and memorizing poems by a wide spectrum of writers, including Shakespeare, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, and Gwendolyn Brooks, they write and critique their own. Regular conferences. |
| Introduction to Linguistics English 3700/COMM Prof. N. Lee Tues/Thu 10:45AM – 12:00PM | This course is an introductory survey of linguistics — the scientific study of language. What is the nature of human language — and how does it compare to what large language models (LLMs) produce? Is speaking an instinctual or learned behavior? Looking at English — and at a diverse range of languages spoken and signed around the world — what do the native speakers of a language know about the language’s word structure, sentence structure, sentence meaning, and pronunciation? How is language mentally represented and processed? How is language affected by social class and race? In this course, we will discover how human language is a complex but law-governed mental system, capable of open-ended linguistic creativity — and imbued with social power and meaning |
| Modern Drama English 3770 Prof. S. Vella Tues/Thu 9:05AM – 10:20AM | This course examines dramatic texts that emerged around the world from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Plays from a wide range of languages, cultures, and geographical locations will be considered in conversation with changes in production economics, staging technology, and acting technique. This period witnessed an unprecedented mobility for theatre artists and styles, facilitated by touring, film and photography, and wider availability of translations. This mobility, however, took place in a situation of uneven power dynamics facilitated by global colonialism and capitalism. We will therefore encounter these plays and artists in their socio-political contexts and will emphasize consideration of the ethical stakes of cross-cultural influence. |
| Critical-Race Theory English 3832/BLS 3085 Dr. S. Eversley Tues/Thu 4:10PM-4:25PM | Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an academic framework that examines how race and racism are embedded in legal and social structures. It argues that racism is not merely an individual prejudice, but that it is a systemic concern. This course will investigate how power, language, history, and representation inform constructions of race and racial hierarchies including thinking about intersectional fields such as in gender and sexuality, postcolonial studies, and Black studies. Our work together will consider ways that the central ideas of CRT illuminate and inform literature, film, music, archival material, and contemporary cultural production. Everyone is welcome. |
| Genres of African Literature English 3845/BLS 3845 Prof. M. Eatough Mon/Wed 10:45AM – 12:00PM | The African novel is often recognized as one of the most vibrant sites of cultural production in the modern world. In part, perhaps, due to the relative newness of novel-writing in Africa, fictional narratives from the continent frequently demonstrate a dizzying blend of oral traditions, folk histories, experimental styles, and political engagement. In this course, we will focus on African novels from the post-World War II period, with a particular emphasis on the different genres of fiction to have emerged during these years. Our readings will include canonical realist novels, feminist fiction, war novels, and more recent examples of romance, thrillers, and science fiction. We will use these readings to examine how particular genres of literature engage with the realities of decolonization, genocide, the AIDS epidemic, global capitalism, and the African cultural “renaissance.” Possible texts include works by Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mariama Bâ, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Tade Thompson, Zukiswa Wanner, and Masande Ntshanga. |
| Topics in Film: The Science Fiction Film English 3940 Prof. F. Cioffi Tues/Thu 10:45AM – 12:00PM | This course will examine the science fiction film, from Metropolis to Mickey 17. We will watch those two films as well as a selection of the following: Them, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Panic in the Year Zero, The Thing, The Fly, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Altered States, Star Wars, Star Trek,Alien, and several others. The plan is to screen one film a week, shown over the course of two class sessions. This should leave us time for some discussion after each half of the film. We will also have some classes interspersed in which we just talk about the SF film and articles from the reader, entitled Liquid Metal and edited by Sean Redmond. Graded writing will be done in blue books in class. Here are the topics from the text: Section I. The Wonder of Science Fiction Section 2. Science Fiction’s Disaster Imagination Section 3. Spatial Abyss: The Science Fiction City Section 4. The Origin of the Species: Time Travel and the Primal Scene Section 5. Liquid Metal: The Cyborg in Science Fiction |
| Topics in Literature: True Crime English 3950 Prof. C. Mead Mon/Wed 2:30PM – 3:45PM | This course provides an opportunity to study important literary themes, genres, periods, or authors not found or only touched on in other courses. This format allows for an intensive examination of these topics, which may vary from semester to semester. Representative subjects include the Gothic imagination, the Harlem Renaissance, the writer and the city, mythic patterns, and psychoanalysis and literature. Students may enroll in ENG 3950 more than once if the topic is different. |
| Topics in Literature: Mythology and Literature English 3950 Prof. L. Kolb Tues/Thu 4:10PM – 5:25PM | The Trojan War has provided inexhaustible subject matter for poets, artists, and filmmakers from the ancient world until today. This course begins with Homer’s epic account of this war, the Iliad, before turning to classical, Medieval, and Renaissance adaptations. How do the Iliad’s major themes–war, honor, gender, death–transform as they are handled in lyric poetry, plays, letters, and visual art across the centuries? How is adaptation both a form of imitation, and an original creative act? In the second half of the semester, we move into modern adaptations, including Madeleine Miller’s Song of Achilles (2011) and the film Troy (2004). Even as these works revisit an ancient conflict, they offer us new ways of thinking about our own world. |
| Topics in Language: Linguistics of the Real World English 3960 Prof. K. Belmihoub Mon/Wed 5:50PM – 7:05PM | Introduction to Writing Studies and Rhetorical Theory This course provides an opportunity for in-depth, intensive study of important concepts in writing studies and linguistics introduced in other courses. Subjects, which may vary from semester to semester, include but are not limited to language of the media, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, literacy, language and gender, language and race, pedagogy, multilingualism, discourse analysis, translation studies, rhetoric, composing and editing in digital environments, and computer applications in language study. (Students may enroll more than once in ENG 3960 if the topic is different). |
| The Globalization of English English 4015 Prof. B. Schreiber Mon/Wed 2:30PM – 3:45PM | This course investigates the state of English in the world today—how the English language aids globalization, and how globalization changes English as it becomes central across speech communities. After studying the historical and geopolitical bases for the rise of English as a global language, the course explores the implications of decolonization, diaspora communities, and digital technology for diversifying the structure, norms, and usage of the English language. Students will discuss the controversial history, changing attitudes, new competencies, and competing ideologies associated with English both globally and locally. Students will receive credit for ENG 4015, COM 4015, or SOC 4015. These courses may not substitute for each other in the F-grade replacement policy. This course investigates the state of English in the world today—how the English language aids globalization, and how globalization changes English as it becomes central across speech communities. After studying the historical and geopolitical bases for the rise of English as a global language, the course explores the implications of decolonization, diaspora communities, and digital technology for diversifying the structure, norms, and usage of the English language. Students will discuss the controversial history, changing attitudes, new competencies, and competing ideologies associated with English both globally and locally. Students will receive credit for ENG 4015, COM 4015, or SOC 4015. These courses may not substitute for each other in the F-grade replacement policy. |
| Chaucer English 4120 Prof. C. Christoforatou Konstantinis Mon/Wed 10:45AM – 12:00PM | ON THE ROAD WITH THE CHIVALROUS, THE PIOUS AND THE ‘NOT-SO-PIOUS’ Knights, merchants, squires and self-proclaimed saints share fascinating stories of their travels and travails in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Written at the end of the fourteenth century, Chaucer’s masterpiece contains a series of stories ranging from the serious and pious to the unabashedly earthy and outrageously funny. The tales are told by a cast of memorable pilgrims whose diversity spans the spectrum of late medieval society: a dashing knight and a manly monk, a drunken miller and a bookish young scholar, a dainty nun and a conniving pardoner, along with a smart and domineering wife; they all compete with one another, trade insultsand jokes, and share tales. The class will explore the ways in which Chaucer experiments with medieval literary genres (from chivalric romance and bawdy fabliau to beast fables, saints’ lives, dream visions and myths) frustrating and playing upon the expectations of the reader. Against the diverse background of the tales, we will consider the dramatic context of the pilgrimage itself, ask questions about how the character of an individual pilgrim (or the interaction between pilgrims) shapes our perceptions and expectations of their tales, and reflect on medieval individual’s relationship to God, society and the foreign. In piecing together Chaucer’s portrait of late medieval society, we will discover how Chaucer illuminates and distorts social realities, rendering a colorful portrait of life that is strangely familiar to the modern reader. As a class, we will have an opportunity to examine medieval manuscripts in digitized form through access to the collections of the British Library, the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Index of Medieval Art where additional artifacts such as relics, tapestries, mosaics, and ivories are on display. |
| Shakespeare English 4140 Prof. H. Ramdass Tues/Thu 5:50PM-7:05PM | What are the elements that come together to create a Shakespearean tragedy? Let’s explore this question through a hands-on approach to some of the Bard’s bloodiest works. Excerpts of key sources, major influences and literary criticism provided to you, including Plutarch’s Lives, Machiavelli’s The Prince and The Discourses, and Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, will contextualize our investigations. We begin with the early Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, then move to later works: Julius Ceasar, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. Through close reading practices, discussion, film analysis, class presentations and writing, you will develop your understanding of how these plays posit, interrogate and rework thematic questions and concerns central to Shakespearean tragedy. |
| Milton ENG 4170 Prof. S. Swarbrick Mon/Wed 12:50PM – 2:05 PM | This course offers students an in-depth study of John Milton’s monumental epic poem Paradise Lost in its religious, political, and cultural contexts. We will consider Milton’s place in literary history, his impact on later writers (including the Romantics), his religious and political radicalism, and his poetic afterlives in contemporary popular culture (from the graphic novel to science fiction). In addition to ParadiseLost, we may examine Milton’s 1645 poems, prose writing, and late masterpiece, Samson Agonistes. We will also engage some critical reading practices, including disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, and ecocriticism, as tools for understanding Milton’s lasting political and cultural importance. |
| Romanticism ENG 4300 Prof. C. Grandy Tues/Thu 2:30PM – 3:45PM | Romanticism and its Afterlives British romanticism is an ethos that arose during a relatively short time period, roughly 1790 to 1830. Yet, it represents what philosopher Isaiah Berlin called “the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West.” Beginning with the French revolution and responding to the rising tide of industrial capitalism, writers and thinkers of the romantic period posed radical questions to the status quo, including the institutions of marriage, inherited wealth, monarchy, and slavery. They also pushed back against the Enlightenment period’s emphasis on rationality and logic, finding spiritualism in nature, poetry, and the imagination. This capstone seminar will cover key romantic concepts and writers, while also exploring the legacies and impacts of romanticism in different contexts. We will look to romantic literature as the source for contemporary genres like lyric poetry, gothic horror, dystopia, romance, and science fiction. By analyzing how romanticism lives on in works by 19th, 20th, and 21st century writers and artists, we will gain a better appreciation of its significance to modern thought. We will read two novels, a selection of essays, and quite a lot of poems. Within these broad literary forms, we will closely analyze specific formal and literary devices, from symbolism to narrative style, in order to draw connections to broader cultural, political, economic, and sociological concerns. This class will be led as a seminar, with focus on close reading, textual analysis, and class discussion. |
| The Nineteenth-Century British Novel ENG 4320 Prof. K. Frank Tues/Thu 5:50PM – 7:05PM | “Selfies” of Romantic Lives in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel. How do the British fashion themselves (individually and as a nation) in the nineteenth-century novel, and how does the Caribbean serve as a lens/foil for such self-making, or re-making? How does this anticipate contemporary expectations of selfhood and nationhood? How are depictions of challenging issues of those times—industrialization and urbanization, class and social im/mobility, immigration and the expansion of empire, relations between the sexes and the “races”— instructive in confronting similar issues of our time? In this course we will examine these matters in authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Maria Edgeworth, and Florence Marryat. |
| Modern Irish Writers ENG 4410 Prof. C. Jordan Mon/Wed 4:10PM – 5:25PM | If you want to go on an odyssey with some of the most exciting writers of the modern era (many of whose books were banned when they were first published) register for Modern Irish Writers next semester. We will read a fascinating novel about a man who sells his soul to the devil for eternal youth and beauty (Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray) and be drawn in by the raw intensity of Edna O’Brien’s compelling stories of sexual seduction and betrayal (A Fanatic Heart). O’Brien’s books were burned in Ireland by religious authorities when they were first published. We will be dazzled by the poetry of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill who explores the complexity of the relationship between men and women in the twenty-first century, but fills the landscape of her poetry with women warriors, powerful queens, and magical shape-changers from the pagan past. A provocative play we will read is George Bernard Shaw’s, St. Joan. The play is based on the true story of St. Joan of Arc who was burned as a witch in medieval France, and hundreds of years later was canonized by the Vatican as a saint! She wore men’s clothes as she led the French troops into battle, and scholars refer to her as one of the first feminists. Other works will include the short stories of James Joyce, praised for their penetration of the dark recesses of the human psyche, and the poems of William Butler Yeats, whose obsession with a beautiful revolutionary haunted his life. Both Yeats and Shaw won the noble prize for literature. |
| Contemporary American Literature ENG 4500 Prof. S. W. Mao Mon/Wed 4:10PM- 5:25PM | This course will examine American literature from the past fifty years. It will explore what is distinctive or contemporary about the texts produced during this period, with an emphasis on how they both borrow and depart from earlier literary traditions. Issues the course considers may include the end of the Cold War and the new ideological divisions that emerged in its wake, the influence of rapidly evolving digital technologies, the development of experimental and radical techniques in various literary forms, the increasing cultural and linguistic diversity of the United States, the role of popular culture, including mass market genres such mystery, romance, and science fiction, as well as shifts in our understanding of gender roles and ethnic identities. |
| Mixed-Race Literature English 4560/BLS 3064 Prof. R. Walker Tues/Thu 2:30PM – 3:45PM | Fiction written by and centering on people of mixed black and white descent have perennially been assimilated into the African American canon, much in the same way that biracial individuals have historically been classified as black in the U.S. Against this tendency, this course will examine some of the many fictions published by and about biracial people, taking seriously the particular racial perspective that they explore. Among the writers we’ll consider are the trailblazing novelist Charles Chesnutt; James Weldon Johnson, “the Dean of African American literature”; Nella Larsen, arguably the most accomplished novelist of the Harlem Renaissance; and Danzy Senna, today’s preeminent novelist of biracial experience. We’ll pay close attention to this literature’s historical context, considering it in relation to such developments as Reconstruction, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, shifts in gender ideology, legal history, and the Civil Rights Movement. |
| Modern Satire English 4700 Prof. L. Silverman Mon/Wed 4:10PM – 5:25PM | This course surveys satiric expression from classical origins in Aesop, and Lucian, through the great Enlightenment English authors such as Swift and Johnson, to contemporary sites such as South Park, as writers for stage, page and video critique the shortcomings of their society. A major focus of the reading will be the transformation of popular traditions of satire by successive writers, particularly the Aesopian tradition of beast fable, as it informs such works as Spenser’s Mother Hubberds Tale, Jonson’s Volpone, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and the Lucianic tradition of otherworldly fantasy, on which Swift draws so imaginatively in Gulliver’s Travels |
| Advanced Topics in Language: American Extinctions English 4950 Prof. A. Yoon Mon/Wed 5:50PM – 7:05PM | The Making of the New World Every year, reports of lost biodiversity fill the news; animals are classified according to risk status; and popular entertainment increasingly offers dire visions of extinction events. Contemporary portrayals of extinction often dwell on the novelty of confronting it and the urgency of halting its progress. Yet extinction has been a consistent and defining phenomenon in the American hemisphere since its colonization, unfolding in various modalities: as an historical narrative, an affective haunt, an ecological danger, and a colonial practice. This course investigates the importance of extinction as both a foundational narrative and a lived reality of the “New World.” We will examine how extinction in multiple forms accompanied the establishment of early colonial societies, and we will chart an alternative history of the American democracy through literary records that bear witness to how settlers’ claims of possession meant large-scale dispossession for other humans, animals, and plants. When extinction is imposed by forces of colonization, racism, sexism, anthropocentrism, and war, what are the possibilities of evasion or survival? What forms of remembrance can be had for extinguished lives? Readings will include texts by Mary Rowlandson, James Fenimore Cooper, William Apess, Herman Melville, and William Faulkner. Primary texts will be complemented by secondary literature drawn from Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, legal scholarship, and feminist theory. |