Course Descriptions Spring 2025

M 02:00PM-04:30PM
Rita Dove

In this graduate-level workshop, designed for MFA poets in the first two years of the program, students will continue developing their own writing practices while exploring other compositional and critical techniques. We’ll devote most class sessions to reviewing peer-generated poetry, but we’ll also discuss published works by established writers and other aspects of the creative process. In addition, we will examine what it means to “manage” a writer’s life, with particular emphasis on writing routines as well as exploring ways to probe, massage and coax poems into revealing their secrets. Students should be prepared to participate energetically in group critique sessions in addition to polishing their own writing. All students will be required to complete one “wild card” assignment; both first and second-year MFA students will assemble a portfolio of poetry at semester's end.

M 02:00PM-04:30PM
Jesse Ball

This advanced workshop is designed for first- and second-year graduate students in the Masters of Fine Arts in Fiction program.  Enrollment is by instructor permission only. 

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Clare Kinney

“A chamber of sudden change”; “a meeting place of image and voice”; “a game with mortal stakes”; “the collision of music, desire and argument”: these are some of the ways that poets and critics have described the sonnet. Starting with the Petrarchan experiments of Renaissance Europe and extending our reach through the Romantics and the modernists to Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Kiki Petrosino, Terrance Hayes, and others, we will consider the persistence and the many metamorphoses of the form. Sonnet writers construct a “a moment’s monument” for religious, political, philosophical and meta-poetical purposes as well as to anatomize desire, and when they present sonnets in sequence they make lyric do something of the work of narrative. Every time a sonnet is written, its author becomes part of a very long literary conversation and may make that intervention the occasion to set thought and feeling in a new dialogue, to reconsider “the contradictory impulses of being in the world,” to talk back to tradition, to make the dead speak again, to re-make and re-break the rules of form. Exploring the history, poetics (and the race and gender politics) of this tenacious short form, we will consider the craftiness of craft and the particular power of “bound language.” In addition to addressing a wide selection of sonnets written from the 16th century to yesterday, we will also read critical writings on the sonnet by a variety of scholars and poets.

Requirements: lively participation in discussion; a series of discussion board responses to readings, one 6-7 page paper; a presentation on a contemporary sonnet of your own choice; a substantial final project (critical or hybrid creative-critical).

This course can satisfy the pre-1700 requirement for PhD, MA and undergraduate students: contact instructor for more information.

W 10:00AM-12:30PM
Stephen Cushman

The stories, rhythms, and rhetoric of the Bible have been imprinting readers and writers of English since the seventh century. Moving through selections from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, from Genesis to Revelation, this course focuses on deepening biblical literacy and sharpening awareness of biblical connections to whatever members of the class are reading in other contexts. Along the way we will discuss English translations of the Bible; the process of canonization; textual history; and the long trail of interpretive approaches, ancient to contemporary. Our text will be the New Oxford Annotated Bible, 5th ed. All are welcome. No previous knowledge of the Bible needed or assumed.

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Mark Edmundson

We’ll read with care and imagination what are perhaps the two greatest long poems in English, John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Both are works of palpable genius, but of very different kinds. Milton’s poem is committed to hierarchy, order and degree. In his cosmos, justified subordination and command are the highest ideals. (Though he is constantly challenging them.) His world at its best is firmly, yet flexibly ordered. He is a brilliant exemplar of true conservatism. Whitman is much different. “Unscrew the locks from the doors / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jams,” Walt chants. Whitman wants to dissolve all needless boundaries in the interest of perfect democratic equality. He wants to undo the barriers between old and young, rich and poor, women and men. And he does so, at least imaginatively, in “Song of Myself.” We’ll read the poems for what they are in themselves. But we’ll also consider them as brilliant exemplars of the progressive mind and its conservative counterpart. Students may be surprised as to where their allegiances lie. With any luck, we’ll all find ourselves, in the words of Wallace Stevens, “more truly and more strange.” A mid-term paper, a final essay, and some short writing assignments.

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
Stephen Hopkins

This course provides an introduction to the language and literature of medieval Iceland (also called Old Norse or Old Icelandic, roughly 800-1400 CE), and the goal is to arrive at a sound reading knowledge of the Old Norse language. Drawing upon Byock’s textbook, Viking Language, the first half of the semester focuses on internalizing the basics of Old Norse grammar and vocabulary. While acquiring these rudimentary linguistic skills, we will practice translating bits of prose and poetry (The Prose Edda, Egils Saga, et al.)  as supplied in the textbook. After midterms, we will translate The Tale of Thorsteinn Staff-Struck. The course will also include secondary readings to orient us towards Old Norse genres, contexts, and critical/theoretical approaches prevalent in the field today, with an emphasis on the history of the conversion and the importation of writing technologies (i.e., basic paleography). 

T 03:30PM-06:00PM
Michael Suarez

How did Great Britain come to abolish the slave trade in 1807 and what roles did literature play in enlightening readers to the barbarities of this human traffic? Reading works such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, and a variety of poems, both canonical and from relatively unknown voices, we will attempt to immerse ourselves in the literature of British abolition. Juxtaposing such writings with visual materials (viz., the slave ship Brooks), abolitionist political pamphlets, and letters in the C18 public press will give greater depth to our discussions. Finally, we will read Caryl Phillips’ novel Cambridge and reflect on how a literature of abolition might function in our own time.

This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement.

M 03:30PM-06:00PM
Carmen Lamas

In this course we will read works that situate the Latinx experience in its Americas context. Such genres as the memoir, speculative fiction, romance, YA, graphic novels, historical fiction and poetry will be read. Issues such as border crossing, immigration, and deportation will serve to approach and query Latinidad in/from its many historical, geographic, generic, aesthetic, and political manifestations. We will locate these works in the wider debates regarding literature, language, departmental/field placement, and the interdisciplinary nature of Latinx studies. No prior experience reading Latinx literature is necessary. Fourth-years welcome with permission. All readings, writings, and discussions are in English.

R 05:00PM-07:30PM
Lisa Goff

“Material culture” is the stuff of everyday life: landscapes and street corners, skyscrapers and log cabins, umbrellas and dining room tables and Picassos and Fitbits. Every thing in our lives, those we choose and those that are thrust upon us, conveys meaning—many meanings, in fact, from the intentions of the creator to the reception (and sometimes the subversion) of the consumer. Interpreting objects, buildings, and places provides insight into the values and beliefs of societies and cultures past and present. In this course we will study theories of material culture, many of which now intersect with literary criticism, from a variety of scholarly disciplines including anthropology, historical archaeology, art history, geography, environmental humanities, American Studies, and literary studies. And we will apply those theories to texts and artifacts of all kinds, from novels and short stories to movies, photographs, historic sites, visual art and culture, fashion and clothing, landscapes, and more. We will read theorists familiar to students of literature, such as thing theorist Bill Brown, but also folklorist Henry Glassie; archaeologist James Deetz; anthropologist Elizabeth Chin, and political theorist Jane Bennett. The class will prepare you to interpret things in ways that illuminate texts, and to read texts in ways that reveal and cultivate the meanings of things.

F 09:30AM-12:00PM
David Vander Meulen

This course in textual criticism deals with some of the fundamental problems of literary study:

● If a work exists in multiple forms and with different wording, what constitutes "the text"?

● How are such judgments made and standards determined?

● How are verbal works as intellectual abstractions affected by the physical forms in which they are transmitted?

● If one is faced with the prospect of editing a work, how does one go about it?

● How does one choose an edition for use in the classroom?

● What difference does this all make?

The course will deal with such concerns and will include:

● A short survey of analytical bibliography and the solution of practical problems as they apply to literary texts.

● Study of the transmission of texts in different periods.

● Consideration of theories and techniques of editing literary and non-literary texts of different genres, and of both published and unpublished materials.

The course will build to the preparation of a scholarly edition by each student. The class on books as physical objects, ENGL 5810, provides helpful background but is not a prerequisite.

*This course satisfies the Graduate English requirement for the history of criticism or literary theory.*

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM
Walter Jost

Ours is an age of communication, and one of its hallmarks is the “conflict of interpretations” among schools of criticism, theory, and cultural study. This course requires no specialized background in these matters, for in fact we all know how to talk, read, interpret, and argue. The question is, how well? with how much control and discipline? how do we develop our abilities? The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer once wrote that “Where, indeed, but to rhetoric should the theoretical examination of interpretation turn? Rhetoric from oldest tradition has been the only advocate of a claim to truth that defends the probable, the eikos (versimile), and that which is convincing to the ordinary reason, against the claim of science to accept as true only what can be demonstrated and tested.” Together we will develop a basic understanding of the arts of discourse called “hermeneutics” and “rhetoric,” through close reading and discussions of selected scholarly texts (chiefly essays and book chapters), testing our learning against literary, legal, and religious works (e.g., G. K. Chesterton’s allegorical The Man Who Was Thursday, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, cases in common law, and Biblical parables, among others).

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
Adrienne Ghaly

How do the arts and the humanities contribute to conversations about the environment and the fate of our planet? How are they responding to the environmental challenges of the Anthropocene, the geological age in which humans (some more than others) shape Earth systems? This course introduces the questions, methods, and arguments that organize work in the environmental humanities (EH). The seminar’s primary objective to is to advance graduate student capacities to use skills, knowledges, tools, and archives of the humanities to advance pluralist, integrated understandings of environmental issues. In support of that purpose, the seminar develops critical reflection on conceptual, theoretical and methodological questions in EH about disciplinarity, collaboration, innovation, and public engagement. The course materials draw from literary and cultural studies, philosophy, history, anthropology, and religion. This graduate seminar is open to MA and PhD students from any discipline, including the sciences and social sciences. 

This class is collaborative by design, with guest speakers from across UVA presenting over the course of the semester. It also fulfills one of the requirements for the graduate certificate in Environmental Humanities (info can be found here).  

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM
Elizabeth Fowler

The extreme art of the settler-colonial frontier—stringent, searching, terrifying, ambitious, violent, feminist, fantastic, surreal, comic—Spenser's poetry and prose, almost all written in Ireland, has provoked much of the best work by early modernists over the last three decades. We'll attempt immersive reading, make forays into the work of the in-progress Oxford Spenser edition, and grapple with problems poetic, editorial, theoretical, ecological, aesthetic, moral, historical, and jurisprudential. Spenser is soaked in Malory, Chaucer, Vergil, Homer, Aristotle—and English-language authors in all the ensuing centuries are soaked in him, Shakespeare to Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Yet where else can you get a dominant female knight, an elusive queen of faerie, queer sex scenes of many variations, a dragon who vomits books, joyous rivers in hats getting married, the invention of the words “self” and “emotion,” cannibals singing Petrarchan blazons, and a sex-positive, anatomically correct Mound of Venus? (BTW, Milton says Spenser is a better teacher than Aquinas, and was he ever wrong?) Our goals will be to collaborate on a working sense of Spenser’s poetry and its bibliography, to get good at immersion in lots of material while keeping what’s important to you above the waterline, to become articulate about poetry and able to move around within it while developing interesting trains of thought, and to hone all those skills both in seminar conversation and in your prose.

This course fulfills the pre-1700 requirement.

T 03:30PM-06:00PM
Debjani Ganguly

The course will explore the emergence of the ‘ocean’ as a powerful rubric in global and hemispheric literary studies. The fluidity of the ocean as against terrestrial borders gives new meaning to categories like empire, diaspora, postcolonial, slave, settler, and indentured labor.

Through novels, philosophical tracts, and theories of history, we will study the import of the transatlantic slave trade and its traumatic entanglement with global histories of modern maritime colonialism including those of Indian Ocean worlds. Specifically, we will trace connections across the Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds through the novels of Barry Unsworth, Fred D’Aguiar, and Amitav Ghosh, and the narrative non-fiction of Paul Gilroy. The course will include excerpts from the work of Edouard Glissant, the famous exponent of Caribbean Creolite, from an anthology of black narratives that emerged during the transatlantic slave trade, and from Ian Baucom’s philosophical history of the Zong massacre of 1781.

Primary Texts

Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

Fred D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts

Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies

Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic

Readings available on Canvas

Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic  

Vincent Caretta ed. Unchained Voices 

T 02:00PM-04:30PM
Tamika Carey

This seminar explores Black women’s rhetorical practices as a critical tradition. Through an interdisciplinary lens grounded in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies scholarship and informed by work in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and literary criticism, we will work to identify the techne, the praxis, and the implications of Black women’s choice to use written, visual, and aural strategies to shape and reshape themselves and their worlds. By necessity, we will consider questions such as: how do Black women define and name conditions of their subjectivity and the constraints to their public participation and livelihood? What is the connection between Black feminist thought and Black women’s literacies? Which genres, arguments, and strategies do they rely upon to address personal or sociopolitical concerns? And what might Black feminist/womanist rhetorical criticism or pedagogy involve? Ideally, this work will enable us to outline how Black women’s rhetorics operate as interpretive, interventionist, and instructional resources. Our readings will involve a combination of primary texts and critical writings. The scholars and public intellectuals we are likely to engage include: Jacqueline Jones Royster, Marcyliena Morgan, Elaine Richardson, Gwendolyn Pough, Carmen Kynard, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Beverly Guy Sheftall, Audre Lorde, Brittney Cooper, and Moya Bailey. Assignments may include: a discussion leading and course presentation activity, short weekly writing assignments, a brief annotated bibliography, and a seminar-length essay.

TR 9:30AM-10:45AM
Alison Booth

This seminar, affectionately known as TASTE, disregards the usual course classifications of nation or period or genre, though we will work with texts originally written in English in the past two centuries. We will learn about textual studies of some novels by Jane Austen, short stories and poetry from different times and places, prose biographies in Collective Biographies of Women, and online life writing. While it fulfills an elective for the Certificate in Digital Humanities (DH), the course will strive to be accessible or teachable to anyone who likes to read or edit closely and who is curious to try new things. For anyone comfortable with digital humanities, it offers a perspective on how to teach or learn specific methods or new software. Sustainable, like accessible, has several meanings: in the environment as well as in DH (will it last?), and we will consider it also as an outcome or effect: some literature lasts in part because our taste tells us to reread it and help make it more accessible. Some aspect of the course will be familiar: interpreting the texts; gathering a bibliography; spreadsheets or Google documents; writing an essay. Collaboration on textual studies will perhaps be a new experience.

R 03:30PM-06:00PM
Taylor Schey

This course explores how British literature of the Romantic era (1780s – 1820s) registers and participates in processes of race-making that have shaped the modern world. Taking our cue from theoretical readings in Black studies, we’ll investigate how the racial order of chattel slavery was insidiously strengthened during the historical period in which its economic infrastructure began to be dismantled. While we’ll study some poems and novels that directly address the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery (e.g. abolitionist poetry; The Woman of Colour; Mansfield Park) and a couple that reflect the popularization of racial science (e.g. Frankenstein), we’ll be especially interested in interrogating how the development of seemingly unrelated political movements (e.g. white feminism; popular radicalism), literary conventions (e.g. the ballad revival; the aesthetics of the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque), and Romantic ideals (e.g. community, liberty, the power of poetry, the human) are connected to the broader consolidation of antiblackness and white-supremacist logics in the nineteenth century. This seminar satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement. It also introduces students to an influential tradition of theoretical work in Black studies.

Authors include Jane Austen, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hannah More, Mary Robinson, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Southey, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth; theorists include Rizvana Bradley, Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, bell hooks, Christina Sharpe, Hortense Spillers, Rei Terada, Alexander Weheliye, Frank Wilderson, and Sylvia Wynter.

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM
Jahan Ramazani

How does poetry articulate and respond to the globalizing processes that accelerate in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? In this seminar, we consider modern and contemporary poetry in English in relation to transnational, global, world literary, and postcolonial theory and history. Issues to be explored include the historical memory of colonization and enslavement, global challenges such as war and the climate crisis, and transformations of world-traveling poetic forms and strategies. We closely read the vibrant anglophone poetries of India, Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, Ireland, Black and Asian Britain, and diasporic and Indigenous America, which bring new worlds, new idioms, and new literary possibilities into English. Postcolonial writers enrich poetry in English by hybridizing local traditions with the poetic inheritances of the global North. Forged in response to an increasingly globalized world, the innovations of transnational modernist writers provide crucial tools that the poets of the global South repurpose. Featured writers include postcolonial poets such as Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Lorna Goodison, NourbeSe Philip, A. K. Ramanujan, Okot p’Bitek, Christopher Okigbo, and Daljit Nagra, and modernists like T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and Claude McKay.

M 05:00PM-07:30PM
Njelle Hamilton

Superheroes, space operas, time travel, futuristic tech — the stuff of dreams and the subject of countless popular literary and cultural works over the past century. Far too long featuring mainly white male heroes and US or European settings, sci-fi and fantasy (SF/F) have become increasingly diverse in recent years, even as reframed definitions open up archives of previously overlooked black and brown genre writing from across the globe. Still, the Caribbean is often ignored, or imagined either as a rustic beach or a technological backwater. In this seminar, however, you will encounter authors and auteurs (Indiana, Hopkinson, Ross, Diaz, et al) from the English-, Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean working at the cutting edge of SF/F, and discover novels and stories that center Caribbean settings, peoples, and culture, even as they expand the definition of genre. We’ll read these novels and stories alongside important Caribbean and SF theory and criticism (expect roughly 300-500pp/wk of reading) to generate critical discussion around the limits of mainstream terms and discourses in SFF and formulate region-specific language and frameworks.

In addition to exposing you to Caribbean literary studies, critical debates and methods, this course encourages you to deepen as well as experiment with modes of academic scholarship. In tandem with the ways these Caribbean SFF texts interrogate form and narrative—especially in response to colonization and the hegemony of Western epistemologies—I’ll challenge/inspire you to think about un-disciplining academic writing. What projects might you imagine that match the level of #joysparking that reading these novels bring you, and that demonstrate Caribbean study as praxis? For whom will you write? What platforms, technologies and formats do those readers/listeners/thinkers frequent? How can scholarly writing (or other formats of disseminating research) become an act of radical speculation in its own right?

W 02:00PM-04:30PM
Sumita Chakraborty

Lyric poem, lyric voice, lyric speaker, lyric reading: these and other similar terms share one strange, variously theorized, and often-contested word at their core. This course will explore a range of theories of the lyric from Aristotle and Horace to more contemporary figures like Gloria Anzaldúa, Édouard Glissant, and the scholars who make up the recent turn to “New Lyric Studies.” We will also explore how poetic schools that critique the lyric—such as conceptual poetry and language poetry—define and contest it. MA, MFA, and PhD students are all most welcome, as the assignments for this course will include both creative and critical options.

T 02:00PM-04:30PM
Kevin Moffett

A foray into the short story as a discrete form, its constraints and possibilities. We’ll consider how story writers distill time and compress language to generate volatility and produce resonant echoes in a confined space. We’ll discuss Poe’s single effect and other apparent truisms and entertain, examine, revise, and perhaps debunk them. We’ll read minimalists, maximalists, and mediumalists, the formulaic and the formally inventive. Texts will be chosen with the aim of showing the plasticity and playfulness of the form: possibly Chekhov, Angela Carter, Barthelme, Murakami, Edward P. Jones, Joy Williams. From week to week students will read and write briskly in a variety of modes, culminating in a story project in the second half of the semester.

T 06:00PM-08:30PM
Heidi Nobles

W 10:00AM-12:30PM
Steph Ceraso

Jeb Livingood

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
Mrinalini Chakravorty

This graduate course is a survey of queer studies as a discipline. It situates the emergence of sexuality as an analytic of study for the humanities through a survey of influential foundational texts of the field. The course also engages the most important contemporary debates that is shaping our understanding of the history of sexuality.

M 09:30AM-12:00PM
Bruce Holsinger