ENGL 1100.01: Composition: Research Writing and Rhetoric

Payam Rahmati

MWF 10:10 – 11:00 AM

Composition: Research Writing and Rhetoric is an introduction to expository, analytical, and research-based academic writing. The course involves three major assignments, including (1) writing to reflect, (2) writing to analyze, and (3) writing to persuade. For writing to reflect, students are prompted to offer a critical analysis reflecting on their own literacy journey, research aspects of that literacy, and cite credible peer-reviewed sources about that literacy context. Writing to analyze involves reading, interpreting, and analyzing news articles for rhetorical features. Writing to persuade asks students to create an argument in which they address a question they are interested in and use close-reading skills they have developed while working on the rhetorical analysis essay. The course addresses the following five learning outcomes: (1) Rhetorical knowledge, the ability to analyze contexts and audiences to understand situations and communicate effectively; (2) Critical thinking, the ability to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information, situations, and texts; (3) Processes, the ability to use multiple composing processes, independently and in collaboration with others, to imagine, develop, and revise projects; (4) Conventions, knowledge of formal rules and informal guidelines that define genres and shape perceptions of correctness; and (5) Reflective learning, the ability to practice metacognition, or thinking about one’s own thinking and learning. [3] (No AXLE credit)

ENGL 1100.03 and 1100.04: Composition: Now You See Me: The Mark of the Writer

Jared Harvey

MWF 11:15 AM – 12:05 PM

MWF 12:20 – 1:10 PM

Does writing reveal me or conceal me? How much do I use language and how much does language use me? I might be a Gemini, but is my style giving Taurus? Can I tweet the whole truth and nothing but the truth in 280 characters? If Big Brother is watching me, is it reading me, too? Why did Martin Luther King have to resort to newspaper and toilet paper to write “Letters from a Birmingham Jail”? If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, was it censorship?

In this writing composition course we will explore the differing propensities for authorial visibilities between textual genres and media forms, from autobiography (“this is my story”) to translation (“this is someone else’s story”) to Instagram (“this is my Close Friend's story”). We’ll study the ways writers leave marks that, deliberately and/or unintentionally, reveal their identities and values; on the other hand, we’ll study the ways writers of marginalized identities seek to make their voices heard in societies that seek to silence them. [3] (No AXLE credit)

ENGL 1100.05: Composition: Writing, Research, and Storytelling

Mark Wisniewski

TR 9:30 – 10:45 AM

Humans are unique in that we understand the world through the lens of stories. When we stop to think about it, almost everything we do is a form of storytelling. Advertisements tell us stories about how our lives would be better with different products and services. Novels, movies, television, and video games entertain us, but also affect the way we view the world around us. What, then, about research? Is academic work another form of storytelling? This course will start from the assumption that it is.  The writing projects we complete in this course will focus on how authors tell stories in genres such as ads, drama, film, and research papers, while exploring the ethical implications of how these stories help us define ourselves and others. [3] (No AXLE credit)

ENGL 1100.06: Composition: Speculative Realities

Mark Wisniewski

TR 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM

When scholars are regularly making discoveries in fields from astronomy to zoology, why do some of the world’s brightest minds dedicate time to writing what isn’t true?  This is the question at the heart of fiction.  This question becomes even more engaging when we consider it through the lens of speculative fiction: stories that make little or no attempt to mimic world history or reality.  Not only are the events and people imaginary, but the technologies, governments, customs, and even the laws of nature can be fictional.  In this course, we will examine the short stories of two writers, Octavia Butler and Ted Chiang, as well as supplemental readings from diverse voices, to help us define the relationships between fiction, culture, technology, and identity.  It is at the intersections of these concepts that we find that what isn’t might be just as important as what is. [3] (No AXLE credit)

ENGL 1100.07, 1100.08 and 1100.09: Composition: Storytelling and Storytellers

Jordan Ivie

TR 1:15 – 2:30 PM

TR 2:45 – 4:00 PM

TR 4:15 – 5:30 PM

From the earliest recorded human texts to the TikTok you watched this morning, humans have always expressed themselves through story. We all connect through shared narrative, transforming our own mundane experiences into structured tales of which we are invariably the protagonists. This class investigates the phenomena of storytelling and storytellers through a wide variety of genres, media, and time periods, with the ultimate goal of encouraging students to consider how they consume narratives and how they present themselves as credible sources of information. Through a series of readings, essays, workshops, and other projects, students will consider questions of structure, clarity, and credibility, ultimately producing a persuasive research paper on a topic of their choice. [3] (No AXLE credit)

ENGL 1210W.01: Reading Fiction: Robots, Androids, and Enhanced Humans

Vera Kutzinski

MW 2:30 – 3:45 PM

Intelligent machines and/as life forms have long inspired fears, anxieties, and desires. Many authors have represented such conflicting emotions, along with imagining possible ways to turn conflict into peaceable coexistence. What defines human beings in relation to robots, androids, and other forms of AI? Is a technologically enhanced human still human or something else? Are intelligent non-humans machines or life-forms? How does our humanity intersect with their modes of being? Where do we draw the line? Can we? Should we? We will examine a series of novels and short stories to understand and appreciate the literary methods various authors have used to ponder and propose possible answers to these questions. Through class discussions, in-class workshops, short reading responses, and formal essays with mandatory revisions, you will learn to think critically and write (more) effectively about literature and related matters. [3] (HCA; CORE A, C; LE HFA)

ENGL 1210W.02 and 1210W.03: Reading Fiction: The Art of World-Building

Justin Quarry

TR 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM

TR 1:15 – 2:30 PM

How do writers design worlds that are both fantastic and believable?  How does setting inform the development of character and plot?  How might you better create and employ imaginary worlds—both realistic and speculative—for your own writing?  In reading and writing critically on several speculative novels, students in this course will consider each text's strategy for conveying its world to readers, including the world's chief characteristics and ethos, as well as characters'—and readers'—connections to it.  However, students will also engage in creative writing exercises to apply what they learn to their fiction, as they design an imaginary world of their own.  The semester will then culminate in each student giving a presentation on their world, and in turn their narrative’s inhabitants and conflict—as well as their strategies for developing these. [3] (HCA; CORE A, C; LE HFA)

ENGL 1210W.04: Reading Fiction: AI, Humanity, and the Future

Payam Rahmati

MWF 11:15 AM – 12:05 PM

What happens when machines begin to think, feel, or act like us? This course explores how fiction imagines artificial intelligence and the shifting boundaries between human and machine. Through novels and short stories, we will consider how authors represent the promises and perils of advanced technologies. As we read, we will ask: What counts as consciousness? What does it mean to be human? How do power, identity, and ethics shape relationships between humans and intelligent machines? Through close reading, class discussion, and formal essays, we will learn to interpret how narrative form, character, and world-building reflect our deepest hopes and fears about technological change. [3] (HCA) (CORE A, C) (LE HFA)

ENGL 1220W.01: Art of Drama

Judy Klass

MWF 2:30 – 3:20 PM

This course looks at plays from the Golden Age of ancient Athens to the present. We consider Aristotle’s ideas about how tragedy should lead to catharsis in the audience, and how a tragic hero should have a fatal flaw. We consider theatrical devices tied to moments in history, like a Greek chorus or an Elizabethan soliloquy. The course focuses on plays about families: volatile, funny, vindictive, forgiving, loving, hating – sometimes cruel in their actions and sometimes painfully honest in their words to each other. Theater can feel claustrophobic, with few sets: but this can fill family plays with energy, as people trapped at home together confront problems. We’ll explore how family plays have changed over time and make connections between some very different works. Playwrights include Sophocles, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Chekhov, O’Neill, Odets, Kaufman and Hart, Miller, Williams, Hansberry, Norman, Shepard, Vogel, Hwang, Auburn, Parks and Durang. [3] (HCA) (CORE A, C) (LE HFA)

ENGL 1230W.01: Literature and Analytical Thinking: Reading the Storm

Remy Rendeiro

MWF 10:10 – 11:00 AM

King Lear on the storm-tossed heath; the windswept bedlam of Wuthering Heights; the rainstorm that throws Jane Bennet into the company of her future husband—writers have long used the weather to conjure scenes of emotional and atmospheric drama in their work. For contemporary literature written under the shadow of climate change, however, the weather not only offers scenic backdrop but marks a force whose social, environmental, and cultural impacts constitute some of the greatest, most polarizing dramas of our time. In this course, we will engage a variety of fictional and actual storms—from daily rain showers and sleet to cyclones and hurricanes—that feature in literary, artistic, and cinematic works from the early twentieth century to the present day. Taking these storms as a thematic touchstone in our efforts to learn about the fundamentals of close reading, writing, and revision, we will approach such weather events in literature not only for the wealth of symbolism and gripping plot devices they yield, but for the complex questions they raise about the role of race, gender, and class in discourses of ecological crisis. Possible works include short stories by Kate Chopin, novels by Zora Neale Hurston and Jesmyn Ward, poetry by Patricia Smith and Olive Senior, and secondary readings by Rob Nixon and Amitav Ghosh. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1230W.02: Literature and Analytical Thinking: Women in the City

Emma Palmer

MWF 11:15 AM – 12:05 AM

What do you think of when you think of the city? Bright lights and traffic? New beginnings? Maybe a particular character, like Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City, or Issa Rae’s character in Insecure. In this class, we will explore texts about women in three major U.S. cities: Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, paying particular attention to the intersection of race, class, and gender. The works we will encounter include novels, poetry, and essays, as well as movies and select TV episodes. Students will hone their critical analysis and writing skills through both in-class discussions and three papers written throughout the semester. In our exploration, we will constantly return to the question: what possibilities are allowed and denied by the city? Possible texts include Nella Larsen’s Passing, Joan Didion’s The White Album, Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1230W.03: Literature and Analytical Thinking: The Victorian Bizarre

Maya Riles

MWF 12:20 – 1:10 PM

What is the bizarre? What is it to be bizarre? Who determines what is and is not bizarre? How does the bizarre link to sexuality, eroticism, and empire through the Victorian gaze? We will explore these questions through our examination of sensation fiction—a genre which thrives on melodrama and unconventionality. This class is Victorian-esque. Tracing the ancestors and inheritance of the bizarre and the aphrodisiac, we will ask how our authors navigate, inspire, or negate traits of the multifaceted British social climate. As the inheritors of such works, we will decipher bizarre from mundane, and aphrodisiac from indifference—through class discussions, experimentation, and a series of critical writing assignments, including response papers and a formal essay. Readings will include John Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” William Blake’s “The Sick Rose,” Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1250W.01: Intro to Poetry

Roger Moore

MWF 2:30 – 3:20 PM

This course will give you the skills to read poetry thoughtfully and well. We will read a variety of English and American poems organized by major themes—love, loss, and nature, among others—and will look closely at a couple of poetic forms, such as the sonnet or the dramatic monologue. We will examine at least one poet in depth. Because this is a writing-intensive course, you will write and revise several papers, and we will devote class time to discussion of writing strategies. [3] (HCA; CORE A, C; LE HFA)

ENGL 1250W.02: Intro to Poetry

Lisa Dordal

MW 8:40 – 9:55 AM

In our increasingly fast-paced lives, reading poetry can be a great way to slow down and pay meaningful attention to the world around us and to our own inner landscapes. Although the main objectives of this course are to help you become close readers of poetry and to help you develop your critical writing skills, the poems that we read might very well deepen your understanding of your own life and who you understand yourself to be. The first part of this course will be organized around formal considerations (diction, tone, imagery, figures of speech, sound, etc.). In the second half of the course, we will read the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, Marie Howe, Mark Doty, Natasha Trethewey, and Li-Young Lee. Requirements include two papers (plus revisions), short response papers and homework assignments, a written response to an in-person poetry reading, written responses to select poems from The Slowdown podcast, and participation in class discussions. [3] (HCA; CORE A, C; LE HFA)

ENGL 1250W.03: Intro to Poetry: Poetry and the Oppressed

Salik Geelani

MWF 10:10 – 11:00 AM

What is “the unscrupulous power” that Langston Hughes urges us to remember and resist? Whose voices haunt Paul Celan by the Seine? Why does June Jordan apologize to all the people in Lebanon? Where do Forugh Farrokhzad and Natalie Diaz locate desire? How do Mahmoud Darwish and Agha Shahid Ali dissect the grief of exile? Or, differently, what does poetry offer the oppressed?

In this class, we will explore the relation between poetry, identity, history, oppression, and resistance by close-reading poems from across historical and political contexts. We will detail poetry as a tool and repository of resistance by critically, creatively, and collectively thinking through diverse genres of poetry, such as jazz poems and ghazals, and radical literary-cultural traditions, such as the Black Arts Movement (US) and the Progressive Writers’ Movement (South Asia). Our analytical, interpretative, and expressive skills as readers and writers will be sharpened in the process. [3] (HCA; CORE A, C; LE HFA)

ENGL 1260W.01 and 1260W.03: Introduction to Literary and Cultural Analysis: Neuro-Culture

Jeong-Oh Kim

TR 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM

TR 1:15 – 2:30 PM

My course entitled “Radiant Intertextuality” is based on the premise that in a complex world, problems must be approached from many different angles. The current focus on cross-inter-trans-disciplinarity reflects this premise. Yet all too often, interdisciplinarity is treated more as a rhetorical slogan than as an actual practice. Its transformative challenge is reduced to an additive list without clear motivation: philosophy plus literature, anthropology plus history . . . a principle of X Plus Y. We will take the challenge of interdisciplinarity seriously to ask how it changes the way we do things: the questions we ask, the materials we work with and what we do with those materials, the forms in which we present our findings. My course is open to students interested in scholarly practices that cut across established fields of inquiry. Organized in thematic sections, this course investigates the ways in which disciplines respond to and modify each other—how they become mutually weaving “Radiant Intertextuality.” This course is updated about law and neuroscience, helping students engage in a critical reading of what I call the Neuro-Culture. [3] (HCA; CORE A, C; LE HFA)

ENGL 1260W.02 and 1260W.04: Introduction to Literary and Cultural Analysis: African American Modernism

Gabriel Briggs

TR 9:30 – 10:45 AM

TR 11:00 AM – 12:15PM

Most scholars agree that modernism is a nebulous term and that the definition of black modernism can be equally vague. A recent MLA special panel required experts to examine this “elusive” and “enigmatic” term, questioning whether African American modernism is “a style, a study, or an approach.” We will delve into this discussion through the work of authors such as Sutton Griggs, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman, and Chester Himes to understand what makes their cultural responses to early twentieth-century social, political, and economic stimuli unique and decidedly modern. [3] (HCA; CORE A, C; LE HFA)

ENGL 1260W.05: Introduction to Literary and Cultural Analysis: Asian American Speculative Fiction

Huan He

MWF 2:30 – 3:20 PM

Ghosts, time travel, zombies, monsters, and artificial intelligence: these figures and tropes all appear in contemporary Asian American literature. Through fiction, poetry, and media, this discussion-based seminar will study how the fantastic and the futuristic can rehearse some of the most pressing social concerns of our time at the intersections of race, gender, science, technology, and environmental crisis. While this course is focused on developing critical writing skills, we will occasionally play with creative writing prompts to better understand the power of the speculative imagination. [3] (HCA; CORE A, C; LE HFA)

ENGL 1260W.06: Introduction to Literary and Cultural Analysis: Good Girls Gone Bad: Milton to Miley

Nat Rivkin

TR 2:45 – 4:00 PM

Why do good girls go bad? What exactly makes a fallen woman? To respond to these questions, we will closely read early modern literature and drama alongside contemporary pop culture. By surveying Renaissance texts that portray bad girls, this course considers how femininity draws on race, class, and desire across time and place. Our readings include the biblical epic Paradise Lost, the comedic play Galatea, the lurid autobiography Lieutenant Nun, and the witch-hunting manual Malleus Maleficarum. We will bring these materials into conversation with film and media, such as Charli XCX’s brat, Gil Junger’s Ten Things I Hate About You, and Sam Levinson’s Euphoria. Throughout the term, students will compose both critical and creative assignments designed to improve their skills in writing, research, and literary analysis. [3] (HCA; CORE A, C; LE HFA)

ENGL 1260W.07: Introduction to Literary Criticism: Forms of Revolt

Alex Dubilet

MWF 1:25 – 2:15 PM

What are revolts? What is their significance, their temporality, and their desire? Are they political events or do they generate disorder on social, historical, and even ontological levels? What narratives, concepts, and representations can be faithful to the insurgent force of insurrections? This course will pursue these questions by investigating key theoretical frameworks for the study of revolt and insurrection. Studying a variety of textual genres (e.g., critical theory, philosophy, manifesto, speculative fiction, historical writing, and film), this course will traverse insurrectionary activity from pre-modernity up to the present day and beyond. First day attendance is imperative. Possible authors include Donatella Di Cesare, M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, Gerrard Winstanley, Ranajit Guha, Kristin Ross, CLR James, Huey Newton, Karl Marx, and Michel Foucault.  This class will thus introduce students not only to classic works of literature and critical theory but also to contemporary perspectives of Black Studies and Post-Colonialism. [3] (HCA; CORE A, C; LE HFA)

ENGL 2248.01: The Curious Pursuit of Knowledge

Pavneet Aulakh

TR 1:15 - 2:30 PM

Curiosity propelled science into a nuclear age, but the devastation inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki led scientists working on the Manhattan Project to regret their pursuit of knowledge. For Einstein, “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing”; but we might add: curiosity killed the cat. Through our readings, ranging from western culture’s most foundational myths about the dangers of curiosity, to those of scientists and authors reworking these narratives to refashion this trait into an instrument of human redemption or stage an ambivalent response to our desire to appropriate divine power for ourselves, we will neither condemn curiosity nor champion its inherent value. Instead, we will historicize it by exploring the history of our vexed relationship with this most human of characteristics and considering how prohibitions against and celebrations of knowledge’s pursuit have always been a matter of the stories we tell. [3] (Pre-1800; HCA; CORE A, C; LE HFA)

ENGL 2280W.01: Pop Music and Its Meanings

Emily Lordi

MWF 9:05 - 9:55 AM

This class stages a study of pop music, not merely as entertainment but as a meaningful response to the world. We’ll read lyrics as poetry and analyze several other musical elements (performance, production, use of samples, etc.) that contribute to a song’s overall meaning. We’ll also look at videos, interviews, documentaries, and other mediums through which artists present themselves and their visions to the world; and engage with the greats who have come before. We’ll ask what makes certain pop stars such celebrated interpreters of contemporary life. How do they capture nebulous feelings and nuanced identities? What do they mean to their fans? And finally, what is the cost of their fame? We’ll explore these issues by reading some of America’s most incisive music critics, journalists, and historians, all of whom model different ways of listening and contextualizing artists’ work. [3] (Diverse Perspectives; HCA; CORE A, C)

ENGL 2311.01: British Writers from 1660 to Present

Mark Schoenfield

TR 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM

To represent is to show what something is like, to make it present again. To Represent is to be an example, exemplar, or model. To represent is to speak on behalf of, to legislate for, to act in the place of. The writers we will explore include Aphra Behn, William Wordsworth, and Virginia Woolf, and many others whose work engaged in the triple act of representing themselves and others within particular upheavals historical and political and personal crises, and thus found fame, notoriety, and even self-fulfillment on occasion. They engaged questions about the functions of society, individualsm, and institutions; the role of gender; the meanings of nature; and the standards of artistic value and the powers of literary forms. This extensive reading course (although it still leaves out infinitely more of British literature than it can include) will offer presentations and take-home short-essay exams as ways for students to collaborate, explore more deeply, and synthesize ideas. [3] (HCA; CORE B, C; LE HFA)

ENGL 2319.01: World Literature, Modern: Literature and Language Loss

Akshya Saxena

TR 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM

How does a language disappear and what do we lose with it? This course explores stories of languages threatened by colonialism, climate change, migration, and technology, and shows how writers around the world have brought them to life in their works. With thousands of languages expected to vanish just in our lifetime, the stakes are both global and personal. Through literature, this course introduces you to the world’s multilingual diversity and its entanglements with history, politics, and the future of the planet. [3] (Diverse Perspectives; HCA; CORE B, C; LE HFA)

ENGL 3314.01: Chaucer

Shoshana Adler

TR 9:30 - 10:45 AM

We have, in this course, a straightforward task: to read as much of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as will reasonably fit into a semester. The tales, with their wild diversity of genres, glittering array of personalities, and streaks of comedy, obscenity, cruelty, and irony, are part of the very bones of English poetry. And Chaucer, so often called the “father of English literature,” leaves us as vexed, rich, and ambivalent a legacy as any other father might. The tales will take us on a pilgrimage, to the courts of King Arthur and Genghis Khan, to the ancient Mediterranean, to a squabble between barnyard animals, through problems of monogamy, misogyny, class war, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and literary character. We will learn to read in Middle English, and to respond to the Canterbury Tales as both scholars and artists. [3] (Pre-1800; HCA)

ENGL 3337.01: Shakespeare: Tragedies & Romances: Later Plays

Kathryn Schwarz

MWF 2:30 - 3:20 PM

On the one hand, Shakespeare’s works have often been used as reference points for social hierarchies, categories, and norms. On the other hand, these same works provide rich resources for challenging orthodox systems and structures. This course will engage the plays’ complex, often contentious representations of social experience: constructions of identity in relation to gender, sexuality, and erotic attachment; representations of cultural authority and cultural conflict; crises produced through mistake, transformation, and disguise; and tensions surrounding ethnicity, religion, and race. Throughout the semester, we’ll take various angles on what might broadly be termed politics: the politics of nationalism, gender, history, violence, identity, and community. Discussions will consider both early histories of production and more recent readings, stagings, and adaptations for new media. Course requirements include a group presentation, analytic essays, research assignments, and regular participation. [3] (Pre-1800; HCA)

ENGL 3361.01: Restoration and the 18th-Century: The Making of Jane Austen

Scott Juengel

TR 9:30 - 10:45 AM

Jane Austen didn’t come out of nowhere. Even though she ushered in a new paradigm in the modern novel, her achievements were long in the making, shaped by a shifting literary culture that increasingly centered women writers and depended on female readers. This course will examine eighteenth-century women of letters (Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Anna Barbauld, Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, etc.) who were instrumental in challenging a masculinist public sphere, as well as select works that directly influenced Austen. The syllabus will be bookended by Austen herself, beginning with her Lady Susan, written when Austen was still a teenager, and ending with Sense and Sensibility, her first published novel. In the process we will consider how a writer is forged in dialogue with those that preceded her. [3] (Pre-1800; HCA)

ENGL 3370.01: The Bible in Literature

Roger Moore

MWF 12:20 - 1:10 PM

Knowledge of the Bible is indispensable for understanding English and American literature. This course examines the ways that writers from the medieval period to the present engage Biblical stories, images, and characters. How does Chaucer’s Wife of Bath engage Biblical restrictions on women? How do the Beatitudes help Margaret Atwood critique fanatical religion in The Handmaid’s Tale? How does the conversion of the Apostle Paul inform Flannery O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back”? This course is valuable for English majors seeking a better understanding of the sources and backgrounds of English and American literature, as well as the general student who wishes to learn about the role of Christian themes in shaping canonical works of the English tradition. Students will write two short essays and complete a final research paper. While deep knowledge of the Bible is not required, some familiarity with basic Biblical themes and narratives would be helpful. [3] (Pre-1800; HCA)

ENGL 3614.01: The Victorian Period: The Brontes

Scott Juengel

TR 1:15 - 2:30 PM

Perhaps no family of writers have done more to construct our modern conceptions of passion and compulsion than the Brontë sisters. Although each died tragically young, Emily, Charlotte, and Anne Brontë transformed their strange and isolated adolescence into unsettling meditations on family, gender, selfhood, and the atmospheric mysteries of modern life. This study of a single extraordinary family and its melancholic fate will explore how novels and poetry can become the arts of resilience. In addition to the sisters’ extraordinary juvenilia and poetry, we will focus on four novels: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Villette. We will conclude the class reflecting on the afterlife of the Brontës in Narnia-like children’s stories and Hollywood blockbusters. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 3620.01: 19th-Century American Literature: Black Atlantic Currents

Mezzanine with ENGL 8450.01

Ajay Batra

MW 2:30 - 3:45 PM

Between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of chattel slavery exposed millions of people of African descent to conditions of forced captivity, racialized violence, and labor exploitation. In response to those oppressive conditions, Black individuals and communities spanning the coasts of West Africa and the colonized New World forged a dynamic tradition of creative expression and resistance that powerfully demonstrated their resilience, their political consciousness, and their desire for collective liberation. That widespread tradition—known to scholars as the Black Atlantic—will be the focus of our work in this seminar. Reading a wide selection of primary sources in English from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America and the Caribbean, we will examine how Black writers used literature and print culture both to contest the injustices of slavery and to envision forms of freedom beyond it. Moreover, we will read leading works of theory and criticism to gain familiarity with the innovative methods and the urgent questions currently animating scholarly debates at the nexus of Black studies, American studies, and Caribbean studies. Students in this course will complete in-class presentations and writing assignments designed to foster both intensive engagement with our subject matter and the development of advanced skills in research, analysis, and scholarly writing. [3] (Diverse Perspectives; HCA)

ENGL 3654.01: African American Literature: Black Memoir

Emily Lordi

MWF 10:10 - 11:00 AM

Ever since the authors of slave narratives helped to inaugurate the African American literary tradition, the genre of the memoir has held a privileged place among Black American writers. Authors have used the form to communicate realities that the dominant culture has ignored or suppressed, as well as to create community through artful testimony to shared experience. We’ll read first-person accounts by such writers as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, and Kiese Laymon—paying special attention to the styles and strategies of these urgent and innovative accounts. [3] (Diverse Perspectives; US)

ENGL 3654.02: African American Literature: Home to Harlem

Gabriel Briggs

TR 1:15 - 2:30 PM

This course examines the depth and breadth of the cultural phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance. However, rather than view this episode as an isolated period of African-American expression, we will see how Renaissance era artistry extended an earlier “New Negro” tradition, and how it encapsulated African-American cultural responses to early twentieth-century social, political, and economic stimuli. Within this diverse landscape we will investigate artists, essayists, poets, musicians, and novelists that include: W. E. B Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, Louis Armstrong, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman and George Schuyler. [3] (Diverse Perspectives; US)

ENGL 3659W.01: Cultures of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Jason Ahlenius

MW 8:40 - 9:55 AM

This seminar explores the evolving cultures of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands over two centuries, from Mexican territories, to the “American frontier,” to the border as it exists today. Our discussion will engage with the diverse media through which our imagination of the borderlands has taken form, including literature, film, cartography, visual and performance art, photography, and more. We will consider these legacies from both U.S. and Mexican perspectives, but also through the eyes of Indigenous communities, Latinxs, whites, and others whose words and actions have formed the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Through our exploration of culture and history, we will ask several broad questions: What is the “frontier” and how is it different from the “border”? What are borders—are they physical boundaries, or are they psychosocial conditions? Similarly, what are nations—are they stable and homogeneous groups, or are they flexible and diverse communities? (Diverse Perspectives; HCA)

ENGL 3720.01: Literature, Science, and Technology: AI, Robots, and Clones 

Jay Clayton

TR 9:30 - 10:45 AM

How do the futures literature and film imagine shape public attitudes toward science and technology? What is the human in an age of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology? How does popular culture influence public policy toward scientific research? This course focuses on fictions and films about artificial life from Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and James Whale’s iconic 1931 film of that novel, through Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), to Isaac Asimov’s classic I, Robot, to twenty-first century novels such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021). Films will include Blade Runner (1982), A.I. (2001), Ex Machina (2015), and Companion (2025). [3] (P)

ENGL 3726.01: New Media: Race and Digital Culture

Huan He

MWF 3:35 - 4:25 PM

Can virtual reality automate empathy with others? How do video games make race and racism playable? Who labors to make our digital worlds possible? How does AI reproduce an imaginary of the human that reinforces whiteness? This course examines the dreams and nightmares that make up our collectively experienced “digital age,” which has a long history before the Internet and social media. We will read theoretical essays, literature, art, and interactive media to understand the embodied stakes of digitality and address questions of race and identity in online and virtual spaces. We will study how technologies perpetuate new and old forms of domination, and we will learn from writers and artists who imagine alternative digital futures. Certain days will be dedicated to hands-on activities with new media technologies such as VR, ChatGPT, and gaming consoles. No technical knowledge is required. In addition to written assignments, students will propose a final research or multimedia project based on individual interest. [3] (Diverse Perspectives; HCA)

ENGL 3730.01: Literature and the Environment: What is Nature? 

Rachel Teukolsky

TR 2:45 - 4:00 PM

What is nature? Is it found in a park, where you wander among trees and cute forest animals? Is it an untouched, pristine wilderness? Are some of us closer to nature than others? This course examines the ways that artists and writers have constructed “nature” as an idealized place or set of qualities, partly imaginary, partly concrete. We will consider a broad range of literature, imagery, philosophy, and film, including science fiction/eco-fiction by Octavia Butler (Dawn) and Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Romantic nature poetry by William Wordsworth; Henry Thoreau, Walden (“Why I Went into the Woods”); Charles Darwin, Origin of Species; H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau; Tommy Pico’s subversive Native-American, queer perspective in Nature Poem; and James Cameron’s film, Avatar. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 3744.01: Advanced Poetry: Once Upon a Poem

Mezzanine with 8331.01

Jessie Hock

R 12:30 - 3:30 PM

Perhaps you have never heard of Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), but he is one of the greatest poets ever to write in the English language. One reason he is not familiar to the general public is that he didn’t write much, only about fifty poems in English, but each is a complex jewel. This class will revolve around his most remarkable piece of writing, “Upon Appleton House,” a short poem with epic sweep, which we will take as a jumping-off point to learn about the contexts that shaped Marvell, his age, and his poem. Topics will include the lyric genres and poetic movements of early modern England, including Petrarchism, metaphysical poetry, cavalier poetry, pastoral, devotional lyric, satire, and more. We will also learn about the cultural impacts of the English Civil Wars (1642-1651), which left an enormous mark on England, its people, and its literature. The relation between politics and poetry will be a major topic for the course. Nevertheless, at its heart, this is a class about one poem, which we will read and reread each week, even as we add layers of context, analysis, and reflection. My hope is that this will make the class an exercise in learning to love poetry (or love it more, or differently), insofar as getting to know one poem intimately will teach us the power of slowing down and marveling (pun intended!) at the wonders of poetic form. Assignments will include weekly readings (primary and secondary), response papers, and active class participation. Students will also write a shorter midterm and longer final paper. Students taking the class as a graduate seminar will complete additional secondary readings each week and write a longer research paper for their final assignment. [3] (Pre-1800; HCA)

ENGL 3894.02: Major Figures in Literature: William Faulkner

Mezzanine with ENGL 8351.01

Vera Kutzinski

MW 4:40 - 5:55 PM

How have different audiences read and re-read Faulkner, by turns celebrating and loathing his work? Why do we still read him today? We begin by looking at the 1949 Nobel laureate as one of the centerpieces of the post-WWII American literary canon and ask, for instance, which of his novels the New Critics, who dominated that US academy at the time, privileged and why. What aesthetic, cultural, and political values did Faulkner’s literary writings represent to them? Which specific aspects of his texts did they emphasize, which did they prefer to ignore? Along with mid-century and more recent commentaries on Faulkner, we will examine three of his novels (The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Intruder in the Dust) and several short stories. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1101.01: Creative Writing Tutorial: Fiction

Langston Cotman

TBD

This fiction tutorial is designed to assist students in the development of independent writing projects. This is a self-directed course, meaning students are expected to bring personal work to be reviewed and discussed with the instructor on a weekly basis. The instructor will tailor their instruction to each student in an effort to best encourage and assist the student’s self-directed creative pursuits. Each session is an opportunity for revision, guidance for new material, and receiving any form of feedback or recommendation that may contribute to the student’s intent. Students of any skill level or discipline are encouraged to apply. [1] (No AXLE credit) 

ENGL 1102.01: Creative Writing Tutorial: Poetry

Sydney Mayes

TBD

In this poetry tutorial students will develop independent writing projects and reading practices. This self-directed course will include weekly meetings with the instructor to discuss student work and instructor assigned readings. These weekly meetings are opportunities for students to receive guidance on their work and to learn new techniques to help realize their poetic visions. The tutorial space is a space for students to follow their instincts as poets and readers. Students of any skill level or discipline are encouraged to apply. [1] (No AXLE credit) 

ENGL 1280.01: Beginning Fiction Workshop

Kumari Devarajan

MWF 2:30 - 3:20 PM

We all grew up being told stories, and we all tell ourselves stories to help make sense of life. In this course, we will dive into what gives a story its magic. We’ll read some of the best short story writers and learn from their work about elements that make up a story. Through in class exercises and at home assignments, we’ll practice writing and revising stories. Beginning and experienced writers welcome–together we’ll create a safe environment for giving and receiving feedback in a workshop model. Over the semester, students will write two short stories and revise them for their final project. [3] (HCA; CORE A; LE HFA)

ENGL 1280.02: Beginning Fiction Workshop

Iman Saleem

TR 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM

This workshop is for reading, writing and talking — in that order. We will read a combination of novel extracts and short stories, write our own, and discuss and critique both of the aforementioned. Some questions we will try to answer: What does writing have to be, besides just ‘good’? Why? How does certain writing make you feel and think the way it does? What do we ask of the fiction that we read and write? And how does it answer? [3] (HCA; CORE A; LE HFA)

ENGL 1290.01: Beginning Poetry Workshop

Christiana Castillo

MWF 1:25 - 2:15 PM

In this beginning poetry workshop, we will explore all the possibilities of what poetry can do. We will engage with poems from both historical and contemporary poets through close readings to dissect poetry line by line to understand the forces at work in a poem. We will study craft elements, develop a critical vocabulary, learn to give and receive feedback, and generate ten original poems together. By the end of this course, students will have a revised packet of poems, an understanding of what forces are at play in poems, including their own, and a broadened understanding of poetry as an art form. We will revel in the joy and mystery of poetry. [3] (HCA; CORE A; LE HFA)

ENGL 1290.02: Beginning Poetry Workshop

Athena Nassar

TR 9:30 - 10:45 AM

Course description TBD. [3] (HCA; CORE A; LE HFA)

ENGL 2239.01: Persuasive Journalism

Amanda Little

MW 2:30 - 3:45 PM

This writing course explores the landscape of contemporary journalism and opinion writing. We'll discuss core tenets of journalistic integrity, read and critique newspaper op-ed pages, contemporary manifestoes, blogs and social media. Students will craft opinion pieces on topics ranging from sports and celebrity culture to social justice and climate change. 

Taught by an investigative writer and longtime Bloomberg columnist, this course explores the lines that divide reporting and persuasive journalism, and examines the tactics and techniques at the core of opinion writing. Students will research and respond to current events, write and publish their own op-ed series via Substack, and connect with top editors and writers in American news media. [3] (HCA; CORE A, B; LE HFA)

ENGL 3210.01: Intermediate Nonfiction Workshop

Justin Quarry

TR 2:45 - 4:00 PM

How do you tell a personal story in a short space, for a wide audience?  How do you shape your experiences into art?  In this workshop, students identify the parts of their lives rich with resonance and discovery—from day-to-day happenings to landmark moments—and craft them for the page with the goal of compelling readers.  In studying, they read two texts on the art of the personal essay as well as a diverse selection of essays by contemporary writers; in practicing, they write four essays of varying lengths (two of 100 words, two of 1500-1750 words), all of which are then workshopped by their professor and peers.  The final project consists of revisions of all essays.  Of particular emphasis in students’ reading and writing is the broad topic of relationships—familial, platonic, romantic, etc.—to produce potential (but not required) submissions for, among others, the college contest editions of the “Tiny Love Stories” and “Modern Love” columns in The New York Times. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 3230.01: Intermediate Fiction Workshop

Sheba Karim

TR 1:15 - 2:30 PM

Great writing requires dedication, imagination and…revision! In this course, you’ll learn what it means to rework a short story. During the course of the semester, you will hone your writing and revision skills by writing one short story and revising it twice. You will also read published stories and essays on craft and complete writing exercises. The heart of this class is the workshop, where you will offer and receive supportive and constructive feedback on the short stories written for class. This class is for fiction writers looking to further develop, explore, and refine their craft and narrative techniques. The final for the course will consist of a revision of your short story. [3; maximum of 6 credits total for all semesters of ENGL 3230] (HCA)

ENGL 3250.01: Intermediate Poetry Workshop

Su Cho

TR 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM

In this course, we will learn how to read poetry as writers and study different poetic forms. This will be a highly collaborative class focusing on discovering your unique poetic voice through creative inquiry, experimentation, and of course, writing your own poems. I believe in fostering good, creative habits that will help you develop your own writing practices.

We will read poems, write poems, listen to podcasts, seek art, listen to music, take walks, make things, and break things–all to fuel our creativity. The final project will consist of a portfolio of your own poems and a craft essay. Ultimately, we will actively contribute to what people consider American literature today and hopefully surprise ourselves along the way. [3; maximum of 6 credits total for all semesters of ENGL 3250] (HCA)

ENGL 3260.01: Advanced Poetry Workshop

Rick Hilles

R 2:45 - 5:45 PM

This is an advanced poetry workshop, and, as such, I envision it as an opportunity for a deepening of your relationship to the practice of poetry. To facilitate this deepening, the class periods will be rigorous and packed with what I hope will be lively and insightful discussions. You will be encouraged to experiment with many different forms and styles of poetry, reading extensively the work of both your peers and published poets, while also offering your best insights in open discussions. The main focus for our class will be the writing workshop, where we will discuss your poems and those of your peers, all the while seeking the most helpful and fruitful ways to approach all creative work put before us. Thus, it will be essential for you to keep up with all of the reading. (Besides, you never know how new poems will open you up to other creative possibilities.) Poetry, as you know, is an immensely challenging and a uniquely fulfilling art form, requiring at times Herculean effort and the patience of Job. By the end of the semester, I hope you will have exceeded your own expectations for yourself and will discover some new favorite poems and poets in the process. To apply to be admitted to the course, please send me, ASAP, 3 recent poems (in one attachment) plus a few paragraphs about yourself, the courses you’ve taken thus far in poetry, as well as your relationship with poetry at this moment in your life. Please email the above to me at: rick.hilles@vanderbilt.edu (Subject to change.) [3; maximum of 6 credits total for all semesters of ENGL 3260] (HCA)

ENGL 3620.01: 19th-Century American Literature: Black Atlantic Currents (Honors Seminar)

Mezzanine with ENGL 8450.01

Ajay Batra

MW 2:30 - 3:45 PM

Between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of chattel slavery exposed millions of people of African descent to conditions of forced captivity, racialized violence, and labor exploitation. In response to those oppressive conditions, Black individuals and communities spanning the coasts of West Africa and the colonized New World forged a dynamic tradition of creative expression and resistance that powerfully demonstrated their resilience, their political consciousness, and their desire for collective liberation. That widespread tradition—known to scholars as the Black Atlantic—will be the focus of our work in this seminar. Reading a wide selection of primary sources in English from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America and the Caribbean, we will examine how Black writers used literature and print culture both to contest the injustices of slavery and to envision forms of freedom beyond it. Moreover, we will read leading works of theory and criticism to gain familiarity with the innovative methods and the urgent questions currently animating scholarly debates at the nexus of Black studies, American studies, and Caribbean studies. Students in this course will complete in-class presentations and writing assignments designed to foster both intensive engagement with our subject matter and the development of advanced skills in research, analysis, and scholarly writing. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 3744.01: Advanced Poetry: Once Upon a Poem (Honors Seminar)

Mezzanine with 8331.01

Jessie Hock

R 12:30 - 3:30 PM

Perhaps you have never heard of Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), but he is one of the greatest poets ever to write in the English language. One reason he is not familiar to the general public is that he didn’t write much, only about fifty poems in English, but each is a complex jewel. This class will revolve around his most remarkable piece of writing, “Upon Appleton House,” a short poem with epic sweep, which we will take as a jumping-off point to learn about the contexts that shaped Marvell, his age, and his poem. Topics will include the lyric genres and poetic movements of early modern England, including Petrarchism, metaphysical poetry, cavalier poetry, pastoral, devotional lyric, satire, and more. We will also learn about the cultural impacts of the English Civil Wars (1642-1651), which left an enormous mark on England, its people, and its literature. The relation between politics and poetry will be a major topic for the course. Nevertheless, at its heart, this is a class about one poem, which we will read and reread each week, even as we add layers of context, analysis, and reflection. My hope is that this will make the class an exercise in learning to love poetry (or love it more, or differently), insofar as getting to know one poem intimately will teach us the power of slowing down and marveling (pun intended!) at the wonders of poetic form. Assignments will include weekly readings (primary and secondary), response papers, and active class participation. Students will also write a shorter midterm and longer final paper. Students taking the class as a graduate seminar will complete additional secondary readings each week and write a longer research paper for their final assignment. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 3894.02: Major Figures in Literature: William Faulkner (Honors Seminar)

Mezzanine with ENGL 8351.01

Vera Kutzinski

MW 4:40 - 5:55 PM

How have different audiences read and re-read Faulkner, by turns celebrating and loathing his work? Why do we still read him today? We begin by looking at the 1949 Nobel laureate as one of the centerpieces of the post-WWII American literary canon and ask, for instance, which of his novels the New Critics, who dominated that US academy at the time, privileged and why. What aesthetic, cultural, and political values did Faulkner’s literary writings represent to them? Which specific aspects of his texts did they emphasize, which did they prefer to ignore? Along with mid-century and more recent commentaries on Faulkner, we will examine three of his novels (The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Intruder in the Dust) and several short stories. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 4999.01: Honors Thesis

Rachel Teukolsky

T 4:15 - 6:15 PM

For students who have successfully been admitted to the honors program and have completed the Honors Colloquium ENG 4998 in the fall. In this course, students develop their individual honors thesis, working with advisors, the Writing Studio, and their cohort of fellow writers. The thesis experience concludes with an oral examination on the thesis topic. [3] (No AXLE credit)

ENGL 7470.01: The Historical Poem: Writing into Time

Major Jackson

W 4:00 - 7:00 PM

One of the more recent and interesting trends in American poetry, and one that could end up defining our national literature, is the rise of the historical poem.  While scholars and the reading public debate the triumphs and pitfalls of poems based in personal experience, a host of poets and critics have successfully written and extolled the virtues of poems that explore unacknowledged figures and rarely commemorated events in United States history. In this course, we will study an array of poets including Elizabeth Alexander, Martha Collins, Rita Dove, Robert Hayden, Sally Wen Mao, Layli Long Soldier, Frank X. Walker, C.D. Wright, and others that invite multiple approaches to writing poems that “contain history.” The writing assignments in this course will encourage you to write into time. The culminating assignment is a portfolio of historical-based poems that illuminates time periods, historical figures, and forgotten events that reveal how the past shapes our literary consciousness and creates its own record. [4]

ASAM 3107.01: Science, Technology, and the Body in Global Asia

Ben Tran

TR 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM

Social, cultural, and political dimensions of science, technology, and the body. [3] (HCA)

CAL 2725W.01: Why Argue About Politics?: An Approach to Deliberative Democracy

Dana Nelson

MWF 3:35 – 4:25 PM

Ideals and practices of deliberative democracy in the US. Prospects for deliberation and conversation in a divided political era. [3] (CORE A, E) (LE HFA)

CORE 2500.01: Exploratory Core - The Divided Metropolis: Culture and Design in the City

Elizabeth Meadows | Christopher Rowe

TR 9:30 – 10:45 AM

Cultures create cities; cities transform cultures. The city is one of humanity's great inventions, revolutionizing technology, health care, and finance, yet cities are often represented as sites of corruption and danger. This course unites English and Engineering in exploring the evolution of urban environments and the roles of literature and culture in that evolution. We will examine the landscape of urban infrastructure and representations of cities in books and works of art to unearth how and why cities create opportunity and innovation while simultaneously restricting access to such benefits. Students will examine urban designs from antiquity to the present and their relationship to culture and geography; read literary works covering cities in the ancient world, in the 19th-century Industrial Revolution, and in the 20th-century flight to suburbia; identify the characteristics of "livable cities."  Class includes domestic air travel and enrolled students are expected to have all travel documents ready at the start of spring semester (REAL ID, passports or other documentation). Students will be charged a nonrefundable course fee of $2,750 following students accepting their space in the course. Students eligible for financial aid should contact their Financial Aid Officer to discuss funding options. [3] (Core capacity tags: A, E / AXLE tags: HCA)

CORE 2500.11: Exploratory Core - How to Find a Life of Meaning

Dana Nelson

MWF 2:30 – 3:20 PM

Our internet-organized world promises us endless freedom: access to information, goods and, supposedly, happiness. Our social networks promise us friendship, support and contact. But we're feeling (as people attest and studies confirm) more trapped, more devoid of agency and purpose, more lonely, unfocused and isolated, and, perhaps worst, more confused about truth and unmoored from any sense of meaning and guiding values. "Finding a Life of Meaning in a World of Likes and Retweets" will help you situate these problems not just in our own moment but also historically and then will turn to literature as-in Kenneth Burke's resonant characterization-"equipment for living." By reading about others searching for meaning, we'll experiment with and enhance our own self-worth and integrity. We'll explore our own belief and values as we read about others finding and developing theirs. We'll cultivate a self-understanding that doesn't depend on what others think about us but keeps us aligned with our core values. We will advance our own answers to the questions life asks of, and the demands it make on us. In so doing we will strengthen our personal congruence and self-esteem through learning and practice. We'll develop and exercise social trust and responsibility in our classroom community to create a setting where we can hazard and share our noble experiments of living in truth, and in finding and experiencing meaning! [3] (Core capacity tags: A, E / AXLE tags: HCA)

CORE 2500.12: 

Judy Klass

MWF 2:30 – 3:20 PM

This is a multi-genre course; students will write short stories, plays, screenplays, poems and songs. We will read work by great Jewish writers illustrating different modes (stories with first-person narrators and third-person narrators, plays with two characters and many characters, screenplays that intercut between locations, sonnets, poems that do not rhyme, etc) before students create their own work. Some of the works we read will touch on Jewish culture, history and preoccupations, and students may want to draw on their own cultural identities in some of what they write -- or not. [3] (Core capacity tags: A, C / AXLE tags: P)

GSS 3304.01: Gender, Power, and Justice

Kathryn Schwarz

MW 4:00 – 5:15 PM

What is the relationship between theory and practice? It’s an old question; still, as I write a course description amidst our current cultural dynamics, it strikes me with new force. We invest much energy to create theoretical paradigms for social experiences: theories of gendered, racial, economic, and sexual inequities; of discipline and ideology; of separatism, coalition, and community; of vulnerability, interdependence, oppression, and resistance. At what points do theory and practice meet to produce effective action, and to facilitate the pursuit of social justice?

As we consider the complicated nexus of gender, justice, and power, we’ll engage thinkers who interweave the conceptual with the experiential: feminists of color; queer activists; radical separatists; advocates for interrelation and coalition; creators of manifestoes and polemics. I’ll set some of these texts, but our archive will be a collaborative project. Each of you will have opportunities to share resources, drawn from your own disciplines, from contemporary popular discourses, and from other contexts that add depth and vitality to our conversations. We’ll work together to bring individual insights and experiences into conversation with one another. And we’ll approach theories of social justice not only on their terms but also on our own, with a degree of enthusiasm, a measure of skepticism, and at least a flicker of hope. [3] (P)

JS 2290.01: Imagining the Alien: Jewish Science Fiction

Judy Klass

MWF 1:25 –  2:15 PM

Science fiction and speculative fiction by Jewish writers in cultural context. Aliens, robots, and secret identities; time travel; utopia and political critique; questions of Jewish identity. [3] (HCA)

JS 2420.01: American Jewish Songwriters

Judy Klass

MWF 12:20 –  1:10 PM

From the late 19th Century to the present. Vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, the development of the stage musical, and the Brill Building. Folk, rock, pop, and country. Contributions of Jewish songwriters to American music. [3] (US)

MHS 2155.01: Hysterical!: Insanity, Impropriety, and Gender

Lauren Mitchell

MW 4:00 –  5:15 PM

Who gets to say what? Whose narratives are believed, and whose are labeled as unreliable, even dangerous? And how do our own biases support these labels? The line between what's funny and what's inappropriate and bizarre has always been thin and inflected by dynamics of gender, race, and societal expectations.  Since mental health pathology is often guided by what is considered socially appropriate behavior, we will think through how that impacts who gets to be authentic and who risks being "crazy."  We'll tackle the recent history of hysteria, a label that pathologized women who behaved inappropriately, as it connects to contemporary representations that toe the line between bawdy laughter, vulgarity, and straight-up uncomfortable. This interdisciplinary course builds upon four major categories to unpack hysteria, its history, and its current implications. We’ll start by looking at the history of hysteria as a mental health pathology in the 19th century. Following this, we will move into mental health narratives, then we will explore the horror genre, and we will end with comedy.  We’ll combine these genres to gendered perceptions of storytelling, performance, and fictional representations of "madness."  Students will be expected to critically read up to two theoretical texts per week alongside literature.  The course will contain three major assignments in order to maintain conversations placing theory, literature, and mental health practice together.  (HCA)

ENGL 1100.01: Composition: Narrative and the Human Experience

Mark Wisniewski

MWF 8:00 – 8:50 AM

Available only to students simultaneously enrolled in any section of CORE 1010.

Narrative plays an indisputable role in our daily lives, be it the elements a reporter chooses to include in a news story, shaping a cohesive personal history to understand ourselves, or reading a novel.  While the impact of narratives is undeniable, the nature and limits of storytelling’s role in shaping our understanding of reality is hotly contested.  What are the ethical implications of narrativizing reporting, be it news or data analysis?  Is personal identity dependent on our ability to narrativize events?  Are all narratives equally deserving of our attention?  These are some of the questions we will examine together.  Class discussions will parallel and expand on those in CORE: Being Human classes.  ENGL 1100 allows students to spend a semester engaging academic writing and research as a craft, while working on projects designed to complement assignments in CORE: Being Human. [3] (No AXLE credit)

ENGL 1100.02, 1100.03, and 1100.04: Composition: Individuals and Communities

Jordan Ivie

1100.02: MWF 12:20 – 1:10 PM

1100.03: MWF 1:25 – 2:15 PM

1100.04: MWF 2:30 – 3:20 PM

Available only to students simultaneously enrolled in any section of CORE 1010.

In the 1982 sci-fi film Star Trek; the Wrath of Khan, Spock famously proclaims, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” In a divided America, it is more important than ever to genuinely consider this dynamic and explore the responsibilities of the individual to the larger community and the responsibilities of the community to the individuals that make it up. Where do individual rights end for the sake of the larger community? When does the community sacrifice in order to maintain the individual rights of its citizens? What happens when the individual comes into conflict with the community? This course explores these questions through a wide variety of genres, media, and time periods, with the ultimate goal of encouraging students to consider their own places within larger communities. Through a series of readings, essays, workshops, and other projects exploring this topic, students will also consider questions of structure, clarity, and credibility, ultimately producing a persuasive research paper on a topic of their choice. [3] (No AXLE credit)

ENGL 1100.05, 1100.06, and 1100.07: Composition: Research and Writing Rhetoric

Payam Rahmati

1100.05: TR 8:00 - 9:15 AM

1100.06: TR 9:30 - 10:45 AM

1000.07: TR 11:00 - 12:15 PM 

Available only to students simultaneously enrolled in any section of CORE 1010.

Composition: Research and Writing Rhetoric is an introduction to expository, analytical, and research-based academic writing. The course involves three major assignments, including (1) writing to reflect, (2) writing to analyze, and (3) writing to persuade. For writing to reflect, students are prompted to offer a critical analysis reflecting on their own literacy journey, research aspects of that literacy, and cite credible peer-reviewed sources about that literacy context. Writing to analyze involves reading, interpreting, and analyzing news articles for rhetorical features. Writing to persuade asks students to create an argument in which they address a question they are interested in and use close-reading skills they have developed while working on the rhetorical analysis essay. The course addresses the following five learning outcomes: (1) Rhetorical knowledge, the ability to analyze contexts and audiences to understand situations and communicate effectively; (2) Critical thinking, the ability to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information, situations, and texts; (3) Processes, the ability to use multiple composing processes, independently and in collaboration with others, to imagine, develop, and revise projects; (4) Conventions, knowledge of formal rules and informal guidelines that define genres and shape perceptions of correctness; and (5) Reflective learning, the ability to practice metacognition, or thinking about one’s own thinking and learning. [3] (No AXLE credit)

ENGL 1100.08, 1100.09, and 1100.10: Composition: The Autobiographical Author

Jared Harvey

1100.08: TR 9:30 – 10:45 AM

1100.09: 11:00 – 12:15 PM

1000.10: TR 1:15 – 2:30 PM

Available only to students simultaneously enrolled in any section of CORE 1010.

This course will examine the relationship between the living self and the written self, and how the writer negotiates between the two in order to author the autobiographical gesture. What level of craft is required to communicate sincerity, and by what story-telling methods does the writer communicate “true” events? Is the self constructed or excavated? How do different texts present different selves; who am I in different discourse communities (Does my Instagram handle get along with my driver’s license ID?)? Why do we seek out traces of the autobiographical in fictional texts; on the other hand, are all autobiographical texts fictive? In this course we will consider these and related questions by analyzing texts of myriad form and media, from the poetry of Ariana Reines to the essays of James Baldwin; from the tweets of Donald Trump to Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Students will employ and develop close-reading skills as well as analytical and creative writing. The course will culminate in students writing their own “autobiographies,” with a short critical supplement adjoined.  Because “I” is an author. [3] (No AXLE credit)

ENGL 1210W.01 and 1210W.02: Reading Fiction: The Art of World-Building

Justin Quarry 

1210W.01: TR 11:00 - 12:15 PM

1210W.02: TR 1:15 - 2:30 PM

How do writers design worlds that are both fantastic and believable?  How does setting inform the development of character and plot?  How might you better create and employ imaginary worlds—both realistic and speculative—for your own writing?  In reading and writing critically on several speculative novels, students in this course will consider each text's strategy for conveying its world to readers, including the world's chief characteristics and ethos, as well as characters'—and readers'—connections to it.  However, students will also engage in creative writing exercises to apply what they learn to their fiction, as they design an imaginary world of their own.  The semester will then culminate in each student giving a presentation on their world, and in turn their narrative’s inhabitants and conflict—as well as their strategies for developing these. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1220W.01: Introduction to Drama

Judy Klass

TR 11:00 - 12:15 PM

This course looks at plays from the Golden Age of ancient Athens to the present. We consider Aristotle’s ideas about how tragedy should lead to catharsis in the audience, and how a tragic hero should have a fatal flaw. We consider theatrical devices tied to moments in history, like a Greek chorus or an Elizabethan soliloquy. The course focuses on plays about families: volatile, funny, vindictive, forgiving, loving, hating – sometimes cruel in their actions and sometimes painfully honest in their words to each other. Theater can feel claustrophobic, with few sets: but this can fill family plays with energy, as people trapped at home together confront problems. We’ll explore how family plays have changed over time, and make connections between some very different works. Playwrights include Sophocles, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Chekhov, O’Neill, Odets, Kaufman and Hart, Miller, Williams, Hansberry, Norman, Shepard, Vogel, Hwang, Auburn, Parks and Durang. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1220W.02: Introduction to Drama

Clara Wilch

MW 3:30 - 4:50 PM

What does it mean if "All the world's a stage; And all the men and women merely players,” as a character in Shakespeare’s As You Like It memorably suggested? How do the concepts and tools of theatre and performance shape our actual identities, lives, and understandings of one another, especially in the era of social media? This course will consider these questions by critically and creatively engaging with modern and contemporary performance practices, from plays and performance art to “performances of everyday life.” Students will develop skills for interpreting and critiquing plays texts and live encounters with art. We will also experiment with performance studies theories and methods, observing society and culture through the lens of performance to better understand how norms are created and might be changed. Texts include Susan Glaspell’s Trifles; Marie Clements' Burning Vision; Wole Soyinka’s “Drama and the African World-view”; and Richard Schechner’s “Rasaesthetics.” [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1250W.01 and 1250W.02: Introduction to Poetry

Lisa Dordal

1250W.01: MWF 8:00 – 8:50 AM

1250W.02: MWF 9:05 – 9:55 AM

In our increasingly fast-paced lives, reading poetry can be a great way to slow down and pay meaningful attention to the world around us and to our own inner landscapes. Although the main objectives of this course are to help you become close readers of poetry and to help you develop your critical writing skills, the poems that we read might very well deepen your understanding of your own life and who you understand yourself to be. The first part of this course will be organized around formal considerations (diction, tone, imagery, figures of speech, sound, etc.). In the second half of the course, we will read the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, Marie Howe, Mark Doty, Natasha Trethewey, and Li-Young Lee. Requirements include two papers (plus revisions), short response papers and homework assignments, a written response to an in-person poetry reading, written responses to select poems from The Slowdown podcast, and participation in class discussions. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1250W.03: Introduction to Poetry

Roger Moore

TR 1:15 - 2:30 PM

This course will give you the skills to read poetry thoughtfully and well. We will read a variety of English and American poems organized by major themes—love, loss, and nature, among others—and will look closely at a couple of poetic forms, such as the sonnet or the dramatic monologue. We will examine at least one poet in depth. Because this is a writing-intensive course, you will write and revise several papers, and we will devote class time to discussion of writing strategies. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1250W.04: Introduction to Poetry: On Secrets and What We Don't Say

Su Cho

MW 2:30 - 3:45 PM

In this class, we will dispel the notion that poetry is difficult. We will read contemporary poems, essays about poetry, and interviews with poets. We will map various American poetic movements, engage in robust class discussions, practice critical essay writing, and consider all the imagistic and sonic delights poetry has to offer. I like to think that poetry tells us everything we need to know, and we will endeavor in writing poems as well. Together, we will practice clear, critical, and concise writing through essays, short responses, and some creative work. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1260W.01 and 1260W.02: Literature and Culture: The Art of Style

Gabriel Briggs

1260W.01: MWF 9:05 – 9:55 AM

1260W.02: MWF 10:10 – 11:00 AM

Multi-disciplinary exploration of literature and culture in relation to society, politics, and aesthetics.  Analysis of diverse cultural forms such as media, music, public spaces, or advertisements. Literature's role in shaping identity and fostering social transformation. In particular, it examines Ernest Hemingway, one of the most influential writers in twentieth-century American Literature. To better understand Hemingway’s enduring cultural presence, students will read a number of short stories, novels, and non-fiction prose he produced between 1924 and 1951. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1260W.03: Literature and Culture: Celebrity Authors

Emily Lordi

TR 11:00 - 12:15 PM

This course will focus on issues of contemporary authorship and literary celebrity. Who are the people “behind” the works we study? What do they say about themselves, and should our sense of them as people shape our readings of their work? These questions are especially pressing now, when most writers need a strong public presence to succeed in the literary marketplace, and many promote their work by giving public readings and interviews and publishing personal essays. How do these acts of self-representation help us to read writers’ fiction and poetry? How does unflattering news about them complicate our interpretation of their work? Authors whose works we will study—through class discussion, close readings, and other short writing assignments—include Rupi Kaur, Danez Smith, Junot Diaz, Jia Tolentino, Kiese Laymon, and Ocean Vuong. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1260W.04: Literature and Culture: Prison Writing

Ajay Batra

TR 1:15 - 2:30 PM

Nearly two million people currently reside in prisons, jails, and immigrant detention centers across the United States. In this course, we will examine the different forms and genres of writing created in these spaces of confinement, both in our present and across American literary history. Reading essays, letters, poems, memoirs, manifestos, and more, we will discuss how incarcerated people have turned to the written word in order to meditate on their experiences of captivity, remain close to loved ones on the outside, build community with fellow detainees, and articulate strong, incisive critiques of systemic injustice. Additionally, we will consider how the highly restrictive, oppressive conditions of prisons and other carceral institutions have tended to shape the practices of literary expression developed by imprisoned writers across time and space. Throughout the term, students in this course will complete critical, creative, and collaborative assignments designed to improve their skills in writing, research, and literary analysis, as well as their fluency in discussing issues of race, class, gender, and inequality. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1275W.01 and 1275W.02: Ethics in Literature

Jeong Oh Kim

1275W.01: MWF 12:20 - 1:10 PM

1275W.02: MWF 1:25 - 2:15 PM

My course, “Ethics in Literature” analyzes works of literature to weigh those ethical issues that literature sets in motion by its response to the world—the pursuit of happiness, good and evil, truth and simulacra, moral reasoning, justice, suffering, and the human rights. We will combine literary studies with ethical frameworks, ranging from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics via John Rawls’ theory of justice to Alain Badiou’s Ethics. In this course, works of art participate not only in reinventing a community, devising tropes, characters, and settings for interaction, but they also provide a critique of its communal, situational truth claim, one which re-imagines, for instance, mortal responsibilities (“The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemir”), the scandal of medical science (Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), human perfectibility (“The Birthmark”), and the rights of (wo)man (Frankenstein) as well as criminality (Crime and Punishment). We will re-draw ethical boundaries of literature. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 2264.01: Imagining Asian America: Bad Asians

Ben Tran

MWF 10:10 - 11:00 AM

This course studies “bad Asians” as a counter-history to the fallacies of the “model minority” stereotype so often pegged to Asian Americans. No-No Boys, Renegades, Freedom Fighters, Feminists, Student Activists, the Yellow Peril, Sex Workers. How does the exemplary “model minority” and the stigmatized “bad Asian” fit into and advance the history of race in the United States? This course counts toward English, Asian Studies, and Asian American and Asian Diaspora majors and minors. [3] (Diverse Perspectives, HCA)

ENGL 2292.01: Literature, Philosophy, and Culture: Figures of the Political

Alex Dubilet

TR 1:15 - 2:30 PM

What is the political? And how has it been figured? In what sense might the space of the political be understood as natural or artificial? What counts as political action and how does its definition depend on what is deemed non- or pre-political? How have our senses of the political been informed by literature, by modern conceptions of history and time, and by historical realities of colonialism? We will read a wide range of literary and philosophical texts. Possible authors include Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Gerrard Winstanley, Herman Melville, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, CLR James, Huey Newton, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Eman Abdelhadi and ME O’Brien, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. This class will thus introduce students not only to classic works of literature and critical theory but also to contemporary perspectives of Black Studies and Post-Colonialism. [3] (Diverse Perspectives, HCA)

ENGL 2310W.01: British Literature to 1660

Shoshana Adler

TR 8:00 - 9:15 AM

This course offers a sampling of the magnificent triumphs and astonishing duds of early English literature. Reading acknowledged masterpieces alongside the obscure, the obscene, and the outright strange, we will explore important aspects of premodern culture, including disorderly sexualities, intense religious piety and discrimination, early colonialism, the warrior culture of chivalry, gendered authorship, and a taste for the grotesque. By reading Chaucer and Shakespeare alongside contemporaneous texts shunted to the margins we will be able to make our own assessments about the history of taste and literary value that shapes the English canon. What are the rules and techniques by which writers in the Medieval and Renaissance periods shaped reality, negotiated their own historical context, and affected their audience? What were the available genres, tropes, and feelings? This course will equip students to seriously engage with early literary history. No prior knowledge required. [3] (Pre-1800, HCA)

ENGL 3336.01: Shakespeare: Early Plays

Kathryn Schwarz

TR 2:45 - 4:00 PM

This course focuses on the first half of Shakespeare’s career, examining clusters of plays that invite us to think across genres. How do concerns about political instability link a tragedy such as Titus Andronicus to a history such as Richard III? How might All’s Well That Ends Well illuminate both the cultural idealism of Henry V and the cultural cynicism of Hamlet? If Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream were written in the same year, how can this help us analyze the specificities of form? Throughout the semester, we’ll take various angles on what might broadly be termed politics: the politics of nationalism, gender, history, violence, identity, and community. Discussions will consider both early histories of production and more recent readings, stagings, and adaptations for new media. Course requirements include a group presentation, analytic essays, research assignments, and regular participation. [3] (Pre-1800, HCA)

ENGL 3343.01: Race and Early Modernity (Honors Seminar)

Mezzanine with ENGL 8331.01

Shoshana Adler

TR 11:00 - 12:15 AM

Monsters that live on the margins of maps; libels about Jewish neighbors; King Arthur’s questing knights; fantastical tales of unknown islands; Shakespearean stage productions; cannibals, crusaders, and Muslim princesses: the foundational elements of much of English literature are inseparable from the history of race. This course examines some of the earliest incarnations of race-making in medieval and early modern English literature, in all their vast strangeness and discomfiting familiarity. What about our contemporary assumptions about race might shift when we consider its earliest discourses? How might the racial ideologies of the past help us to imagine our present differently? We will also read theorists of comparative racial critique. No prior knowledge or expertise in early literature required. [3] (Diverse Perspectives or Pre-1800, HCA, cumulative 3.4 G.P.A. is required)

ENGL 3611.01: The Romantic Period: The Passions and the Horrors

Mark Schoenfield

TR 9:30 - 10:45 AM

While glory seemed betrayed, while patriot zeal

Sank in our hearts, we felt as men should feel

With such vast hordes of hidden carnage near;

And horror breathing from the silent ground.

So wrote WilliamWordsworth, upon visiting the fields of Waterloo, with its stray discarded bullets, tatters of ripped uniforms, and occasional scraps of brittle bones, after Napoleon’s final defeat.  Mary Shelley’s alienated creature in Frankenstein felt “revenge” was “the devouring and only passion of my soul” and, in confronting his maker, confronted romantic-era culture. Romantic literature reflects a time of revolution, when Britain feared enemy invasion, confronted its own dreadful engagement in the slave trade, faced famine and the massive disruptions of industrialization.  Its writers sought new literary genres and theoretical formulations of the mind to understand this turbulence.  We will explore poets, novelists, and journalists whose experiments in writing transformed aesthetic norms and social understandings.  In this discussion-based course, students will collaborate on presentations and use their papers to think more deeply about the issues and texts that interest them most. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 3630.01: The Modern British Novel

Elizabeth Covington

MWF 10:10 - 11:00 AM

What do anarchists, gaslighting, Venetian boatmen, and a lighthouse have in common? They all figure prominently in modern British novels! In this course, we will read a selection of British novels spanning from 1907 to 2019, and we will explore various issues including gender, race, sexuality, colonialism, and war. The course will also address urgent contemporary issues related to human rights, late capitalism, race relations, and gendered violence. You will hone your critical thinking and writing skills by engaging with some of the most celebrated and exciting texts in British literary history. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 3654W.01: African American Literature: Literatures of Slavery and Emancipation

Ajay Batra

TR 9:30 - 10:45 AM

African American literature first emerged against a backdrop of captivity, forced migration, and enslavement. Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Black writers transcended strict prohibitions against reading and writing to craft complex literary works that reflected powerfully on their diverse experiences of displacement, oppression, and spiritual awakening, as well as their practices of survival and their collective pursuit of liberation. In this course, we will attend closely to both major and minor works from this foundational period in African American literary history. Reading a combination of poems, essays, autobiographies, sermons, plays, and prose fiction, we will examine how Black writers creatively repurposed conventional forms and genres in order to tell their stories, construct their identities, create beauty, and speak truth to power. In addition, we will read a small selection of historical documents that chronicle the efforts of Black communities to resist conditions of bondage and to define freedom on their own terms. Major authors discussed in this course may include Phillis Wheatley (Peters), David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet E. Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, and W. E. B. Du Bois. [3] (Diverse Perspectives, HCA)

ENGL 3662.01: Asian American Literature

Huan He

TR 2:45 - 4:00 PM

What is “Asian American” about Asian American literature and culture? Is it the identity of an author, the representation of a character, a familiar narrative trope, a political orientation, an aesthetic or style, or perhaps something else entirely unseen? This question will guide us through the limitations and possibilities of cohering a set of works through racial identity and identification. The punchline is that there is no neat answer to this question, and we’ll see that Asian American writers (as well as artists and filmmakers) draw from a rich aesthetic repertoire, one that reflects recognizable forms and traditions but also pushes the boundaries of these established ways of writing about the world and its pressing issues. So, along the way, we’ll look at how these writers and artists have creatively and urgently responded to larger questions about identity, migration, war, capitalism, colonialism, and solidarity. In our discussion seminar, we may read works by Maxine Hong Kingston, Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Theresa H.K. Cha, Ocean Vuong, Thi Bui, Shani Mootoo, and Charles Yu, plus theoretical essays scattered throughout. In addition to two essays and discussion posts, students have the opportunity to propose a research or creative project as a final assignment. [3] (Diverse Perspectives, HCA)

ENGL 3720.01: Literature, Science, and Technology: Early Modern Science, Race, and Empire

Pavneet Aulakh

TR 1:15 - 2:30 PM

This course will examine the relationship between science, the establishment and expansion of European empires in the “new world,” and race-making during the scientific revolution. The three foci organizing this course are rooted in the period’s consistent framing of the project for scientific advancement as a mastering of Nature aimed at “enlarging the bounds of Human Empire.” Motivated by the celebratory declarations of early scientists that the “newfound world” discovered by a microscope must, like Mexico, “be conquered by a Cortesian army” and that “There is an America of secrets, and unknown Peru of Nature” awaiting mastery, we will explore how the cataloguing, collecting, and representation of the peoples, flora, and fauna of the new world in early modern ethnographies, scientific writing, and literary works evidence not only a taxonomizing impulse, but also a formative moment in the history of science’s application to the fictional construction of racial difference. [3] (Pre-1800, HCA)

ENGL 3726.01: New Media: Race and Digital Culture (Honors Seminar)

Mezzanine with ENGL 8442.01

Huan He

TR 4:15 - 5:30 PM

Can virtual reality automate empathy with others? How do video games make race and racism playable? Who labors to make our digital worlds possible? How does AI reproduce an imaginary of the human that reinforces whiteness? This course examines the dreams and nightmares that make up our collectively experienced “digital age,” which has a long history before the Internet and social media. We will read theoretical essays, literature, art, and interactive media to understand the embodied stakes of digitality and address questions of race and identity in online and virtual spaces. We will study how technologies perpetuate new and old forms of domination, and we will learn from writers and artists who imagine alternative digital futures. Certain days will be dedicated to hands-on activities with new media technologies such as VR, ChatGPT, and gaming consoles. No technical knowledge is required. In addition to written assignments, students will propose a final research or multimedia project based on individual interest. [3] (Diverse Perspectives, HCA, cumulative 3.4 G.P.A. is required)

ENGL 3728.01: Science Fiction: The Golden Age to Afrofuturism

Jay Clayton

MWF 9:05 - 9:55 AM

Science fiction is one of the dominant genres of the 21st century. In fiction, film, and TV, dystopian scenarios involving AI, robots, climate change, and cloning vie with dreams of technological perfection. This course looks at the distinctive modes of imagination that define the genre that defines our time. How does SF influence and respond to society? How do we decide questions of literary value and canon formation? Readings will range from H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine to “golden age” stories by Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, and Bradbury to novels and short stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, N.K. Jemisin, and Nnedi Okorafor. Films will include Blade Runner, Dune, Interstellar, Gravity, Annihilation, Gattaca, and Arrival.

ENGL 3734.01: Law and Literature: U.S. Empire

Helen Makhdoumian

MWF 1:25 - 2:15 PM

This course explores a couple of interrelated questions: How do authors revisit and re-present law and governmentality in poetry and prose? How do they depict legal institutions, processes of adjudication, and calls for social justice? How can we use the tools of literary studies to analyze and interpret legalistic writings? Potential texts include Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, Margaret Verble’s Stealing, Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine, as well as various additional short stories and creative nonfiction essays. [3] (Diverse Perspectives, HCA)

ENGL 3892.01: Special Topics in Critical Theory: Modernity, Religion, and Secularization

Alex Dubilet

TR 11:00 - 12:15 AM

From its beginnings, modern critical thought has taken religion as its primary target: From early modern historical criticism of the Bible to Enlightenment struggle against superstition and heteronomy to Marx’s famous statement that the critique of religion is the presupposition of all critique. Modernity claims to overcome religion and inaugurate a secular, human era of reason. This seminar engages a wide array of classical and contemporary texts to critically investigate such histories of critique, narratives of secularization, and claims of secular modernity. We will read such authors as Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Jacob Taubes, Sylvia Wynter, Talal Asad, and Saba Mahmood to ask: How do such progressive and emancipatory visions of modernity hide more ambivalent relations to state power? How are processes of secularization (moving from God to Man) connected to processes of racialization (that designate some as less than human or not human at all)? Do we know what we mean when we say “religion” and “secularism”? And how does the theological persist in putatively secular realities such as political sovereignty, law, history, and violence? [3] (HCA)

ENGL 3894.01: Major Figures in Literature: Ernest Hemingway

Gabriel Briggs

MWF 11:15 - 12:05 PM

Ernest Hemingway's influence on American Literature is profound and enduring. From his Nick Adams stories to his cross-continental reporting and award-winning novels, he transformed the way readers see, hear, and understand prose fiction. Despite his legacy, Hemingway remains an enigma. Often overlooked in contemporary classrooms and commonly misunderstood by a mythology that lingers about his public persona, Hemingway's writing comments on critical periods in our nation's past and captures critical insights on American expatriate existence. We will interrogate literary moments of war, romance and alienation and the vivid style that left an indelible imprint on the face of American Literature to constantly explore and examine. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 3894.02: Major Figures in Literature: Jane Austen and Her World

Roger Moore

TR 4:15 - 5:30 PM

Upon reading Pride and Prejudice, Winston Churchill famously declared, “What calm lives they had, those people. No worries about the French Revolution or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars. Only manners controlling natural passion so far as they could, together with cultured explanations of any mischances.” That Jane Austen was untouched by the historical and political upheavals of her day, that in her novels she avoids avoid serious issues in favor of polite investigations of manners, as Churchill implies, is a pervasive misunderstanding of her work. In this course, we will read all six of Austen’s novels in their historical context and will discover just how deeply engaged she was with the world around her. In defining Austen’s world, we will consider not only relevant historical sources but the literary works that informed her writing. If you already love Jane Austen, or if you simply want to explore a new author, there is no better time to study her than in 2025, the 250th anniversary of her birth. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 3898.01: Special Topics: Women in Pop

Emily Lordi

TR 9:30 - 10:45 AM

From Whitney to Britney, Madonna to Chappell, Rihanna to Taylor, women in pop have shaped American music and taste for decades. We’ll examine women artists in pop first and foremost as artists—creators of meaningful, fun and inimitable responses to the world (whether or not they write their own songs). We’ll analyze lyrics, as well as other musical and performative elements that contribute to a song’s overall meaning. We’ll also look at videos, interviews, documentaries, social media accounts and other mediums through which women artists present themselves and their visions to the world. We’ll ask what makes certain pop stars such celebrated interpreters of contemporary life. How do they capture nebulous feelings and nuanced identities? What do they mean to their fans? And finally, what is the specifically gendered cost of their fame? We’ll explore these issues by reading some of America’s most incisive music critics, journalists, and historians, all of whom model different ways of listening to and contextualizing these artists’ work. [3] (Diverse Perspectives, HCA)

ENGL 3898.02: Special Topics: 1925: A Year in Art, Literature, and Film

Scott Juengel

TR 1:15 - 2:30 PM

One hundred years ago the Western world was emerging from a pandemic, witnessing the rise of authoritarianism, and losing faith in its democratic institutions, which were thought to be governed by a “phantom public.”  It also happened to be one of the most extraordinary years of literary, artistic, and cultural production in modern times. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway; Kafka’s The Trial; Cather’s The Professor’s House; Hemingway’s debut, In Our Time; Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer; Alain Locke’s anthology of the Harlem Renaissance; Chaplin’s The Gold Rush; Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin; Dreiser’s An American Tragedy; Maugham’s The Painted Veil; T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” and Langston Hughes’s “The Weary Blues”; Hitchcock directs his first film; Louis Armstrong forms his own band; Walter Benjamin submits his work on the Trauerspiel; Walter Lippmann publishes The Phantom Public and Marcel Mauss, The Gift; there are key developments in the history of television and in quantum mechanics.  And here in Tennessee, the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial.  This course is the study of a single, remarkable year, mostly but not exclusively through its art and literature.  What is involved in breaking history down per annum?  How should we understand the relationship between cultural disquiet and creativity? [3] (HCA)

ENGL 4998.01: Honors Thesis

Rachel Teukolsky

W 2:30 - 4:45 PM

The Honors Colloquium prepares students to write their Honors Thesis in the spring (Engl. 4999). Through shared readings, students explore critical, theoretical, and creative approaches to literary texts and methodologies. Students learn research methods, effective modes of argumentation, and creative techniques. Over the course of the semester, students develop their thesis topics, both critical and creative, as they work collaboratively together in writing groups. The colloquium is reserved for students who have applied and been admitted to the English Honors Program; for more information on the honors program, please contact your advisor or Mark Schoenfield, the Director of Undergraduate Studies. [3] (No AXLE credit)

For more information on how to apply, visit the Honors Program page here.

ENGL 1101.01: Creative Writing Tutorial: Fiction

Langston Cotman

TBD

This fiction tutorial is designed to assist students in the development of independent writing projects. This is a self-directed course, meaning students are expected to bring personal work to be reviewed and discussed with the instructor on a weekly basis. The instructor will tailor their instruction to each student in an effort to best encourage and assist the student’s self-directed creative pursuits. Each session is an opportunity for revision, guidance for new material, and receiving any form of feedback or recommendation that may contribute to the student’s intent. Students of any skill level or discipline are encouraged to apply. [1] (No AXLE credit) 

ENGL 1102.01: Creative Writing Tutorial: Poetry

Ajla Dizdarevic

TBD

Course description TBA. [1] (No AXLE credit) 

ENGL 1280.01: Beginning Fiction Workshop

Yevheniia Dubrova

MWF 9:05 - 9:55 AM

Have a story simmering in your mind but not sure how to get it onto the page? Or maybe you’ve never tried writing fiction but are curious to see where your imagination can take you? In this workshop, we’ll explore the craft of storytelling—how to create compelling characters, shape vivid scenes, and build tension that keeps readers turning the page.

Through weekly writing exercises, close readings of classic and contemporary fiction, and thoughtful peer feedback in the workshop setting, you’ll sharpen your instincts as a storyteller and learn to revise with intention. By the end of the semester, you’ll write two original short stories, experiment with different narrative techniques,  and discover what makes a story feel alive. No prior experience necessary—just bring your curiosity, a willingness to write, and an openness to seeing your work in new ways. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1280.02: Beginning Fiction Workshop

Kanchi Sharma

MWF 11:15 - 12:05 PM

Together, we will develop a toolkit in the craft of fiction. We will discuss published stories with a critical eye – what are the tools used? How do the creative choices affect the reader’s response? We will read and discuss craft essays and form our own opinions about the definitions and rules of fiction. Just like writing, workshopping is a muscle that needs to be practiced and developed with intention. We will learn how to workshop each story with care, in a manner that centres the agency of each writer. Every student will get the opportunity to workshop thrice in the semester. For the third story, students are encouraged to explore and experiment with forms and length. You may choose to have fun with a few micros, flash fiction, or continue with another short story. The intention is to come out of this class with two to three new stories, a deeper understanding of fiction, and self-confidence in your voice. Hopefully, you may also find a community of readers that can nourish and nurture your writing beyond the class.

This workshop intends to be a safe space for writers who are keen to develop their voice. We aren’t looking for perfection but authenticity and intention. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1280.03: Beginning Fiction Workshop

Johnny Nagle

MWF 1:25 - 2:15 PM

If you can make the reader laugh he is apt to get careless and go on reading

-Henry Green

In this course, we’ll embark on a journey of creative discovery. Have you ever sat down to write a story, only to find yourself stuck by the third sentence? Or wondered why you can write personal essays beautifully, but struggle the moment you have to create something entirely fictional? By studying a wide range of novel excerpts and short fiction, we will break writing down into key components like voice, perspective, character, plot, and structure. We’ll explore the art of storytelling and the craft behind writing beautiful sentences. Some of you may discover a knack for storytelling, while others will learn to see literature from a writer’s perspective.

Throughout the term, we will discuss classic pieces of fiction and attempt to craft our own. Students will submit two original short stories, which we will discuss in class in a friendly, respectful, and safe environment. Constructive feedback will be provided, and one of these pieces will be revised extensively and turned in at the end of the term. This is a beginner’s course designed for students interested in developing their passion for writing. No prior experience is required, but a genuine interest is essential. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1290.01: Beginning Poetry Workshop

Lana Reeves

MWF 10:10 - 11:00 AM

This introductory workshop is for all poetry lovers, or for anyone intrigued by words and their possibilities on the page. We will read a broad array of 20th century and contemporary poets, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Don Mee Choi, Ocean Vuong, Safia Elhillo, and Amanda Gunn, and we will analyze the tricks and tools these poets use to create impactful poems. In addition, we will write our own weekly poems, and we’ll discuss these drafts together in an inclusive, respectful workshop environment. Students will also work toward a final portfolio of revised poems, which will showcase their growth as writers, readers, and literary thinkers over the course of the semester. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1290.02: Beginning Poetry Workshop

Kinsale Drake

MWF 2:30 - 3:20 PM

In this introductory poetry workshop, we will explore contemporary poetry, expand the possibilities of our own work, and elevate our poems through exploration and interrogation: What is being said? What is the music and the meaning of it? What is the role of the poet in the current world, and where do we map ourselves within the literary ecosystem? Students will encounter Natalie Diaz, Walt Whitman, Layli Long Soldier, Ocean Vuong, Natasha Tretheway, and poetry ancestors that speak to them. We will endeavor to focus on learning and pushing the limits of poetic form, expressing ourselves as artists and caretakers of this world, as well as practicing our roles as literary citizens within the workshop space through conversations, lively close-readings, and craft. Beginner and experienced poets welcome. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1290.03: Beginning Poetry Workshop

Sydney Mayes

TR 9:30 - 10:45 AM

In this beginning poetry workshop, we will explore all the possibilities of what poetry can do—for us as individuals and as a community. Students will engage with the work of poets like Sharon Olds, Donika Kelly, José Olivarez, Kaveh Akbar, Evie Shockley and Danez Smith. Students will write poems that reflect their interior and exterior lives. These poems will then be workshopped in a safe and inclusive community. This class will be a rigorous introduction to craft and the contemporary poetic landscape. With a heavy focus on form, we will be exploring constraint as a tool to develop students’ poetic capabilities and knowledge of what a poem is, has been and can be. No prior experience needed. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 3215.01: The Art of Blogging

Amanda Little

W 3:35 - 6:35 PM 

Are blogs dead? On the rise? Have they supplanted journalism? Transformed it? Students will explore how blogging began, what it is today, and why it still matters. They'll critique influential blogs, Substacks and online journalism and examine the roots of self-published manifestoes dating back to 17th-century pamphleteers. They'll look to the future, exploring podcasting and the micro-blogging phenomenon of social media. Students will create and regularly update their own blogs and are encouraged to push outside their comfort zones, engaging in the current news cycle on topics from arts and culture to science and politics. A 500-1000 word writing sample on a topic of the student's choosing is required for enrollment into this course. Please submit your application to Professor Little by March 31st at amanda.g.little@vanderbilt.edu. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 3230.01: Intermediate Fiction Workshop

Sheba Karim

TR 1:15 - 2:30 PM 

Great writing requires dedication, imagination and…revision! In this course, you’ll learn what it means to rework a short story. During the course of the semester, you will hone your writing and revision skills. You will also read published stories and essays on craft, read and critique original narratives by peers, and complete writing exercises.  This class is for fiction writers looking to further develop, explore and refine their craft and narrative techniques. The heart of this course is the workshop, the development and discussion of your own creative work. The final for the course will consist of a final revision of your short story. [3; maximum of 6 credits total for all semesters of ENGL 3230] (HCA)

In order to enroll in this course, it is required that you either a) have already taken the Beginning Fiction Workshop class or any Intermediate or Advanced creative writing workshop, or b) have permission from the instructor. You can contact Professor Karim here. 

ENGL 3230.02: Intermediate Fiction Workshop: Speculative Fiction Writing 

Justin Quarry

TR 2:45 - 4:00 PM 

How can a story be both literary and genre?  How can fantasy in literary fiction not only drive plot but also develop character?  In exploring such questions, this workshop aims to broaden students’ knowledge of craft and strengthen their utilization of literary techniques simultaneous to teaching them how to incorporate speculative elements in their work.  The main texts for the course will be approximately 24 stories written by workshop members, but students also will read and examine craft essays and contemporary American short fiction to better understand how to apply what they learn.  The final for the course will consist of significant revisions of both stories produced during the semester.  [3; maximum of 6 credits total for all semesters of ENGL 3230] (HCA)

In order to enroll in this course, it is required that you either a) have already taken the Beginning Fiction Workshop class or any Intermediate or Advanced creative writing workshop, or b) have permission from the instructor. You can contact Professor Quarry here. 

ENGL 3250.01: Intermediate Poetry Workshop

Rick Hilles

TR 4:15 - 5:30 PM 

This course is a discussion- and a workshop-based course in which we will study the craft of poetry writing. This semester we will concentrate on traditional elements of poetry—meter, rhyme, and form. In other words, this will be a class in verse as much as poetry. Each week, we will discuss an aspect of what is called prosody: metrical feet, rhyme schemes, stanzas, and forms like the sonnet, the villanelle, and the sestina. You will discover that there is a wide latitude within the limitations of form, which is not surprising considering that most poetry in English is written in formal rather than free verse, the latter being a relatively young and largely American innovation. But we will talk about free verse, too, and you will have the opportunity to write it, as well. In addition to weekly assigned readings (designed to educate and inspire you with our weekly writing assignments), I will ask you to attend the poetry readings in the VU Visiting Writers Series and to write a brief (3 page, double spaced) listener’s response for each one, which you may submit to me with your final portfolio. [Subject to change.] [3] (HCA)

In order to enroll in this course, it is required that you either a) have already taken the Beginning Poetry Workshop class or any Intermediate or Advanced creative writing workshop, or b) have permission from the instructor. You can contact Professor Hilles here.

ENGL 3343.01: Race and Early Modernity (Honors Seminar)

Mezzanine with ENGL 8331.01

Shoshana Adler

TR 11:00 - 12:15 AM

Monsters that live on the margins of maps; libels about Jewish neighbors; King Arthur’s questing knights; fantastical tales of unknown islands; Shakespearean stage productions; cannibals, crusaders, and Muslim princesses: the foundational elements of much of English literature are inseparable from the history of race. This course examines some of the earliest incarnations of race-making in medieval and early modern English literature, in all their vast strangeness and discomfiting familiarity. What about our contemporary assumptions about race might shift when we consider its earliest discourses? How might the racial ideologies of the past help us to imagine our present differently? We will also read theorists of comparative racial critique. No prior knowledge or expertise in early literature required. [3] (Diverse Perspectives or Pre-1800, HCA, cumulative 3.4 G.P.A. is required)

ENGL 3726.01: New Media: Race and Digital Culture (Honors Seminar)

Mezzanine with ENGL 8442.01

Huan He

TR 4:15 - 5:30 PM

Can virtual reality automate empathy with others? How do video games make race and racism playable? Who labors to make our digital worlds possible? How does AI reproduce an imaginary of the human that reinforces whiteness? This course examines the dreams and nightmares that make up our collectively experienced “digital age,” which has a long history before the Internet and social media. We will read theoretical essays, literature, art, and interactive media to understand the embodied stakes of digitality and address questions of race and identity in online and virtual spaces. We will study how technologies perpetuate new and old forms of domination, and we will learn from writers and artists who imagine alternative digital futures. Certain days will be dedicated to hands-on activities with new media technologies such as VR, ChatGPT, and gaming consoles. No technical knowledge is required. In addition to written assignments, students will propose a final research or multimedia project based on individual interest. [3] (Diverse Perspectives, HCA, cumulative 3.4 G.P.A. is required)

ENGL 4998.01: Honors Thesis

Rachel Teukolsky

W 2:30 - 4:45 PM

The Honors Colloquium prepares students to write their Honors Thesis in the spring (Engl. 4999). Through shared readings, students explore critical, theoretical, and creative approaches to literary texts and methodologies. Students learn research methods, effective modes of argumentation, and creative techniques. Over the course of the semester, students develop their thesis topics, both critical and creative, as they work collaboratively together in writing groups. The colloquium is reserved for students who have applied and been admitted to the English Honors Program; for more information on the honors program, please contact your advisor or Mark Schoenfield, the Director of Undergraduate Studies. [3] (No AXLE credit)

For more information on how to apply, visit the Honors Program page here.

ENGL 7430.01: Graduate Fiction Workshop

ZZ Packer

T 3:35 - 6:35 PM

This course takes up the study of fiction writing at the graduate level. Each student will workshop three stories, the third being an optional exercise or a third complete story. Students will engage in workshop in an open, safe environment, critiquing elements of craft, theme, and content at a high level. We will engage in in-depth readings of published works that reflect the interests of the cohort, reading one or two short novels and a handful of short stories. [4] 

ENGL 7440.01: Graduate Poetry Workshop

Rick Hilles

W 3:35 - 6:35 PM

This workshop is designed to enhance and help you further deepen your art and aesthetic sensibilities. As this is a discussion class, it is vital to our shared ecosystem that you come fully prepared to attend each session in a spirit of active, open, passionate (and compassionate) engagement. The primary focus of this graduate poetry workshop will be your work-in-progress. Together we will also read books of poetry (modern and contemporary) mostly in conjunction with the VU Visiting Writers Series. I also invite you to email me, if there are poets and/or specific books of poetry that you would love to together this semester. The hope is that by examining these individual volumes—their urgencies, themes, and organizing structures—it will help you shape and organize your own. In addition to writing your own work, providing written commentary on the work of your peers, and the assigned readings, I will also ask you to write one ten to twelve page (double-spaced) reflective essay on yourself as a poet as well as on your influences, both literary and other urgencies that bear down on you in your writing (as prep for your thesis foreword). [Subject to change.] [4] 

ENGL 7460.01: Literature and the Craft of Writing: Forms of Poetry

Su Cho

M 4:40 - 7:40 PM

It is no secret that American poetry is built on and thrives on the multilingual and sonic diversity of the people living here. We all, yes, all of us, inhabit a multifaceted relationship with language–whether that’s because you speak another language or have an accent or modulate for different audiences. In this class, we will put this multilingual, multifaceted approach at the forefront of our craft by reading across genres. Let’s see what happens to our poetry when we embrace the fear of failure and reject the binary of being understood or misunderstood. Let’s embrace the possibility of what Cathy Park Hong describes as “illegibility [being] a political act.” Let’s experiment with this kind of willful poetics in our own poetry and offer it up to each other. [4] 

ENGL 7460.02: Literature and the Craft of Writing: Forms of Fiction

Lorrie Moore

M 3:35 - 6:35 PM

Course description TBA. [4] 

ENGL 8110.01: Proseminar

Jessie Hock

W 12:00 - 2:50 PM

The proseminar provides an introduction to English graduate studies through attention to both practical and theoretical issues. We will preview the arc of progress through the PhD program, from the art of the seminar paper to developing a dissertation project. Special attention will be paid to developing the writing skills necessary for professional success; you will draft and exchange conference abstracts, conference papers, and book reviews. We will also examine the stages through which an essay, that begins as a conference or seminar paper, may move toward publication. Together we will read a host of theoretical and critical essays that cover established and emerging approaches across historical periods, geographic areas, and genres. [4] 

ENGL 8120.01: Pedagogy Seminar

Candice Amich

MW 4:40 - 5:55 PM

This is a learning-intensive workshop where you will plan your spring 2026 1000-level class. We will emphasize a learning-centered, student-oriented approach to teaching, and a revision-based approach to writing instruction. You will learn how to plan your class holistically, to backward design from clearly defined learning goals. You will design assignments from assessment models that connect organically and transparently to your learning goals for the class. You will get ideas for interacting with and managing classroom affect to produce better learning for your students. You will learn, in tandem with your observation of other courses, to design and run fruitful class discussions with your students’ learning outcomes in mind. You will learn to evaluate and comment productively on student papers. You will finish with a fully designed class, with plans for each day, with discussion plans, writing and recall exercises, and other classroom activities. [4] 

ENGL 8331.01: Studies in Medieval and Early-Modern British Literature

Mezzanine with ENGL 3343.01

Shoshana Adler

TR 11:00 - 12:15 AM

Monsters that live on the margins of maps; libels about Jewish neighbors; King Arthur’s questing knights; fantastical tales of unknown islands; Shakespearean stage productions; cannibals, crusaders, and Muslim princesses: the foundational elements of much of English literature are inseparable from the history of race. This course examines some of the earliest incarnations of race-making in medieval and early modern English literature, in all their vast strangeness and discomfiting familiarity. What about our contemporary assumptions about race might shift when we consider its earliest discourses? How might the racial ideologies of the past help us to imagine our present differently? We will also read theorists of comparative racial critique. No prior knowledge or expertise in early literature required. [4] 

ENGL 8410.01: Studies in Romantic and Victorian Literatures: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Visual Culture

Rachel Teukolsky

M 12:20 - 3:10 PM

This interdisciplinary course will study nineteenth-century British literature alongside the era’s visual culture. “Visual culture” is a newer branch of visual studies that expands the art-historical field to include not only paintings and sculptures but also more popular, mass-circulated items and experiences. The nineteenth century witnessed the explosion of visual culture in objects that ranged from hand-held stereoscopes to panoramas to world exhibitions. The course will approach the topic from multiple angles. We’ll read literary works remarkable for their visual play, including works by Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë (among others). We’ll consider the influential art criticism of John Ruskin, who used a deeply political lens to theorize aesthetics. We’ll explore some key archives of nineteenth-century visual culture, including illustrated books, advertising posters, and representations of the Great Exhibition of 1851, usually considered the first world’s fair. Class meetings will also consider Victorian photography, illustration, ekphrasis, criminality, and empire, as well as the 1890s invention of cinema. Important theorists will include W.J.T. Mitchell, Walter Benjamin, Jonathan Crary, Tom Gunning, Anne McClintock, Michel Foucault, and Sharon Marcus, among others. The course welcomes both novices and more advanced readers. We will also take a field trip to the Vanderbilt Museum of Art, for a curator-led tour of the fall exhibition (“Paper Backs: Hidden Stories of European Prints from VUMA’s Collection”) and a dive into Vanderbilt’s special holdings in the nineteenth century. [4] 

ENGL 8442.01: Media Studies: Race and Digital Culture 

Mezzanine with ENGL 3726.01

Huan He

TR 4:15 - 5:30 PM

Can virtual reality automate empathy with others? How do video games make race and racism playable? Who labors to make our digital worlds possible? How does AI reproduce an imaginary of the human that reinforces whiteness? This course examines the dreams and nightmares that make up our collectively experienced “digital age,” which has a long history before the Internet and social media. We will read theoretical essays, literature, art, and interactive media to understand the embodied stakes of digitality and address questions of race and identity in online and virtual spaces. We will study how technologies perpetuate new and old forms of domination, and we will learn from writers and artists who imagine alternative digital futures. Certain days will be dedicated to hands-on activities with new media technologies such as VR, ChatGPT, and gaming consoles. No technical knowledge is required. In addition to written assignments, students will propose a final research or multimedia project based on individual interest. [4]

CAL 2180.01: Friction in the Machine: Society, Technology, Safety, Freedom

Dana Nelson

TR 4:15 - 5:30 PM

From Walden to Why We Drive, this class study structures of individual, communal, corporate and technological freedom.  What is the relation of individual to society, the citizen to the polity?  What does it mean to be a free modern individual, a free modern citizen, a free modern country, a free market society?  How have structures for and ideas about freedom changed from the early nineteenth-century to now?  What are the ideas, aims and techniques or technologies ordering those changes?  We’ll read novels, watch a movie, and read political anthropology, philosophy and social psychology.  We’ll think about everything from enclosure, city planning, modern crop science, social media, demolition derby and driverless cars. This class will help you explore the questions above and generate more of your own in US history and in our own American lives. [3] 

CORE 2500.03: Exploratory Core: Forgiving: Why To Do It and How

Dana Nelson

TR 2:45 - 4:00 PM

We live in a cancel culture. Red lines abound. Family members, colleagues, fellows are exiled, and everything is beyond someone's pale. At the same time, occasions for injury proliferate. Anger amplifies algorithms, which feed and profit from our growing unhappiness and sense of aloneness. How to regain agency and connection in this landscape? Drawing on behavioral and moral psychology, as well as on diverse literary sources, this course will examine the question of forgiveness: who does it, why, how, and what it can accomplish. The course will also touch on theories and practices of restorative justice. [3]

CORE 2500.09: Exploratory Core: On Lying and Deception

Matthew Congdon and Scott Juengel

TR 9:30 - 10:45 AM

This course responds to the ongoing erosion of civil discourse and prevalence of lying as a political strategy by studying the social and ethical consequences of making false claims. Surveying a range of canonical meditations on lying in philosophy and literature from antiquity to our contemporary condition, this class will use the study of deception as a means of introducing students to the philosophy of language, the ethico-political function of deceit, and theories of fictionality and literary worldmaking. Authors discussed in this course will include Plato, Shakespeare, Kant, J.L. Austin, and Hannah Arendt, among others. [3]

CORE 2500.19: Exploratory Core: Contemporary Writers at Work

Major Jackson

R 5:00 - 8:00 PM

For multiple decades, Vanderbilt University has hosted award-winning writers. This course is designed as an active critical and real-world engagement of contemporary writers featured in the Gertrude C. and Harold S. Vanderbilt Reading Series. We willread books of fiction and poetry and attend as a class literary readings hosted by the English Department. Our goal is to observe how contemporary authors tell stories, sing ourlives, and testthe boundaries of literary form. We will study and examine how writers deploy language, style, voice, and structure atits highestreaches. We willread an exciting cross-section of writers whose works offerinsightinto the process and ethics of narration and capture of lyric subjectivity, yet also profoundly underscore the human journey. The abiding question we will explore is how writers imaginatively address cultural, social, historical, and political questions of ourtimes. How do literary event and curation act as a vital cultural practice in society. Additionally, students will get a sense ofthe ecosystem surrounding literary programming, one thatincludes an up-close perspective ofthe curatorial process, marketing, and implementation of a vibrantreading series. By the end ofterm, students will emerge with a material understanding of how contemporary literature is composed,read, edited, discussed and circulated as a cultural artifacttoday. [3]

GSS 2242.01: Women Who Kill

Kathryn Schwarz

TR 4:15 - 5:30 PM

Western cultural history is shaped by acts of violence. What then does it mean to define violence in gendered terms, and to focus on violent women? Classical writers tell stories about murderous mothers and Amazon warriors; Renaissance writers warn men that their wives could kill them in their beds; Victorian writers accuse ‘hysterical’ women of homicidal tendencies; contemporary novels and films recycle plots about lesbian serial killers; modern political discourse tethers clichés about feminine emotions to the threat of global war. How does the capacity for lethal acts give women access to power? How does a fixation on that capacity license masculine oppression? This course will connect the fascination with deadly women to what might broadly be termed politics: the politics of agency, misogyny, history, identity, and community. Discussions will range from classical texts to modern novels, films, cultural theories, and new media. Course requirements will include a group presentation, short research projects, informal meditations, and regular class participation. [3] (P)

ENGL 1210W.01: Reading Fiction: The Art of Style

Gabriel Briggs - Online Synchronous

MTWRF 1:10 - 4:00 PM 

Ernest Hemingway's influence on American Literature is profound and enduring. From his Nick Adams stories to his cross-continental reporting and award-winning novels, he transformed the way readers see, hear, and understand prose fiction. Despite his legacy, Hemingway remains an enigma. Often overlooked in contemporary classrooms and commonly misunderstood by a mythology that lingers about his public persona, Hemingway's writing comments on critical periods in our nation's past and captures critical insights on American expatriate existence. We will interrogate literary moments of war, romance and alienation and the vivid style that left an indelible imprint on the face of American Literature to constantly explore and examine. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1260W.01: Literature and Culture: Love Books: Sex and Literature from Antiquity to Early Modernity

Jessie Hock - Online Asynchronous

What does it mean to write about love, beauty, and pleasure in the expectation that someone else will read what you have written? From a spiritual, sublime, or cosmological force to an embodied, even pornographic or ridiculous experience, “love” in the texts we will read in this class is a highly diverse phenomenon. However varied, the idea of love allows poets and philosophers to explore what it means to write, think, and read about subjectivity, identity, and emotion. We will begin with three of the most influential ancient authors (Lucretius, Ovid, and Virgil), all of whom link desire to the forces of unreason, violence, madness, and poetic fantasy, and then turn to Renaissance writers in Italy, France, and England. We will pay particular attention to the rise of a new tradition of love as a form of lyric autobiography and to articulations of female pleasure, desire, and sexual experience. Finally, we will explore “libertine” movements in which narratives about apparently “deviant” lovers enable social critique and dissent.

Readings will include texts by Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Petrarch, Labé, Stampa, Ronsard, Montaigne, Donne, Shakespeare, Marvell, Behn, Rochester, and more, and will span a wide range of genres, including epic, lyric, dramatic, autobiography, and philosophical prose. Students will understand major episodes in the cultural and literary history of Augustan Rome and Renaissance Europe, and will reflect on love’s role as a philosophical, literary, and physical concept in both ancient and Renaissance literature and philosophy. Students will also gain awareness of the fluidity of gender identifications and the sexual freedom of ancient and Renaissance poetry. Finally, students will become skilled at reading, analyzing, and discussing poetry. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1100.01: Composition

Elizabeth Covington - In Person

MTWRF 10:10 - 12:00 PM

The primary objectives of this course are to demystify the college-level essay and to develop your writing skills so that you will be able to write quality essays during and after your time at Vanderbilt. In addition to thinking about questions of style, we will conduct in-depth investigations of the three fundamental elements of an excellent essay: analysis, argumentation, and explication. I will ask you to think critically and to craft subtle, persuasive, well-reasoned essays. The analytical and argumentative skills developed in this class will help you to articulate your ideas clearly and convincingly. [3] (No AXLE credit)

ENGL 1100.02: Composition: The Art of the (Open) Letter

Jared Harvey - In Person

MTWRF 10:10 - 12:00 PM

Who do I become when I write a letter to my boss; my partner; my friend; my teacher? Who do I write for, if not to?

In this writing composition course we will start from (and also put pressure on) the supposition that all writing – even a college essay – is a kind of open letter. We’ll explore the ways the quantity of an audience changes the quality of a text (from an Instagram Story to a Close Friends Story), and the ways the nature of an occasion changes the nature of a text (in times of censorship, how do I “envelope” my words with secrecy?). Ultimately, we’ll find ways in which sharpening our ideas of our audience will sharpen our writing, our style, even our levels of authenticity. In keeping, we’ll study the works of writers who play with the form of the public letter, such as James Baldwin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rupi Kapour, and V.V. Ganeshananthan. [3] (No AXLE credit)

ENGL 1100.03: Composition: Writing, Research, and Storytelling

Mark Wisniewski - In Person

MTWRF 10:10 - 12:00 PM

Humans are unique in that we understand the world through stories. When we stop to think about it, almost everything we do is a form of storytelling. Advertisements tell us stories about how our lives would be better with different products and services. Novels, movies, television, and videogames entertain us, but also affect the way we view the world around us. What, then, about research? Is academic work another form of storytelling? This course will start from the assumption that it is. Over the course of the semester, we will engage in writing projects that explore how advertising, entertainment media, and research are all forms of storytelling, each of which raises ethical questions about how we define ourselves and others. [3] (No AXLE credit)

ENGL 1210W.02: Reading Fiction: The Art of Style

Gabriel Briggs - Online Synchronous

MTWRF 10:10 - 12:00 PM 

Ernest Hemingway's influence on American Literature is profound and enduring. From his Nick Adams stories to his cross-continental reporting and award-winning novels, he transformed the way readers see, hear, and understand prose fiction. Despite his legacy, Hemingway remains an enigma. Often overlooked in contemporary classrooms and commonly misunderstood by a mythology that lingers about his public persona, Hemingway's writing comments on critical periods in our nation's past and captures critical insights on American expatriate existence. We will interrogate literary moments of war, romance and alienation and the vivid style that left an indelible imprint on the face of American Literature to constantly explore and examine. [3] (HCA)

ENGL 1100.04: Composition: Individuals and Communities

Jordan Ivie - Online Synchronous

MTWRF 11:10 - 1:00 PM

In the 1982 sci-fi film Star Trek; the Wrath of Khan, Spock famously proclaims, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” In a divided America, it is more important than ever to genuinely consider this dynamic and explore the responsibilities of the individual to the larger community and the responsibilities of the community to the individuals that make it up. Where do individual rights end for the sake of the larger community? When does the community sacrifice in order to maintain the individual rights of its citizens? What happens when the individual comes into conflict with the community? This course explores these questions through a wide variety of genres, media, and time periods, with the ultimate goal of encouraging students to consider their own places within larger communities. Through a series of readings, essays, workshops, and other projects exploring this topic, students will also consider questions of structure, clarity, and credibility, ultimately producing a persuasive research paper on a topic of their choice. [3] (No AXLE credit)

ENGL 1260W.02: Literature and Culture: Oceans and Literature

Jeong Oh Kim - Hybrid: In-Person / Online Synchronous

MTWRF 9:10 - 11:00 AM 

My course entitled “Radiant Intertextuality” is based on the premise that in a complex world, problems must be approached from many different angles. The current focus on cross-inter-trans-disciplinarity reflects this premise. Yet all too often, interdisciplinarity is treated more as a rhetorical slogan than as an actual practice. Its transformative challenge is reduced to an additive list without clear motivation: philosophy plus literature, anthropology plus history . . . a principle of X Plus Y. We will take the challenge of interdisciplinarity seriously to ask how it changes the way we do things to encounter new subjects, to make connections across disciplines, and to develop fundamental, life-long skills that will prepare for today’s increasingly global and interconnected world: the questions we ask, the materials we work with and what we do with those materials, the forms in which we present our findings. In a sense, our interdisciplinary studies are “Oceanic”: that is, my course continually invites outside forces and influences, currents and waves, literally or figuratively, be it critical theory, literary criticism, marine science, natural philosophy, or the experience of geographic, Oceanic, and cultural difference. In subject matter, approach, and methodology, my course “Radiant Intertextuality” aims to contribute to a fresh, critical perspective on the Oceans as culture, space, atopia, and image. My course is open to students interested in scholarly practices that cut across established fields of inquiry. [3] (HCA)

Students may elect to count one of the following 1000-level courses toward their major: ENGL 1111, 1210W, 1220W, 1230W, 1240, 1250W, 1260W, 1270W, 1280, 1290. 

• ENGL 1100 Composition: For students who need to improve their writing. Emphasis on writing skills, with some analysis of modern nonfiction writing. [3] (No AXLE credit)
• ENGL 1111 First Year Writing Seminar: Independent learning and inquiry in an environment in which students can express knowledge and defend opinions through intensive class discussion, oral presentations, and written expression. May be repeated for credit once if there is no duplication of topic, but students may earn only up to 3 credits in any 1111 course per semester of enrollment. [3; maximum of 6 credits total for all semesters of 1111] (AXLE credit category varies by section)
• ENGL 1210W Prose Fiction: Forms and Techniques: Close study of short stories and novels and written explication of these forms. [3] (AXLE: 1000-level W course, HCA)
• ENGL 1220W Drama: Forms and Techniques: Close study of representative plays of the major periods and of the main formal categories (tragedy, comedy) and written explication of these forms. [3] (AXLE: 1000-level W course, HCA)
• ENGL 1230W Literature and Analytical Thinking: Close reading and writing in a variety of genres drawn from several periods. Productive dialogue, persuasive argument, and effective prose style. Offered on a graded basis only. [3] (AXLE: 1000-level W course, HCA)
• ENGL 1240 Beginning Nonfiction Workshop: Writing various forms of prose nonfiction. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 1250W Introduction to Poetry: Close study and criticism of poems. The nature of poetry, and the process of literary explication. [3] (AXLE: 1000-level W course, HCA)
• ENGL 1260W Introduction to Literary and Cultural Analysis: Analysis of a range of texts in social, political, and aesthetic contexts. Interdisciplinary study of cultural forms as diverse as poetry, advertisement, and film. [3] (AXLE: 1000-level W course, HCA)
• ENGL 1270W Introduction to Literary Criticism: Selected critical approaches to literature. [3] (AXLE: 1000-level W course, HCA)
• ENGL 1280 Beginning Fiction Workshop: Introduction to the art of writing prose fiction. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 1290 Beginning Poetry Workshop: Introduction to the art of poetry writing. [3] (HCA)

• ENGL 2200 Foundation of Literary Study: Fundamentals of literary study: close reading; analytic writing; historical context; abstract reasoning in theory; creative expression. [3] (HCA). *2200 may count as an elective in any program. Please consult your adviser.
• ENGL 2310 Representative British Writers (to 1660): Selections from British literature with attention to contexts and literary periods. From the beginnings to 1660. Provides a broad background for more specialized courses and is especially useful for students considering advanced studies in literature. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 2311 Representative British Writers (from 1660): Selections from British literature with attention to contexts and literary periods. From 1660 to the present. Provides a broad background for more specialized courses and is especially useful for students considering advanced studies in literature. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 2316 Representative American Writers: Selections from the entire body of American literature with attention to contexts and literary periods. Provides a broad background for more specialized courses and is especially useful for students considering advanced studies in literature. Repeat credit for students who have completed 2316W. [3] (US)
• ENGL 2316W Representative American Writers: Selections from the entire body of American literature with attention to contexts and literary periods. Provides a broad background for more specialized courses and is especially useful for students considering advanced studies in literature. Repeat credit for students who have completed 2316. [3] (US)
• ENGL 2318 World Literature, Classical: Great Books from the points of view of literary expression and changing ideologies: Classical Greece through the Renaissance. Repeat credit for students who have completed 2318W. [3] (HCA)
• ENG: 2318W World Literature, Classical: Great Books from the points of view of literary expression and changing ideologies: Classical Greece through the Renaissance. Repeat credit for students who have completed 2318. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 2319 World Literature, Modern: Great Books from the points of view of literary expression and changing ideologies: The 17th century to the contemporary period. Repeat credit for students who have completed 2319W. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 2319W World Literature, Modern: Great Books from the points of view of literary expression and changing ideologies: The 17th century to the contemporary period. Repeat credit for students who have completed 2319. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 2320 Southern Literature: The works of Southern writers from Captain Smith to the present. Topics such as the Plantation Myth, slavery and civil war, Agrarianism, and "post-southernism." Authors may include Poe, Twain, Cable, Faulkner, Welty, Percy, Wright. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 2330 Introduction to Environmental Humanities: Interdisciplinary study of human beings' relationship to the environment. Literary, artistic, historical, and philosophical perspectives. Cultural understandings of the environment. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 2330W Introduction to Environmental Humanities: Interdisciplinary study of human beings' relationship to the environment. Literary, artistic, historical, and philosophical perspectives. Cultural understandings of the environment. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 2740 Topics in Literature and Philosophy: Literary, philosophical, and cultural texts on varied philosophical topics. May be repeated for credit if there is no duplication in topic. Students may enroll in more than one section of this course per semester. [3] (HCA)

For Creative Writing workshops, Pre-1800 and Diverse Perspective courses, please view their corresponding sections. 

• ENGL 3215 The Art of Blogging: Conventions of the rapidly evolving literary form of blogging. Creation and maintenance of a personal blog. Critique of online journalism across many genres, including activism, politics, science, and arts and culture. Interaction with professional bloggers. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3215W The Art of Blogging: Conventions of the rapidly evolving literary form of blogging. Creation and maintenance of a personal blog. Critique of online journalism across many genres, including activism, politics, science, and arts and culture. Interaction with professional bloggers. Serves as repeat credit for students who have completed 3215. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3240W Pop Science: The Art and Impact of Popular Science Writing: Mechanics and influence of popular science writing in the 21st century. Students will critique bestselling books and award-winning journalism; develop and publish their own blogs with a focus on science, technology, and the environment; and interact with top science writers, editors, and podcasters. Not open to students who have earned credit for CSET 3890 section 01 offered fall Fall 2019. [3] (SBS)
• ENGL 3280 Literature and the Craft of Writing: The forms and techniques of creative writing. Contemporary practices in fiction and poetry in historical context. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3610 The Romantic Period: Prose and poetry of the Wordsworths, the Shelleys, Byron, Keats, and others. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3610W The Romantic Period: Prose and poetry of the Wordsworths, the Shelleys, Byron, Keats, and others. Serves as repeat credit for ENGL 3610W. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3611 The Romantic Period: Continuation of 3610. Prose and poetry of the Wordsworths, the Shelleys, Byron, Keats, and others. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3614 The Victorian Period: Works of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Hardy, and others. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3614W The Victorian Period: Works of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Hardy, and others. Serves as repeat credit for ENGL 3614. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3618 The Nighteenth-Century English Novel: The study of selected novels of Dickens, Thackeray, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and other major novelists of the period. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3620 Nighteenth-Century American Literature: Explorations of themes, forms, and social and cultural issues shaping the works of American writers. Authors may include Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Douglass, Jacobs, Stowe, Melville, Dickinson, Alcott, Whitman, and Twain. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3622 Nighteenth-Century American Women Writers: Themes and forms of American women's prose and poetry, with the emphasis on alternative visions of the frontier, progress, class, race, and self-definition. Authors include Child, Kirkland, Fern, Jacobs, Harper, Dickinson, and Chopin. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3624W Literature of the American Civil War: Origins and impact of the war as depicted in short stories, novels, poems, and films. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Stephen Crane, Margaret Mitchell, William Faulkner, and Margaret Walker. [3] (US)
• ENGL 3630 The Modern British Novel: The British novel from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Forster, and other novelists varying at the discretion of instructor. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3634 Modern Irish Literature: Major works from the Irish literary revival to the present, with special attention to the works of Yeats, Synge, Joyce, O'Casey, and Beckett. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3640 Modern British and American Poetry: Yeats to Auden: A course in the interpretation and criticism of selected modern masters of poetry, British and American, with the emphasis on poetry as an art. Poets selected may vary at discretion of instructor. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3642 Film and Modernism: Film in the context of the major themes of literary modernism: the divided self, language and realism, nihilism and belief, and spatialization of time. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3644 Twentieth Century American Novel: Explorations of themes, forms, and social cultural issues shaping the works of American novelists. Authors may include Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Hurston, Ellison, McCarthy, Bellow, Kingston, Morrison, Pynchon. Emphasizes writers before 1945. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3645 Twentieth Century American Novel: Explorations of themes, forms, and social cultural issues shaping the works of American novelists. Authors may include Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Hurston, Ellison, McCarthy, Bellow, Kingston, Morrison, Pynchon. Emphasizes writers after 1945. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3646 Poetry Since World War II: Poets studied vary at discretion of instructor. Offered on a graded basis only. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3680 Twentieth Century Drama: Topics in twentieth century drama drawn from the American, British, and/or world traditions. Formal structures of dramatic literature studied within contexts of performance, theatrical production, and specific dramatic careers. Authors may include O'Neill, Albee, Hansberry, Hellman, Stoppard, Wilson, and Churchill. Emphasizes American drama. [3] (US)
• ENGL 3681 Twentieth Century Drama: Topics in twentieth century drama drawn from the American, British, and/or world traditions. Formal structures of dramatic literature studied within contexts of performance, theatrical production, and specific dramatic careers. Authors may include O'Neill, Albee, Hansberry, Hellman, Stoppard, Wilson, and Churchill. Emphasizes British and world drama. [3] (US)
• ENGL 3683 Contemporary British Literature: The novel, short story, and verse in Great Britain since World War II. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3692 Desire in America: Literature, Cinema and History: The influence of desire and repression in shaping American culture and character from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. [3] (US)
• ENGL 3694 America on Film: Art and Ideology: American culture and character through film, film theory, and literature. [3] (US)
• ENGL 3695 America on Film: Performance and Culture: Film performance in the construction of identity and gender, social meaning and narrative, public image and influence in America. [3] (US)
• ENGL 3710 Literature and Intellectual History: Fiction, poetry, and prose writings that represent overarching themes in English and/or American literature across conventional historical periods in order to define and trace their genealogy and evolution. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3711 Literature and Intellectual History: The emergence of modern consciousness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3711 Literature and Intellectual History: The emergence of modern consciousness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Serves as repeat credit for ENGL 3711. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3720 Literature, Science and Technology: The relationship of science and technology to literature, film, and popular media. Focus on such topics as digital technology, genetics, and the representation of science in particular periods, genres, movements, and critical theories. Repeat credit for students who have completed 3720W. [3] (P)
• ENGL 3720W Literature, Science and Technology:The relationship of science and technology to literature, film, and popular media. Focus on such topics as digital technology, genetics, and the representation of science in particular periods, genres, movements, and critical theories. Repeat credit for students who have completed 3720. [3] (P)
• ENGL 3726 New Media: History, theory, and design of digital media. Literature, video, film, online games, and other interactive narratives. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3726W New Media: History, theory, and design of digital media. Literature, video, film, online games, and other interactive narratives. Serves as repeat credit for 3726. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3728 Science Fiction: Social and historical developments within the genre. Works from the late nineteenth century to the present. Cultural issues, including race, gender, sexuality, violence, and the representation of science. Repeat credit for students who have completed 3728W. [3] (P)
• ENGL 3728W Science Fiction: Social and historical developments within the genre. Works from the late nineteenth century to the present. Cultural issues, including race, gender, sexuality, violence, and the representation of science. Repeat credit for students who have completed 3728. [3] (P)
• ENGL 3730 Literature and the Environment: Environmental issues from British, American, and global perspectives. Methodological approaches such as ecocriticism, environmental and social justice, ethics, and activism. The role of literature and the imagination in responding to ecological problems and shaping environmental values. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3734 Literature and Law: Study of the relationship between the discourses of law and literature. Focus on such topics as legal narratives, metaphor in the courts, representations of justice on the social stage. Repeat credit for students who have completed 3734W. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3734W Literature and Law: Study of the relationship between the discourses of law and literature. Focus on such topics as legal narratives, metaphor in the courts, representations of justice on the social stage. Repeat credit for students who have completed 3734. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3736 Words and Music: An investigation of works of literature that have inspired musical settings and the musical settings themselves. Emphasis on literary and musical analysis and interpretation. No musical background assumed. Repeat credit for students who have completed MUSL 2330. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3740 Critical Theory: Major theoretical approaches that have shaped critical discourse, the practices of reading, and the relation of literature and culture. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3742 Feminist Theory: An introduction to feminist theory. Topics include cross-cultural gender identities; the development of "masculinity" and "femininity"; racial, ethnic, class, and national differences; sexual orientations; the function of ideology; strategies of resistance; visual and textual representations; the nature of power. [3] (P)
• ENGL 3744 Advanced Poetry: Formal analysis and close reading of major poems in the extended canon of British and American poetry. Related examples of historical, theoretical, and applied criticism. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3746 Workshop in English and History: Team-taught by a historian and an interdisciplinary scholar. Explores intersection of disciplines through close examination of texts in historical context. Preference to students majoring in the English-History program. May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic. Students may enroll in more than one section of this course each semester. [3] (No AXLE credit)
• ENGL 3748 Introduction to English Linguistics: Systematic study of present-day English sounds, words, sentences, and the contexts of language production. Contemporary varieties of English. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3890 Movements in Literature: Studies in intellectual currents that create a group or school of writers within a historical period. May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic. Students may enroll in more than one section of this course each semester. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3890W Movements in Literature: Studies in intellectual currents that create a group or school of writers within a historical period. May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic. Students may enroll in more than one section of this course each semester. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3891 Special Topics in Creative Writing: Advanced instruction in creative writing in emerging modes and hybrid genres. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3892 Problems in Literature: Studies in common themes, issues, or motifs across several historical periods. May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic. Students may enroll in more than one section of this course each semester. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3892W Problems in Literature: Studies in common themes, issues, or motifs across several historical periods. May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic. Students may enroll in more than one section of this course each semester. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3894 Major Figures in Literature: Studies in the works of one or two writers with attention to the development of a writer's individual canon, the biographical dimension of this work, and critical responses to it. May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic. Students may enroll in more than one section of this course each semester. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3894W Major Figures in Literature: Studies in the works of one or two writers with attention to the development of a writer's individual canon, the biographical dimension of this work, and critical responses to it. May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic. Students may enroll in more than one section of this course each semester. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3896 Special Topics in Investigative Writing in America: Course will be taught by a distinguished visiting journalist from a major U.S. newspaper or magazine. May be repeated for credit once if there is no duplication in topic. Students may enroll in more than one section of this course each semester. [1-3; maximum of 6 credits total for all semesters of ENGL 287] (No AXLE credit)
• ENGL 3897 Special Topics in Critical Theory: Diverse range of literary, philosophical, cultural, and political texts. May be repeated for credit if there is no duplication in topic. Students may enroll in more than one section of this course per semester. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3898 Special Topics in English and American Literature: Topics vary. May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic. Students may enroll in more than one section of this course each semester. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3898W Special Topics in English and American Literature: Topics vary. May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic. Students may enroll in more than one section of this course each semester. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3899 Special Topics in Film: Theory and practice of cinema as an aesthetic and cultural form. May be repeated for credit once if there is no duplication in topic. Students may enroll in more than one section of this course per semester. [3; maximum of 6 credits total for all semesters of ENGL 3899] (HCA)

• ENGL 2310 Representative British Writers (to 1660): Selections from British literature with attention to contexts and literary periods. From the beginnings to 1660. Provides a broad background for more specialized courses and is especially useful for students considering advanced studies in literature. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 2318 World Literature, Classical: Great Books from the points of view of literary expression and changing ideologies: Classical Greece through the Renaissance. Repeat credit for students who have completed 2318W. [3] (HCA)
• ENG: 2318W World Literature, Classical: Great Books from the points of view of literary expression and changing ideologies: Classical Greece through the Renaissance. Repeat credit for students who have completed 2318. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3310 Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature: The study of the Old English language. Selected historical and literary prose. Short heroic poems. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3312 The Medieval World: English literature and culture in relation to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Cross-cultural exchange, national and religious identity, and race. Not open to students who have completed ENGL 3316. [3] (P)
• ENGL 3312W The Medieval World: English literature and culture in relation to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Cross-cultural exchange, national and religious identity, and race. Not open to students who have completed ENGL 3316. Serves as repeat credit for ENGL 3312. [3] (P)
• ENGL 3314 Chaucer: Study of The Canterbury Tales and Chaucer's world. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3316 Medieval Literature: The drama, lyrics, romance, allegory, and satire of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, studied in the context of the period's intellectual climate and social change. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3318 The History of the English Language: The development of English syntax. History of the English vocabulary: word formation, borrowing, semantic change, and meter. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3330 Sixteenth Century: Prose and poetry of the sixteenth century. Emphasis on Spenser and his contemporaries. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3332 English Renaissance: Drama: English drama, exclusive of Shakespeare, from 1550-1642: Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, and others. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3332W English Renaissance: Drama: English drama, exclusive of Shakespeare, from 1550-1642: Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, and others. Serves as repeat credit for 3332. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3335 English Renaissance: Poetry: Development of the English poetic tradition from 1500-1700. Repeat credit for students who have earned credit for 3335W. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3335W English Renaissance: Poetry: Development of the English poetic tradition from 1500-1700. Repeat credit for students who have earned credit for 3335. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3336 Shakespeare: About twenty of the major plays considered in chronological order over two terms, with emphasis on Shakespeare's development as a dramatic artist. Primarily comedies and histories. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3336W Shakespeare: Comedies and Histories: About twenty of the major plays considered in chronological order over two terms, with emphasis on Shakespeare's development as a dramatic artist. Primarily comedies and histories. Serves as repeat credit for ENGL 3336. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3337 Shakespeare: About twenty of the major plays considered in chronological order over two terms, with emphasis on Shakespeare's development as a dramatic artist. Primarily tragedies and romances. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3337W Shakespeare: Tragedies and Romaces: About twenty of the major plays considered in chronological order over two terms, with emphasis on Shakespeare's development as a dramatic artist. Primarily tragedies and romances. Serves as repeat credit for ENGL 3337. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3340 Shakespeare: Representative Selections: A representative selection of plays, including histories, tragedies, comedies, and romances, designed to give the student a sense of the full range of Shakespeare's work in one semester. Repeat credit for students who have completed 3340W. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3340W Shakespeare: Representative Selections: A representative selection of plays, including histories, tragedies, comedies, and romances, designed to give the student a sense of the full range of Shakespeare's work in one semester. Repeat credit for students who have completed 3340. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3346 Seventeenth Century Literature: Poetry and prose from 1600 to the English Civil War, such as Metaphysical and Cavalier poetry, essays, romances, and satires. Authors may include Bacon, Cavendish, Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Lanier, Marvell, and Wroth. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3348 Milton: The early English poems; Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes; the major prose. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3348W Milton: The early English poems; Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes; the major prose. Serves as repeat credit for ENGL 3348. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3360 Restoration and the Eighteenth Century: Explorations of the aesthetic and social world of letters from the English Civil War to the French Revolution. Drama, poetry, and prose, including Restoration plays, political poetry, satire, travel narratives, and tales. Authors may include Behn, Dryden, Congreve, Addison, Swift, Finch, Pope, Fielding, Burney, Johnson, and Inchbald. Earlier writers. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3361 Restoration and the Eighteenth Century: Explorations of the aesthetic and social world of letters from the English Civil War to the French Revolution. Drama, poetry, and prose, including Restoration plays, political poetry, satire, travel narratives, and tales. Authors may include Behn, Dryden, Congreve, Addison, Swift, Finch, Pope, Fielding, Burney, Johnson, and Inchbald. Later writers. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3364 The Eighteenth Century English Novel: The English novel from its beginning through Jane Austen. Development of the novel as a literary form, and study of selected works of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and other novelists of the period. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3370 The Bible in Literature: An examination of ways in which the Bible and biblical imagery have functioned in literature and fine arts, in both "high culture" and popular culture, from Old English poems to modern poetry, drama, fiction, cartoons, and political rhetoric. Readings include influential biblical texts and a broad selection of literary texts drawn from all genres and periods of English literature. [3] (HCA)

Other 3000-level English electives may also fulfill the Diverse Perspectives Requirement based on the instructor's syllabus for that course. If so, this will be indicated in the course schedule. Additionally, courses from other departments may also fulfill the Diverse Perspectives Requirement per approval by the Director of Undergraduate Studies. 

• ENGL 3650 Ethnic American Literature: Texts and theory relevant to understanding race, culture, and ethnicity in the formation of American culture. Literature from at least three of the following groups: African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Chicano/Latino Americans, Caribbean Americans, and European Americans. [3] (P)
• ENGL 3650W Ethnic American Literature: Texts and theory relevant to understanding race, culture, and ethnicity in the formation of American culture. Literature from at least three of the following groups: African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Chicano/Latino Americans, Caribbean Americans, and European Americans. [3] (P)
• ENGL 3654 African American Literature: Examination of the literature produced by African Americans. May include literary movements, vernacular traditions, social discourses, material culture, and critical theories. Repeat credit for students who have completed 3654W. [3] (US)
• ENGL 3654W African American Literature: Examination of the literature produced by African Americans. May include literary movements, vernacular traditions, social discourses, material culture, and critical theories. Repeat credit for students who have completed 3654. [3] (US)
• ENGL 3658 Latino-American Literature: Texts and theory relevant to understanding constructs of Latino identity, including race, class, gender, and basis for immigration, in the context of American culture. The course focuses on the examination of literature by Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and Latin American writers in the United States. [3] (P)
• ENGL 3658W Latino-American Literature: Texts and theory relevant to understanding constructs of Latino identity, including race, class, gender, and basis for immigration, in the context of American culture. The course focuses on the examination of literature by Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and Latin American writers in the United States. Serves as repeat credit for ENGL 3658. [3] (P)
• ENGL 3662 Asian American Literature: Diversity of Asian American literary production with specific attention to works after 1965. Topics such as gender and sexuality, memory and desire, and diaspora and panethnicity in the context of aesthetics and politics of Asian American experience. [3] (P)
• ENGL 3662W Asian American Literature: Diversity of Asian American literary production with specific attention to works after 1965. Topics such as gender and sexuality, memory and desire, and diaspora and panethnicity in the context of aesthetics and politics of Asian American experience. [3] (P)
• ENGL 3664 Jewish American Literature: Nineteenth century to the present. Issues of race, gender, ethnicity, immigration, and diaspora. Offered on a graded basis only. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3670 Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature: Literature exploring European colonialism and its aftermath from the eighteenth century to the present: language, gender, and agency in the colonial encounter; anti-colonial resistance movements; and postcolonial cultures. Topics may vary; course may be taken more than once with permission of the Director of Undergraduate Studies. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3670W Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature: Literature exploring European colonialism and its aftermath from the eighteenth century to the present: language, gender, and agency in the colonial encounter; anti-colonial resistance movements; and postcolonial cultures. Topics may vary; course may be taken more than once with permission of the Director of Undergraduate Studies. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3674 Caribbean Literature: Caribbean literature from 1902 to the present. Emphasis on writing since 1952, which marks the beginning of West Indian nationalism and the rise of the West Indian novel. [3] (INT)
• ENGL 3678 Anglophone African Literature: From the Sundiata Epic to the present with emphasis on the novel. Attention to issues of identity, post coloniality, nationalism, race, and ethnicity in both SubSaharan and Mahgrib literatures. Such authors as Achebe, Ngugi, Gordimer, Awoonor, and El Saadaw. [3] (INT)
• ENGL 3678W Anglophone African Literature: From the Sundiata Epic to the present with emphasis on the novel. Attention to issues of identity, post coloniality, nationalism, race, and ethnicity in both SubSaharan and Mahgrib literatures. Such authors as Achebe, Ngugi, Gordimer, Awoonor, and El Saadaw. Serves as repeat credit for ENGL 3678. [3] (INT)
• ENGL 3742 Feminist Theory: An introduction to feminist theory. Topics include cross-cultural gender identities; the development of "masculinity" and "femininity"; racial, ethnic, class, and national differences; sexual orientations; the function of ideology; strategies of resistance; visual and textual representations; the nature of power. [3] (P)
• ENGL 3742W Feminist Theory: An introduction to feminist theory. Topics include cross-cultural gender identities; the development of "masculinity" and "femininity"; racial, ethnic, class, and national differences; sexual orientations; the function of ideology; strategies of resistance; visual and textual representations; the nature of power. Serves as repeat credit for ENGL 3742. [3] (P)

Admission to these courses is by consent of the instructor.

• ENGL 3210 Intermediate Nonfiction Writing: Instruction in the forms and techniques of nonfiction writing. Admission by consent of instructor. May be repeated once for credit. [3] (HCA)
• ENGL 3220 Advanced Nonfiction Writing: Further instruction in the form and techniques of nonfiction writing. Admission by consent of instructor. May be repeated for credit once if there is no duplication in topic. Students may enroll in more than one section of this course per semester. [3; maximum of 6 credits total for all semesters of ENGL 3220] (HCA)
• ENGL 3230 Intermediate Fiction Workshop: Instruction in fiction writing. Supplementary readings that illustrate traditional aspects of prose fiction. Admission by consent of instructor. May be repeated for credit once if there is no duplication in topic. Students may enroll in more than one section of this course per semester. [3; maximum of 6 credits total for all semesters of ENGL 3230] (HCA)
• ENGL 3240 Advanced Fiction Workshop: Continuing instruction in fiction writing. Admission by consent of instructor. May be repeated for credit once if there is no duplication in topic. Students may enroll in more than one section of this course per semester. [3; maximum of 6 credits total for all semesters of ENGL 3240] (HCA)
• ENGL 3250 Intermediate Poetry Workshop: Instruction in poetry writing. Supplementary readings illustrating traditional aspects of poetry. Admission by consent of instructor. May be repeated for credit once if there is no duplication in topic. Students may enroll in more than one section of this course per semester. [3; maximum of 6 credits total for all semesters of ENGL 3250] (HCA)
• ENGL 3260 Advanced Poetry Workshop: Continuing instruction in poetry writing. Admission by consent of instructor. May be repeated for credit once if there is no duplication in topic. Students may enroll in more than one section of this course per semester. [3; maximum of 6 credits total for all semesters of ENGL 3260] (HCA)

• ENGL 4998 Honors Colloquium: Background for writing the honors thesis. Emphasis on research methods, critical approaches, and the students' own projects. Limited to seniors admitted to the English Honors Program. [3] (No AXLE credit)
• ENGL 4999: Honors Thesis: Prerequisite: 4998. [3] (No AXLE credit)
• Honors Seminars: The Department of English offers two Honors seminars each semester (3000-level course with a pre-requisite of 3.4 GPA). 

ENGL 3851 & 3852 Independent Study

Independent study and directed study courses are primarily intended for majors in their junior and senior years. Exceptions may be made for well-qualified sophomores. To enroll in an independent study course, please complete the following steps:

1. Obtain permission to enroll from the instructor of your choice and Director of Undergraduate Studies prior to the opening of your enrollment window for the semester in which you wish to complete the independent study course.
2. Complete the Contract for Registration in Independent Study Course. The form requires details regarding the nature of the project and the amount of credit to be earned. It must be signed by your instructor and the DUS or Department Chair prior to the tenth day of classes. 
3. Submit your contract for Independent study to Rachel Mace before the end of the change period (the first week of classes). You will then be manually registered in YES.

This elective may be repeated for a total of 6 credits in 3851 and 3852 combined if there is no duplication in topic. Students may earn only up to 3 credits per semester of enrollment. (No AXLE credit)