94 courses with the subject ENGL, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
ENGL 101The Art of Reading and Writing1
Development of critical reading in various forms of literary expression, and regular practice in different kinds of writing. From Beowulf to Milton: Early British Literature : Texts may include Beowulf , Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , The Canterbury Tales , and Paradise Lost . Mark Amodio.
This is a new, team-taught introductory course that provides a 100-level English option for both non-majors and majors that showcases the power of literary and cultural study. It demonstrates in practice why historical literary and cultural contexts are crucial elements for understanding contemporary texts and the questions they care about. Through a team-teaching model, it shows students how the expertise of faculty members across the department speaks to each other’s chosen canons and questions. Authors, genres, critical and theoretical approaches, historical coverage, and themes may vary from year to year.
Each section explores a central issue, such as “the idea of a literary period,” “canons and the study of literature,” “nationalism and literary form,” or “gender and genre” (contact the department office for current descriptions). Assignments focus on the development of skills for research and writing in English, including the use of secondary sources and the critical vocabulary of literary study. Jean Kane.
This course uses techniques of improvisational generation of creative material drawn from schools such as Oulipo, writers such as Raymond Roussel, and teachers such as Ruth Danon. All of them aim to subvert the critical mind in order to allow the unexpected to emerge in directed free writing exercises. The course consists of such writing exercises, as well as direction in using the material that emerges as a platform for further work and drafts. It focuses on the genres of fiction and poetry. The course is designed to direct writing practice at the stage of generation of material. Focus on generation increases tools for overcoming writing blocks and develop muscles in an area that such creative writing classes don’t allow as much time for as they do criticism and analysis of completed pieces. Jean Kane. One 1-hour period. Course Format: INT
(Same as WFQS 183 ) This Intensive offers students an opportunity to engage the polemic as a rhetorical form of particular importance to queer social movements. We review examples of the polemic across a variety of literary forms, including the manifesto, political pamphlet, satirical essay, and allegory, and across different media: films/videos, songs, “zaps,” posters, fashion, memes, and zines. Foregrounding the place of “queer” within a broader history of social justice movements, we inquire into the appeal and effectiveness of the polemic as a strategy for political change (or disruption or refusal) in relation to specific crises and struggles. As an exercise in experiential learning, we try our hands at composing polemics collaboratively. What is the role of anger and outrage in fomenting collective identities or counterpublics? What is the place of camp in the history of the queer polemic? What new digital forms of the queer polemic have emerged from social media platforms? Class activities include visits to the Lesbian Herstory Archive in Brooklyn, New York and the Schomburg’s “In the Life” Collection in Harlem, NY. Hiram Pérez-Piña. Both first and second six-week course. One 2-hour period. Course Format: INT
(Same as ANST 203 ) This course examines the various forms of journalism that report on the complexity of contemporary American lives. In the past I have said that this course, in a plain sense, is an investigation into American society. And, of course, that a part of the aim of the course is to acquire the basic craft of journalistic practice. The other main aim of the course has been that we examine different models of writing, especially in longform, that have defined and changed the norms of reportage in our culture. But in honor of the decisive contributions to American life made over the last several years by the previous president, I want to make #fakenews also a focus of our course. How do we pay attention to, how do we produce, and how do we give compelling form to facts? Amitava Kumar. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
This course examines creative writing as a process in which analysis and innovation meet, asking the question: What is craft? How does one best employ literary tools to accomplish one’s aims as a creative writer? Throughout the semester we consider several works of fiction, narrative nonfiction, poetry, or other literary forms. Through workshops, close reading and critique of published work, and other exercises, the class helps writers build a fundamental vocabulary of literary techniques. Ryan Chapman, Joshua Harmon, Timothy Liu, David Means, Tracy O’Neill, Matthew Schultz, Nina Shengold, Christine Vines. Not offered fall term to first-year students; first-year students may apply through preregistration for spring term. One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor. Course Format: CLS
Continued study and practice of various forms of prose and poetry. Reading and writing assignments may include prose fiction, journals, poetry, drama, and essays.
Open to any student who has taken ENGL 205 or ENGL 206 . Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Spring
ENGL 209Advanced Creative Writing: Narrative1
This class explores the nature of narrative and storytelling in relation to our own attempts at creative expression. Throughout the semester we consider several works of fiction, considering the various ways that writers reimagine form to inflect narrative with meaning. Classes may explore point of view, character, agency, plot, style, and animating concepts or fields to create particular storyworlds. Workshops foreground analysis and commentary about students’ writing. Joshua Harmon, David Means.
Open to any student who has taken ENGL 205 , 206 or ENGL 207 . Priority is given to junior English majors and correlates. In order to register for this class, students should complete an application prior to preregistration, using a form available in the English Department in lieu of writing samples. Notification of acceptance will be given before preregistration begins. Please do not contact the professor. One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Fall and Spring
ENGL 211Advanced Creative Writing: Verse1
Development of the student’s abilities as a writer and reader of poetry. In addition to written poetry, other forms of poetic expressions may be explored, such as performance and spoken word. Josh Harmon.
Open to students who have taken ENGL 205 , ENGL 206 , or ENGL 207 . In order to register for this class, students should complete an application prior to preregistration, using a form available in the English Department in lieu of writing samples. Notification of acceptance will be given before preregistration begins. Please do not contact the professor. One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Spring
ENGL 213The English Language1
Study of the history of English from the fifth century to the present, with special attention to the role of literature in effecting as well as reflecting linguistic change. Treatment of peculiarly literary matters, such as poetic diction, and attention to broader linguistic matters, such as phonology, comparative philology, semantics, and the relationship between language and experience. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
ENGL 215Pre-modern Drama: Text and Performance before 18001
Study of selected dramatic texts and their embodiment both on the page and the stage. Authors, critical and theoretical approaches, dramatic genres, historical coverage, and themes may vary from year to year.
ENGL 216Modern Drama: Text and Performance after 18001
Study of modern dramatic texts and their embodiment both on the page and the stage. Authors, critical and theoretical approaches, dramatic genres, historical coverage, and themes may vary from year to year. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
A study of various critical theories and practices ranging from antiquity to the present day. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as AFRS 219 and ANST 219 ) “Queer of Color Critique” is a form of cultural criticism modeled on lessons learned from woman of color feminism, poststructuralism, and materialist and other forms of analysis. As Roderick Ferguson defines it, “Queer of color analysis…interrogates social formations as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices.” This course considers what interventions the construction “queer of color” makes possible for queertheory, LGBT scholarship and activism, and different models of ethnic studies.We assess the value and limitations of queer theory’s “subjectless critique” (in other words, its rejection of identity as a “fixed referent”) in doing cultural and political work. What kind of complications (or contradictions) does the notion “queer of color” present for subjectless critique? How might queer of color critique inform political organizing? Particular attention will be devoted to how “queer” travels. Toward this end, students determine what conflicts are presently shaping debates around sexuality in their own communities and consider how these debates may be linked to different regional, national or transnational politics. Throughout the semester, we evaluate what “queer” means and what kind of work it enables. Is it an identity or an anti-identity? A verb, a noun, or an adjective? A heuristic device, a counterpublic, a form of political mobilization or perhaps even a kind of literacy? This course satisfies the REGS requirement for the English major. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
This course explores the development of English literature from its beginnings in the Anglo-Saxon period to the Renaissance. In it we examine individual works of literature in their historical and literary context, noting significant features of cultural history as well as developments in literary form. Texts may include Beowulf , Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , Pearl , The Canterbury Tales , Romeo and Juliet , A Midsummer Night’s Dream , and Othello. Mark Amodio. This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as AFRS 223 ) Decades of historiographic erasure have resulted in canonical accounts of the Surrealist movement that overlook the involvement of Black artists. This course introduces students to surrealism through the work of African diasporic artists from the early to late 20th century to assess the impact they had on print culture, ethnography, as well as visual and performance art. Students learn how surrealist creative techniques that call into question the authoritative dominion of consciousness and rationalism were utilized by Black surrealists to dissent openly against Eurocentrism, colonialism, and unquestioned respect for the law. By comparison, the course also considers how Black artists’ practices that predated the arrival of surrealism converged with the movement upon its transnational growth. Assigned readings include works by Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Jayne Cortez, Katherine Dunham, Skunder Boghossian, Wifredo Lam, Sun Ra, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Abdellatif Laâbi, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Amílcar Cabral. Michael Reyes Salas. This course satisfies the REGS requirement for the English major. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
ENGL 225Early American Literature: Authoring Self, Nation, Worlds1
(Same as ANST 225 and GNCS 225 ) This course introduces students to American literatures from before European colonial settlement to the period preceding the Civil War, exploring the significance of literary authorship during an era of authoring a new nation. Through a range of genres including Native American creation stories, colonial histories of exploration, Puritan trial transcripts, personal narratives, poetry, Romantic tales, and sentimental fiction, we trace the literary strategies that writers (and other creative agents) use to claim legitimacy as authors alongside changing ideas about who counts as an author and what it means to “author” something. We also consider how authors respond and contribute to historical circumstances such as settler colonialism, Native resistance, slavery, abolitionism, the nation’s founding, and the literary market. Material texts are a key method of inquiry for this class; we focus on early physical forms in which our readings circulated. To that end, we make two visits to Special Collections, and you are asked to explore digital archives relating to several readings. Using archival artifacts, we consider the shifting forms and reception of literature, especially by authors traditionally regarded at the margins of the literary, and we’ll consider “history” as another kind of textual production that circulates about the past. Blevin Shelnutt. This course satisfies the pre-1800 or a pre-1900 requirement for the English major. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as GNCS 226 ) This course provides exposure to the diverse group of authors who wrote during the 1865-1925 period and who belong to no school. True, some were realists, naturalists, and modernists, but these terms and even general themes, such as ‘individualism’, do not apply to all. The one term that defines the period is ‘difference’ (read variously as contention, invidious comparison, change, diversity, gender dissidence). This course simulates the great rupture between nineteenth-century prose styles and those of the twentieth century, but you will be mindful of the earlier radical streak in American fiction, if I have anything to say about it! Likely authors: Henry James, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Du Bois, Hurston, Toomer, T.S. Eliot. Wendy Graham. This course satisfies the REGS or the pre-1900 requirement for the English major. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
ENGL 227The Harlem Renaissance and its Precursors1
(Same as AFRS 227 ) This course places the Harlem Renaissance in literary historical perspective as it seeks to answer the following questions: In what ways was “The New Negro” new? How did African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance rework earlier literary forms from the sorrow songs to the sermon and the slave narrative? How do the debates that raged during this period over the contours of a black aesthetic trace their origins to the concerns that attended the entry of African Americans into the literary public sphere in the eighteenth century? Eve Dunbar. This course satisfies the REGS or pre-1900 requirement for the English major. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
This course considers such topics as memory, identity, liminality, community, and cultural and familial inheritance within Asian-American literary traditions. May consider Asian-American literature in relation to other ethnic literatures.
(Same as ANST 230 and LALS 230 ) Students and instructor collaborate to identify and dialogue with the growing but still disputed archive of Latine/Latinx/Latina/o Literature. The categories “Latine,” “Latinx,” and “Latina/o” present us then with our first challenge: exactly what demographic do these categories isolate (or create)? How are these categories different from “Hispanic,” “Chicanx,” “Raza,” “Mestizo,” “Boricua,” or “Brown,” to name only a few? Rather than solidify a universal definition for “Latinidad,” our conversations will seek to unsettle (or reframe) conventional understandings of racial and ethnic identities as immutable. Our destabilization of “Latinidad” is productive; in other words, it treats “Latinidad” as dynamic, complex, robust with possibility. Our approach to the question of “Latinidad,” in turn, serves to re-orient the critical dispositions we bring to the category “literature.” How have notions of literariness, canon, belles-lettres, and disciplinarity obscured or marginalized the polyvocal richness of Latine/Latinx cultural production? How do forms like corrido, choteo, spoken word, and testimonio disrupt and enrich our study of “literature.” Miguel Algarín, founder of the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, once proposed that debt and hustle constitute prototypical experiences of survival for the Nuyorican. Algarín concluded that “newness” presented the only viable alternative to “eternal debt” and “living by hustle”: “The poet has to invent a new language, a new tradition of communication.” “Nuyorican” exceeds state taxonomies and cannot be reduced to data recorded by the census or on “papers.” Algarín offers “hustle” and “debt” as metaphysical conceits that imbue Nuyorican “ethnicity” (if we can call it that still) with mutability, aliveness. In similar spirit, this class invites students to seek aliveness in “Latinidad.” How might the metaphor of “eternal debt” help us identify legacies of colonialism that live and breathe in the present, manifested in ways both collective and brutally uneven? How does that same metaphor qualify experiences of independence, freedom, sovereignty, and fugitivity that more conventional understandings of ethnicity flatten or obscure? What does it mean to think of identity as a form of indebtedness or a hustle? Algarín helps initiate our inquiry but does not limit its course. The breadth of the materials and representations covered demands that we also situate “Latinidad” within contexts of hot and cold wars; US foreign and economic policies; seasonal migrant labor; shadow economies; the global feminization of labor; and the commercialization of land and natural resources. These factors contribute to massive displacements of people rarely acknowledged by politicians or corporate media. Much of the literature and cultural production we review contests prevailing narratives about “immigration” (an inadequate catchall that obscures more complex stories). Major frameworks and themes helping us to complicate the story of “Latinidad” include: borderlands; criminalization, carcerality, and deportation; legal vs. cultural citizenships; code-switching; Indigeneity; Afro-Latinidad; contested or shifting racial formations; anxious hybridities; diaspora; queerness; gender politics; intergenerational conflict and silences; and an ambivalent sense of loss (differently articulated as trauma, nostalgia, forgetting, mourning, nationalism, or assimilation). Assigned texts may include work by Elizabeth Acevedo, Gloria Anzaldúa, Bad Bunny, Sandra Cisneros, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jenine Capó Crucet, Jaime Cortez, Jacquira Díaz, Junot Díaz, Denice Frohman, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Roy G. Guzmán, Daisy Hernández, Victor Hernández Cruz, John Leguizamo, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Nicholasa Mohr, Miguel Muñoz, Achy Obejas, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Miguel Piñero, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Gary Soto, Piri Thomas, Justin Torres, and Helena Maria Viramontes. Hiram Perez. This course fulfills the REGS requirement for the English major. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ANST 231 ) This course examines Indigenous North American literatures from a Native American Studies perspective. Native American literature is particularly vast and diverse, representing over 500 Indigenous nations in the northern hemisphere, and written/spoken in both Indigenous languages and languages of conquest (English, Spanish, French). Because of this range of written and oral traditions, our goals for the class are to complicate our understanding of “texts,” to examine the origins of and evolution of tribal literatures (fiction, poetry, non fiction, graphic novel, etc.), and to comprehend the various theoretical debates that have created and nurtured a robust field of Native American literary criticism. A Native American Studies framework acknowledges Indigenous literatures as the cultural and creative labor of Native peoples on behalf of their respective Nations or communities, as well as how the literatures are necessarily entangled with the on-going legacy of settler colonialism. Authors include William Apess, Luther Standing Bear, Pauline Johnson, Mourning Dove, Gerald Vizenor, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, Wendy Rose, Thomas King, Beth Brant, Kimberly Blaeser, and Tommy Pico, among other Native theorists, performance and fine artists, and filmmakers. This course satisfies the Regs requirement for the English major. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as AFRS 233 ) This course examines how the narratives of non-imprisoned Caribbean writers who live in (neo)colonial conditions contest carceral entrapment. To perceive these dynamics, this class focuses less on ‘prison literature,’ which focuses exclusively on the prison experience, and more on ‘carceral literature,’ which is a broader exploration of the meanings of incarceration. In this vein, this course examines a range of literary works from drama to fiction and non-fiction prose narratives with the aim of better understanding how the meanings of incarceration shift and circulate within the wider Caribbean region. Such a re-orientation offers students a comprehensive framework to examine the punitive environments non-incarcerated people inhabit. Michael Reyes Salas. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
Introduction to Old English language and literature. Mark Amodio. This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
ENGL 235 or demonstrated knowledge of Old English, or permission of the instructor. This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Spring
ENGL 237Medieval Literature1
This course serves as an introduction to medieval literature, with a focus on Middle English literatures (c. 1066-1550). Students become familiar with the linguistic and stylistic features of Middle English, and read a variety of texts from the period. Special topics for the course vary from year to year; examples of topics include: Arthurian literature, Chaucer, the Chaucerian tradition, women’s writing in the Middle Ages, transnational/comparative medieval literatures (including French and Italian), medieval “autobiography,” the alliterative tradition, Piers Plowman and the Piers tradition, dream visions, fifteenth century literature and the bridge to the “early modern,” literature and heresy, gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages, and medieval mystical writing. Students engage throughout with the process of establishing English as a “literary” language; authorial identity; the grounding of English literary tradition; and the role of translation and adaptation in medieval writing. The course also prepares students who might wish to pursue work in medieval literature at the 300 level, and/or pursue a senior thesis in the period. Thomas Hill.
(Same as DRAM 241 ) Study of a substantial number of the plays, roughly in chronological order, to permit a detailed consideration of the range and variety of Shakespeare’s dramatic art.
ENGL 243Twentieth Century Black Writers Against the Surveillance State1
(Same as AFRS 243 ) As Black writers in the U.S. formed part of various artistic, political, and literary movements throughout the 20th century, law enforcement agencies employed various surveillance tactics to stave off perceived threats posed by dissent literature. For example, ever since the early 20th century F.B.I. ‘ghost readers’ began to monitor the literary work of Black authors for signs of sedition or treason. This course investigates how such intrusions into privacy influenced the creation and public reception of Black literature. Because the right to privacy is based on notions of self-possession, which we often take for granted today, the course examines how access to privacy is often delimited based on race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and national origin. This course fulfills the REGS requirement for the English major. Michael Reyes Salas. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
Study of poetry, intellectual prose, and drama of importance in Great Britain in the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth century. Famous Enlightenment philosophers include John Locke, Isaac Newton, Voltaire, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Focus, however, is on the great literary writers of the period: including John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Anne Finch, William Congreve, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Johnson, Mary Leapor, William Cowper, James Boswell, and Olaudah Equiano. Robert DeMaria. This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
For readers today, the novel is both the most familiar and the most established form of literature: an inevitable and unremarkable presence in high school and college English classes and newspaper and magazine book reviews, behind film and television adaptations, and on nightstands around the world. And yet, the very name “novel” suggests the form’s unfamiliarity: its association with the surprising, the revolutionary, the modern, the new. This tension— between conventions and institutions of the novel and its novelty—is our focus in this class, as we examine the origins of the form in the culture of eighteenth-century Britain. If the novel (as critic Ian Watt famously put it) tells the story of “particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places,” we ask why the novel emerged at this particular time and in this particular place, considering its ties to socioeconomic, political, and cultural transformations including the rise of the middle class, nationalism, the expansion of global capitalism, the reconfiguration of gender roles, and the constitution of the modern self. Reading major early novels by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and Frances Burney alongside short extracts from other fictional and non-fictional genres, this class aims both to introduce students to the traditional “Rise of the Novel” narrative and to complicate it, positioning “novelistic” prose within the astonishingly vibrant and creative landscape of eighteenth-century writing. Works of fiction in the eighteenth century rarely identified themselves as “novels,” preferring a host of other labels including romances, tales, sketches, or histories; throughout the semester, we examine the novel’s relationships— parasitic, competitive, companionate, etc.—with these other categories, ending in its decisive victory. At the same time, we reconstruct the novel’s dramatic ascent from the very bottom of the hierarchy of artistic value at the beginning of the eighteenth century to a serious and significant art form by the beginning of the nineteenth.
Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair The course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
ENGL 248The Age of Romanticism1
(Same as GNCS 248 ) In this course, we consider how the concepts of revolution and the sublime shaped the themes and forms that were central to the Romantic imagination. As heated writings evoking the political sublime were emerging from debates about the French Revolution, young poets were transforming old forms to fathom connections between the sublime in mind and in nature. Revolution and sublime are spaces of formlessness, expansiveness and volatility, the bleeding edges where rules about how we relate to our world and each other break down. We enter these spaces together through the poems and prose of this period, and see how writers sought transformation—for themselves and their writing—through encounters with nature, dreams, intoxication, gothic landscapes, and ghosts. Our survey also marks some of the major political developments of the period, including feminist and abolitionist movements in England. We write frequently, considering how to build informative and revelatory critical arguments out of the observations and oddities each individual text calls forth. This course satisfies the pre-1900 for the English major. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as GNCS 249 ) Study of Victorian culture through the prose writers of the period. This course explores the strategies of nineteenth-century writers who struggled to find meaning and order in a changing world. It focuses on such issues as industrialization, the woman question, imperialism, aestheticism, and decadence, paying particular attention to the relationship between literary and social discourses. Authors may include nonfiction prose writers such as Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde as well as fiction writers such as Disraeli, Gaskell, Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Mark Taylor.
Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair. This course satisfies the pre-1900 requirement for the English major. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Fall
ENGL 251Topics in Black Literatures1
(Same as AFRS 251 ) This course considers Black literatures in all their richness and diversity. The focus changes from year to year, and may include study of a historical period, literary movement, or genre. The course may take a comparative, diasporic approach or may examine a single national or regional literature.
(Same as ASIA 252 ) This course introduces students to the literary history of Asian novels and short stories written in English. While Asian Anglophone literature rose to prominence in the latter half of the 20th century, in the wake of myriad national independence movements in Asia, its development is inextricable from 19th-century British and American colonial histories. Beginning here, we first examine the literary implications of British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent, Hong Kong, and the Malay peninsula, and American imperialism in the Philippine archipelago. We consider how the novel genre—a form first arising in Western Europe several centuries earlier—has been reconfigured by preexisting regional literary traditions in Asia. Turning to the post-independence era, we engage the literary debates surrounding national allegory, writing in English versus Asian vernaculars, cultural hybridity, the sociolinguistic articulation of “Global Englishes,” and contemporary Asian globalization. While the majority of this course’s authors come from nations with long histories of English-language writing, such as India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia, the expanded circulation of Asian literature in English within the contemporary world-literary marketplace means that we also engage writing from Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and elsewhere. Throughout this course, we reflect on how the porous boundaries of Asian literature in English complicate other literary archives and interpretative frameworks linked to postcolonial studies, world literature, transpacific studies, and Asian American literature. Texts may include Tash Aw’s We, the Survivors , Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke , Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto , Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day , Llyod Fernando’s Scorpion Orchid , Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye , Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s Bangkok Wakes to Rain , Glenn Diaz’s The Quiet Ones , Hoa Pham’s The Other Shore , Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War , Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan , and Hwee Hwee Tan’s Mammon Inc . Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
The specific focus of the course varies each year, and may center on a literary movement (e.g., Transcendentalism, the Beats, the Black Mountain School), a single work and its milieu (e.g., Moby-Dick and the American novel, Call It Sleep and the rise of ethnic modernism); a historical period (e.g., the Great Awakening, the Civil War), a region (e.g., Southern literature, the literature of the West), or a genre (e.g., the sentimental-domestic novel, American satire, the literature of travel/migration, American autobiography, traditions of reportage, American environmentalist writing).
(Same as GNCS 255 ) Readings vary but include novels by Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.
British and Irish Literature from the first half of the 20th century. The mix and focus of genres, topics and authors varies depending on the instructor. However, the period in question covers such writers as Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Vera Brittain, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell, and Graham Greene.
(Same as ANST 261 and MEDS 261 ) This course introduces students to the study of books as physical objects, focusing on the field-transforming interventions of Indigenous studies and the cultural productions of Native peoples in colonial America and the nineteenth-century U.S. Meeting once a week for six weeks, we examine primary sources and critical scholarship that allow us to consider 1) various material textualities of Indigenous expression, within and beyond alphabetic literacy and print, and 2) alternative models of authorship that disrupt what scholar Robert Warrior describes as “the fetishization of single-author works.” Throughout, we interrogate archival power structures and erasures, using recent criticism that conceives methods for tracing in the archives Indigenous agency and survivance. The texts we study may include birchbark books, poems, painted baskets, traditional creation narratives, personal narratives, execution sermons, hymns, treaties, and receipts, along with scholarship by Drew Lopenzina, Phillip Round, and Kelly Wisecup, among others. Blevin Shelnutt. First six-week course. One 2-hour period. Course Format: INT
ENGL 263How to Edit a Text: Basics of Scholarly Editing0.5
Students in this class learn the basic principles and most prevalent theories of scholarly editing. In consultation with the instructor, they produce an edition of a text of their choice. Robert DeMaria. First six-week course. One 2-hour period. Course Format: INT
(Same as GNCS 266 ) The ancestor of today’s cheap paperback novel, yellowbacks were a distinctive feature of the Victorian publishing landscape. Characterized by bold chromolithographed images on yellow strawboard covers (hence the “yellowback” name), these inexpensive reprints made literature affordable for the expanding reading audience of nineteenth-century Britain. Works by best-selling authors of the day, such as Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Charles Dickens, appeared in yellowback editions as did those by older popular writers, including Jane Austen. Travel and etiquette guides, sensation novels, and comic series were also a staple of yellowback publishing. Originally sold from stalls in the newly-opened railway stations of Victorian Britain, these one-volume editions are indelibly associated with the speed, mobility, and modernity that the railroad itself represents. In this intensive, students work with a collection of yellowbacks recently donated to Special Collections in order to prepare for a spring 2025 exhibition to be mounted in the Thompson Library. Students conduct original research on such topics as Victorian print culture, railway reading, the impact of industrialization and new technologies on publishing, the commodification of art, literacy and mass readership, popular taste and popular fiction. Students work directly with the materials in Special Collections, and their research and writing form the basis of the library’s exhibition.
Permission of the instructor. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: INT
ENGL 267Slow Poetry0.5
In this Intensive, students are assigned single poems each week to practice and luxuriate in slow reading. Our goal is to exercise full immersion in poetry, allowing students to linger in the work, enhance comprehension, and build a relationship with it. The class culminates in each student giving a dramatic reading of (memorized or read) a poem of his/her/their choice. Molly McGlennen. First six-week course. One 2-hour period. Course Format: INT
ENGL 268Paying (for) Attention: Reading as Resistance to the Attention Economy0.5
Your English professor assigns that novel—the one that changed all literature after it. You’ve known about it for years and are eager to read it with others. Yes, you’re busy. Yes, it’s long. Still, you commit. But three pages in, a novel-related internet search leads to Wikipedia, then YouTube, then non-novel-related TikTok scrolling. You blame yourself for a lack of focus. But what if your distraction isn’t a personal failing, but a social problem instead? And a historically determined one at that. This intensive begins here. Together we co-create a “slow reading” syllabus that explores how social media, surveillance capitalism, and Big Data have ensnared us in an attention economy that monetizes our most precious resource: the time we have to pay attention . Possible texts might include writing by fictionists and poets (e.g. Ted Chiang, Wendell Berry, Ruth Ozeki), philosophers (Guy Debord, Arne Næss, Byung-Chul Han), art critics and media theorists (John Berger, Neil Postman, Dominic Pettman), and NYT best-selling technoskeptics (Jenny Odell, Jaron Lanier, Oliver Burkeman). We practice secular mindfulness in the Pratt House meditation room, try out analog tools to curb high-tech distraction, contemplate a “slow cinema” film (by Chantal Akerman, Lav Diaz, or Béla Tarr), keep hand-written journals during a multi-day “digital detox,” and take a not-so-silent hike in the Vassar Preserve while enacting “deep listening” (Pauline Oliveros). Throughout these experiments, we reframe our capacity for sustained attention from a mere study skill to a political act of resistance. Alden Sajor Marte-Wood. First six-week course. One 2-hour period. Course Format: INT
“New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald. For this intensive, we read stories – novels, short fiction, journalism, memoirs – set in New York City. We visit, and in many cases, attempt to conjure, the vanished places where the stories were set. Only by haunting these physical sites and recreating them through the virtual technologies of history and literature will we get to see not only what the authors saw, but what they saw that wasn’t there, and what was there they didn’t see. Your main mentored assignment entails constructing a walking tour for your classmates based on one of the narratives. Authors might include Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Teju Cole, James Baldwin, Chang-Rae Lee, Luc Sante, Patti Smith Paula Fox, Colson Whitehead, and Joseph Cassara. We devise the syllabus together. Heesok Chang.
Permission of the instructor. To apply please send an email to hechang@vassar.edu stating your name, year, major, and a concise description of your interest in the course. Open to sophomores, juniors and seniors. One 75-minute period. Course Format: INT
This is a course about poetry—but instead of taking the individual poem as our main object of interest, we instead consider the poetry collection as a form. What makes poems belong together? Through what channels—formal, thematic and otherwise—can poems speak to each another? And what kinds of stories can be told through a series of poems that can’t be told in more traditional narrative forms? Students consider these questions through a slow reading of Stephanie McCarter’s feminist translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a collection of epic stories in verse. Our time together concludes with a live performance of the Metamorphoses by the playwright and performer Todd Conner, staged outside on Vassar’s campus with students’ help. Todd also holds a craft workshop to share the process of adapting Metamorphoses for solo stage performance. This intensive has 8 spots, and is suitable for both English and Drama majors.
Open to Juniors and Seniors, with permission of the instructor. Please send a paragraph outlining your interest and any relevant experience to kgemmill@vassar.edu. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: INT
ENGL 273Slow and Close: Toni Morrison0.5
Have you ever danced a “slow drag”? The slow drag is a colloquialism for a form of partner dancing that grew out of the ragtime and blues musical traditions: musicians slowed down the music’s tempo, allowing partners to hold each other closely and move in unison to the slow beat of the music. The “drag” is intimate, marking partners as “together,” for the song’s length, perhaps longer. Partners notice things about each other that would be unnoticeable at a faster tempo. This intensive takes the pace and intimacy of a slow drag and turns both onto a text. In “Slow and Close,” we spend six weeks slowly reading a single novel. The idea is that by extending our time with the text, we are able to see and experience things we might not otherwise. In addition to slowing down the reading process, students produce close readings (analysis) of small sections of the text for each weekly meeting. For this semester, we dance the drag with Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon . First six-week course. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: INT
(Same as ANST 274 ) On the first page of Heavy: An American Memoir , Kiese Laymon writes, “I did not want to write about us. I wanted to write an American memoir. I wanted to write a lie.” This course asks students to consider what it means to write an American memoir, particularly from perspectives historically excluded from mainstream publishing and prestigious literary journals. Keeping Laymon’s words in mind, we might ask how marginalized voices engage the presumed transparency of the memoir form to render lies (or mythologies) that arguably consolidate the US as a nation. How does the American memoir write from and to the nation? This course centers students’ voices. We learn about memoir (and memory) from reading selected memoirs and criticism, but also from our own life writing, which we share in a workshop setting. Our reading selections provide us with a variety of models for transforming memory into story, including the braided essay, lyric forms, flash, the hermit crab essay, and epistolary, among others. Authors may include Kiese Laymon, Deborah Miranda, Melissa Febos, Doris Cheng, Bich Minh Nguyen, and Hilton Als, among others. Two hours every other week. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: INT
The Vassar Critical Journal intensive provides students with publishing experience at every stage of the process. Students begin as writers, submitting their own work to the journal. They then act as literary agents, reading all submissions and deciding which essays they enjoy and which proceeds to the editing level. They each offer editorial comments and advice on each accepted submission, sending the essays back to the writers for revision and doing final copy edits for publication. They also are expected to promote the journal throughout the course and be responsible for the layout and look of the issue on the whole. In addition, students perform due diligence by reading the literary texts and criticism featured in the articles under submission. (This task is divided among them.) Collectively, students compose an editors’ note to be placed at the head of the publication. By the end of the course, students have collaboratively created a journal of their own making and design. Class meets once a week, but during the initial and final stages of the process, more time is needed. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The intensive is intended for the editorial board of the VCJ, and is open to a few more students who wish to join. Pasquale Toscano. First six-week course. One 2-hour period. Course Format: INT
(Same as AFRS 276 and ANST 276 ) Though our culture has become increasingly comfortable with self exposure, it does not completely explain why people so frequently resort to the genre of memoir to publicize the self. What might be required of the writer—in terms of aesthetics, historical memory, the publishing industry, and the market—might also be mysterious to many. This intensive seeks to peak behind the curtain of memoir making, with an eye toward having students produce a substantial, but hardly oversized (20 pages), draft of a memoir of their own. We meet with real live memoirists, and having read their works, question them mercilessly about how they brought their stories into being. Among the inquiries that will drive our enterprise is what makes a memoir black. Another is what difference does this (racial) difference make for memoir- writing. Tyrone Simpson.
Permission of the instructor and 200-level courses in English/ Africana Studies/American Studies. One 3-hour period. Course Format: INT
Offered
Spring
ENGL 277Reading and Writing Outdoors1
In this intensive, we explore the practice of writing outdoors through two avenues: first, by reading and discussing texts that emerged from their authors’ intimacy with the natural world; and second, and by cultivating our own relationship to the outdoors through a mix of contemplative practices and creative writing. We pair Dorothy Wordsworth’s walking journals with a practice of walking meditation, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writings on indigenous philosophies of reciprocity with tree meditation and inter-breathing. Our aim is not only to observe how writers from a range of literary traditions have expressed their relationship to nature in words, but also to explore which modes of writing and relating activate our own sense of aliveness in nature. This intensive involves physical practices and walking, including some field trips and long hikes. Students must be able to sit on the ground, practice outside in all weathers, and get a little dirty. To apply, please send me a paragraph outlining why you are interested in this intensive, as well as any previous experiences or courses that might be relevant to our topic.
Permission of the instructor. To apply, students are invited to send a paragraph outlining why they are interested in this intensive, as well as any previous experiences or courses that might be relevant to our topic, to kgemmill@vassar.edu. Two hours every other week. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: INT
ENGL 278Reading Middlemarch0.5
(Same as GNCS 278 ) Written in 1871-2, Middlemarch is widely considered to be George Eliot’s masterpiece and a landmark of Victorian realism. Eliot’s epic narrative explores the profound changes wrought on a provincial English town by the industrial revolution, the coming of the railroad, scientific discoveries, and democratic reforms. Middlemarch is also, as Virginia Woolf noted, “one of the few English novels written for grownup people.” At its core are three love stories, two disastrous marriages, and Eliot’s guiding principle that “there is no private life which is not determined by a wider public life.” The novel’s length makes it a difficult text to accommodate on a crowded course syllabus. But the intensive format allows students to engage with Middlemarch singly and slowly. The novel is divided into eight books, and students read a book a week over the course of the semester, with time left over for student projects, critical or creative. Susan Zlotnick. Both first and second six-week course. One 75-minute period. Course Format: INT
This course approaches the study of early and nineteenth-century American literature by engaging students in hands-on archival investigation, analysis of historical objects, and current debates in archival theory. The course consists of six meetings in Vassar’s Archives and Special Collections Library, where we examine literary and cultural artifacts in a range of media and genres, from first-edition volumes by authors like Phillis Wheatley and Herman Melville to colonial maps of the Americas and nineteenth-century women’s magazines. We consider how interacting with such artifacts in person expands the questions that we ask about literary history, particularly concerning the diverse and often overlooked ways that literary texts were created, circulated, and used. Our readings include literary texts represented in Vassar’s archival holdings along with recent criticism exploring the ethics of archival “recovery” work and methods for addressing archival power structures and erasures. First six-week course. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: INT
This course examines comics and their longer-form descendent the graphic novel as both popular literature and distinct developments in the long history of visual storytelling. This history of the comic form has persistently been defined by a preoccupation with the fantastical (superheroes to supernatural horror) and the realistic (autobiography to historical witness) that opens an array of topics to explore: the politics of representation and identity, mythology and the epic hero, desire and the unconscious, material culture and book history, the relationship between text and image, media studies and adaptation. Through such focused study, we emerge from the course with a grounding in methods of comics analysis and a complex understanding of the development of the graphic novel and its relationship to the literary. Readings may include work by Alison Bechdel, Will Eisner, Charles Burns, Junji Ito, Julie Doucet, Marjane Satrapi, Jillian Tamaki, Yvan Alegbe, Lynda Barry, Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore, Joe Sacco, Jaime Hernandez, among others. Seth Cosimini. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
Two units of 200-level work in English, and permission of the associate chair. 1 unit of credit given only in exceptional cases. Course Format: OTH
Offered
Fall or Spring
ENGL 300Senior Tutorial1
Preparation of a long essay (40 pages) or other independently designed critical project. Each essay is directed by an individual member of the department. The Department. Special permission. Course Format: INT
The purpose of this course is to refine our understanding of the craft of writing in order to produce a publishable piece. We discuss examples of beautiful, brilliant, disturbing writing and consider aspects of craft like voice, structure, pacing, and time. Our readings are primarily in short fiction and nonfiction but include poetry and a play. Amitava Kumar.
Open to juniors and seniors who have taken ENGL 207 , ENGL 209 , or ENGL 211 . In order to register for this class, students should complete an application prior to preregistration, using a form available in the English Department in lieu of writing samples. Notification of acceptance is given before preregistration begins. Please do not contact the professor. One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Fall
ENGL 305Senior Creative Writing Seminar1
Senior Composition is a year-long creative writing course aimed at refining craft repertoire, developing a practice of rigorous revision, and producing a written project of style and substance, which may range from a collection of poetry, a sequence of stories, to a short novel. This class begins with the notion that revision and the revising mind are fundamental engines of literary composition. We read a number of texts, considering the question of how a writer “revises” a notion and/or tradition to create a centripetal force holding together a lengthier work or sequence. How might a constraint both generate diffuse work and adhere as a collection? How might a voice cinch together stories or a collection of verse? How can the fragment insinuate a coherent narrator, sensibility, or concept? Our class operates both as a workshop and a laboratory for critical-creative practice. We aim to articulate the raison d’etre of our work, and our intentions for how it will converse with the larger world of literary texts. Tracy O’Neill. Permission of the instructor. Open to senior English majors and correlates. Writing samples are due before preregistration. Check with the English Office for the exact date of the deadline. Yearlong course 305- ENGL 306 . One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor. Course Format: CLS
Senior Composition is a year-long creative writing course aimed at refining craft repertoire, developing a practice of rigorous revision, and producing a written project of style and substance, which may range from a collection of poetry, a sequence of stories, to a short novel. This class will begin with the notion that revision and the revising mind are fundamental engines of literary composition. We will read a number of texts, considering the question of how a writer “revises” a notion and/or tradition to create a centripetal force holding together a lengthier work or sequence. How might a constraint both generate diffuse work and adhere as a collection? How might a voice cinch together stories or a collection of verse? How can the fragment insinuate a coherent narrator, sensibility, or concept? Our class will operate both as a workshop and a laboratory for critical-creative practice. We will aim to articulate the raison d’etre of our work, and our intentions for how it will converse with the larger world of literary texts. Tracy O’Neill.
Permission of the instructor. Open to seniors in all departments. Writing samples are due before preregistration. Check with the English Office for the exact date of the deadline. Open to seniors in all departments. Writing samples are due before preregistration. Check with the English Office for the exact date of the deadline. Yearlong course ENGL 305 -306. One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Spring
ENGL 307Thoreau’s Cabin1
(Same as ENST 307 ) Thoreau’s Cabin: an experiential investigation into carpentry, construction and environmental thinking. This course studies the cabin that Henry David Thoreau designed and built on the shore of Walden Pond in 1845 and completes the interior of a replica of it constructed on the Vassar Farm. We read Thoreau’s Walden , where there is a detailed description of the cabin, and visit Concord, Massachusetts, to see the present reproduction. In addition, we read and discuss Thoreau’s biography and look into the ecological basis of American Transcendentalism. Students are instructed in best practices in building and carpentry and undertake the construction work themselves, including foundation preparation, insulation, wall and ceiling plastering, flooring, and some interior carpentry. No prior building experience required. There are some extra class days on weekends during the semester. Paul Kane.
Permission of the instructor. One 3-hour period plus one 75-minute period. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Fall
ENGL 315Studies in Performance1
This course offers advanced study in the relationship between performance and text. Performance in this case is broadly conceived. It can include dramatic performances of plays, as well as storytelling, comic or musical performance, performance art, and poetry. The course may also explore such categories as gender or identity as forms of performance. Limited enrollment. This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as AFRS 319 ) Re-examinations of canonical literature in order to discover how race is either explicitly addressed by or implicitly enabling to the texts. Does racial difference, whether or not overtly expressed, prove a useful literary tool? The focus of the course varies from year to year. Eve Dunbar.
This course examines various literary traditions. The materials may cross historical, national and linguistic boundaries, and may investigate how a specific myth, literary form, idea, or figure (e.g., Pygmalion, romance, the epic, the fall of man, Caliban) has been constructed, disputed, reinvented and transformed. Topics vary from year to year.
Open to Juniors and Seniors with two units of 200-level work in English, or by permission of the instructor. This course satisfies the REGS requirement for the English major. One 2-hour period. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Fall
ENGL 325Studies in Genre1
An in-depth study of specific forms or types of literature, such as satire, humor, gothic fiction, realism, slave narratives, science fiction, crime, romance, adventure, short story, epic, autobiography, hypertext, and screenplay. Each year, one or more of these genres is investigated in depth. The course may cross national borders and historical periods or adhere to boundaries of time and place. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ANST 329 and GNCS 329 ) Exploration of the literary concepts of realism and naturalism focusing on the theory and practice of fiction between 1870 and 1910, the first period in American literary history to be called modern. The course may examine past critical debates as well as the current controversy over realism in fiction. Attention is given to such questions as what constitutes reality in fiction, as well as the relationship of realism to other literary traditions. Authors may include Henry James, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Charles Chestnutt, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and Willa Cather. This course satisfies the pre-1900 requirement for the English major. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
American Modernism pivots between high culture (stylistically spare, muscular in attitude) and popular fiction (mawkish, sentimental) to understand the stakes in gendering literary modernism. In academia, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Eliot, Pound, and Hemingway anchor the male modernist masthead; screenwriters and novelists, Fanny Hurst, Olive Higgins Prouty, and Anita Loos, the popular canon. Yet, men penned ‘tearjerkers’, stories that lent themselves to filmic adaptation for a mass audience, while only women were disparaged as authors of melodramas and romance fiction. Examining the gendered meanings of nostalgia, consumption, celebrity, this course further challenges the notion of an exclusively male ‘avant-garde’ (a military term designating an advanced guard of culture) through an exploration of lesbian modernism: H.D., Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes. Wendy Graham. This course satisfies the REGS requirement for the English major. One 2-hour period. Course Format: CLS
Advanced study of selected medieval texts and the questions they raise about their context and interpretation. Issues addressed may include the social and political dynamics, literary traditions, symbolic discourses, and individual authorial voices shaping literary works in this era. Discussion of these issues may draw on both historical and aesthetic approaches, and both medieval and modern theories of rhetoric, reference, and text-formation. Mark Amodio.
(Same as DRAM 342 ) Advanced study of Shakespeare’s work and its cultural significance in various contexts from his time to today. This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
Study of the life and works of John Milton (1609-1674) with emphasis on his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667). Robert DeMaria. This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major. One 2-hour period. Course Format: CLS
ENGL 350Studies in Eighteenth-century British Literature1
Focuses on a broad literary topic, with special attention to works of the Restoration and eighteenth century. This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
ENGL 351Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature1
(Same as GNCS 351 ) Study of a major author (e.g., Coleridge, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde) or a group of authors (the Brontes, the Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters) or a topical issue (representations of poverty; literary decadence; domestic angels and fallen women; transformations of myth in Romantic and Victorian literature) or a major genre (elegy, epic, autobiography). Susan Zlotnick.
(Same as GNCS 352 and WFQS 352 ) In-depth study of Romantic-era texts with the option of pursuing a select group of writers under the rubric of a specific genre, methodological approach, topic or theme. This course aims to deepen students’ expertise in one or more of the topics covered in ENGL 248 .
Open to Juniors and Seniors with two units of 200-level work in English, or with permission of the instructor. This course satisfies the pre-1900 or the REGS requirement for the English major. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
ENGL 355Contemporary Native American Poetry1
(Same as ANST 355 ) In this course, we use Native American Studies frameworks to study and appreciate an array of contemporary North American Indigenous Poets. Through literary analysis and close reading, we consider how Native poetics pay serious attention to ideas of sovereignty, decolonization, healing, and intergenerational memory and continuance. Native American poetry is particularly vast and diverse, representing over 500 Indigenous nations in the northern hemisphere and written/spoken in both Indigenous languages and languages of conquest (English, Spanish, French). Because of this range, our goals for the class are to become acquainted with the various creative conversations, discourses, and theoretical debates within the robust field of Native American poetry and poetics. A Native American Studies framework positions the literature as the creative work of Native peoples, expressed on behalf of their respective Nations or communities and complicated by the on-going legacy of colonialism. Molly McGlennen. One 2-hour period. Course Format: CLS
(Same as WFQS 357 ) In-depth study of literatures of the twentieth century, with primary focus on British and postcolonial (Irish, Indian, Pakistani, South African, Caribbean, Australian, Canadian, etc.) texts. Selections may focus on an author or group of authors, a genre (e.g., modern verse epic, drama, satiric novel, travelogue), or a topic (e.g., the economics of modernism, black Atlantic, Englishes and Englishness, themes of exile and migration). Heesok Chang.
Open to Juniors and Seniors with two units of 200-level work in English, or by permission of the instructor. One 2-hour period. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Fall
ENGL 365Selected Author1
Study of the work of a single author. The work may be read in relation to literary predecessors and descendants as well as in relation to the history of the writer’s critical and popular reception. This course alternates from year to year with ENGL 265 . This course satisfies the pre-1900 requirement for the English major. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
This course focuses on literary works and cultural networks that cross the borders of the nation-state. Such border-crossings raise questions concerning vexed phenomena such as globalization, exile, diaspora, and migration-forced and voluntary. Collectively, these phenomena deeply influence the development of transnational cultural identities and practices. Specific topics studied in the course vary from year to year and may include global cities and cosmopolitanisms; the black Atlantic; border theory; the discourses of travel and tourism; global economy and trade; or international terrorism and war.
This course examines strangeness as a modality of craft in which analysis and innovation meet, taking seriously the notion that the text is constructed through layered processes of experiment and revision. Throughout the semester, we explore varied approaches to strangeness, reading both aesthetic manifestos and creative works. We treat our classroom as a laboratory of sorts, engaging the techniques we explore through a short series of writing exercises aimed at practicing various procedures and approaches. Finally, we ask, what’s the point of strangeness? What do strange texts do? Tracy O’Neill.
Open to Juniors and Seniors with two units of 200-level work in English. Second six-week course. One 2-hour period. Course Format: INT
Offered
Spring
ENGL 378Brief Encounters: The Reading and Writing of Flash Fiction0.5
In the short story “Snow” by Ann Beattie, the narrator recalls how her lover once declared of storytelling, “Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.” This course centers flash fiction, that is, narrative under 1,000 words–and the concentrated power brevity may afford. We adopt a surgical heuristic, teasing the textures of language, narrative time, the logic of eventhood, shape, and mood as we read stories written by Augusto Monterroso, Kim Chinquee, Yasunari Kawabata, Somerset Maugham, Robert Lopez, Lydia Davis, Luisa Valenzuela, Diane Williams, Robert Olen Butler, Naguib Mahfouz, Ed Park, and Deb Olen Unferth. Students are expected to write one story flash fiction week, which will be workshopped and carefully revised. Finally, we explore flash fiction literary journals such as NOON, Vestal Review, NANO Fiction, and Flash, with an eye toward submitting flash fiction for publication.
Offered to juniors and seniors who have taken ENGL 205 or ENGL 206 . First six-week course. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: INT
ENGL 379The Research Intensive: Sources, Methods, Processes0.5
This six-week intensive prepares students to write a thesis in English, or to undertake the kind of research required in many 300-level English seminars. In our weekly meetings, we focus on defining a research project, identifying appropriate resources, exploring different methodological approaches, and discussing what’s at stake in literary studies. The weekly meetings also provide a space for students to share ideas and to discuss the challenges of doing research in English. By the end of the Intensive, the students have produced a thesis or research project proposal, a 5-7 page literature review, and an annotated bibliography.
Prerequisite(s): Open to Juniors and Seniors with 2 units of 200-level work in English, or by permission of the instructor. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
Open to Juniors and Seniors with 2 units of 200-level work in English, or by permission of the instructor. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
ENGL 386True Crime0.5
“True Crime” explores the relationship between journalism, literature, film, TV, and other media. In the 19th century, Literary naturalism, a sub-genre of realism, eschewed literary devices and stylistic preciosity, instead describing characters and events in the direct, unembellished prose of the newspaper account. From Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (inspired by the Wilmington NC race riot of 1898) to Frank Norris’s McTeague (inspired by the murder of a charwoman) to Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier inspired by Charles Yerkes financial chicanery) to Richard Wright’s Native Son (inspired by newspaper accounts of a murder), the American novel has relied on ‘real events’ to generate ideas for character and plots. Students may conduct research into the events inspiring these and other novels and present their findings to the group. Alternately, students may choose a crime from any period (be it Lizzy Borden’s alleged murder of her parents, Jack the Ripper’s murders, contemporary serial killers, political assassinations, the Manson crime family, the murders of Emmett Till, Michael Stewart, George Floyd–too many to name, the brouhaha surrounding Jeffrey Epstein) and locate and compare multiple representations of the event (whether in novels, plays, movies, TV shows, podcasts, comics, songs, newspapers, trials, forensic science). In most instances, representations highlight historical, class, and racial tensions (or obliviousness) over the subject and even who has a right to speak for the victim. [The 2016 controversy over the Whitney Museum’s exhibition of Dana Schutz’s depiction of the open casket funeral of Emmett Till is a good example. Schutz is a white artist and her detractors objected to her appropriation of an iconic black figure and potentially profiting from her work.] Students are not limited to 19th century crimes or media for their final projects. Film noir offers a rich cache of images and tropes for understanding the allure of the femme fatale and the lethality of the male gaze in contemporary film and even music videos. TV shows, documentaries, and podcasts are another resource. Students may undertake original research or complete a creative project for this intensive. Likely texts: Truman Capote, In Cold Blood , Dorothy Hughes, In a Lonely Place , Patricia Highsmith, The Blunderer, Vincent Bugliosi, Helter Skelter. Wendy Graham. Second six-week course. One 2-hour period. Course Format: INT
