Courses

ENCW 7310-001 - MFA Poetry Workshop

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.
 

ENCW 7610-001 - MFA Fiction Workshop

Micheline Marcom

ENGL 5190-001 - The Bible

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. (4th ed. is okay, too), which people should buy ahead of time.  (Inexpensive used copies abound online.) All are welcome. No previous knowledge of the Bible needed or assumed.
 

ENGL 5500-001 - Forward to the Basics: Reinventing the Liberal Arts

Walter Jost

In our time colleges and universities still advertise “the liberal arts” as their educational ideal, although in truth these arts are honored more in the breach than in any studied observance of them; meanwhile, on the rough ground where we mortals live, they are seldom spoken about, and when they are, they are usually mentioned as historical curiosities, remnants of an ancient tradition displaced by modern subject matter “fields” and specialized “studies.” In this class, inquiry begins from an alternative premise: the arts of grammar (and hermeneutics), rhetoric, and logic/dialectic name enduring, even inexpungable arts of communicative discourse that all of us engage in whenever we interpret texts, construct arguments, organize evidence, deliberate about competing claims, and attempt to understand how different disciplines make the world more intelligible.

Designed for highly-motivated 4th years and M.A. students, this course examines these discursive arts primarily as intellectual practices. Although we will study important moments in the history of these arts from antiquity through medieval and modern transformations, our principal and sole concern will be what they enable people, what they enable all of us, to do better. Accordingly, we inquire into these intellectual practices as exemplified in literature, law, history, philosophy, and religion/theology. We will ask, for example, how literary critics establish plural approaches to poems or novels; how different philosophers construct and test arguments; how lawyers and judges reason among texts, precedents, facts, and competing interpretations; how historians turn surviving evidence into explanatory narratives; and how religious traditions negotiate relations among authoritative texts, interpretation, doctrine, and argument. Such comparisons will reveal both recurring intellectual operations and significant differences among disciplinary practices.

Admission by application email to the instructor (Walter Jost, Dept. of English) at ….
 

ENGL 5500-002 - Lyric and Lyric Theory

Elizabeth Fowler

So much of the most brilliant poetry in English is brief, intricate, emotional, musical, and written between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. We’ll study Middle English to Early Modern verse (amorous, comic, elegiac, devotional, etc.), refining our sense of what language can do in its most intense, witty, ornate, gorgeous, and sweet moments. We’ll consider poems as part of the built environments of their uses (castles, candles, beds, roads, doors . . . ), think of them as scripts for experiences we might define, notice their sensory overload and their orientation towards knowing things, puzzle over their participation in everyday life. We’ll test important strands of current lyric theory against this material, wondering whether we can revise or challenge what scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries are saying. You’ll become a skillful “close reader,” get some experience with researching material culture and entangling that in your literary criticism, and work out some tentative theoretical or philosophical positionings for yourself. Readers and poets welcome! This class will meet in camp chairs on the grass whenever the weather gods allow. Enthusiastic raw beginners with poetry and/or Middle English are welcome. This course happens to fulfill pre-1700 and the graduate literary theory requirements as well as the (“4000”) seminar requirement for the undergraduate English major.
 

ENGL 5510-001 - Old Norse Language & Literature

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). 

The one thing I'm not sure about is whether the Old Norse course fulfills the pre-1700 requirement or the language requirement. I was told at summer advising this July that Dr. Melissa Frost would definitely consider a class like this as fulfilling the foreign language requirement, especially if, as I'll be doing for Old English in 25-26, it's a two-semester sequence. 
 

ENGL 5530-001 - The Literature of British Abolition

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 literature requirement.
 

ENGL 5560-001 - James Joyce's Ulysses

Victor Luftig

This course is designed for first-time readers of Ulysses and is meant to provide a pleasurable introduction to it. We’ll explore the novel’s difficulty and its usefulness, tracking both which of the many available resources for reading it are helpful and what kinds of applications might justify the effort Ulysses summons. Prior to the first class session, please read as much as you can of an annotated edition of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (The Viking edition with notes by Anderson, which you can easily find used, would be fine.) There will be two papers, one offering the class an account of a resource you’ve sampled and another asking you to think about what contemporary situation you think Ulysses might apply to most meaningfully. There may also be some in-class and/or take-home worksheets focused on contextual information and stylistic particulars. At the end of the course we’ll have a taste of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to prepare you for future explorations of that book—which too is challenging, rewarding, and “lovesoftfun.”
 

ENGL 5580-001 - Material Culture: Theories and Methods

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, parks and monuments, 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; anthropologists such as 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.
 

ENGL 5805-001 - What is Postcolonial Critique?

Nasrin Olla

What is postcolonial critique? Is it a way of reading a text? Does it refer to the processes of historical decolonization in places like Africa, India, and the Caribbean? Or is it a practice of critical thought that can be used to think across multiple spaces and times? In this course, we will approach these questions by reading a wide range of writers including Gayatri Spivak, Edouard Glissant, Achille Mbembe, Susan Buck-Morss, and C.L.R. James.
 

ENGL 8380-001 - Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction

Kelly Fleming

Have you ever read a novel that revealed the secrets of everyone you know? Has a novel ever asked you to draw your version of a character? Have you ever felt personally victimized by a narrator? Novels in the long eighteenth century (1660-1820) routinely defy our definitions for that genre because they result in such questions. While today we typically define novels as extended works of prose fiction, some eighteenth-century novels are short; some are not fictional; some tell their stories through verse, image, or footnotes; some do not end; and at least one has a chorus. In this course, we will read works of prose fiction that appear under the titles of histories, romances, tales, fables, memoirs, and lives in order to explore what a novel is. As we read consider why these works call themselves anything other than a novel, we will encounter a variety of subgenres, including amatory fiction, the travel narrative, the gothic novel, and the historical novel. In order to not turn into quixotes, we will engage with a variety of historical and cultural contexts, as well as theoretical frameworks from the eighteenth century to the present, through which to understand the novel. Authors will include, among others, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen.
 

ENGL 8500-001 - Reading "AI"

Matthew Kirschenbaum

This course starts from the premise that whatever it may mean technologically “artificial intelligence” is also a discursive formulation, which is to say an active signifier in the cultural imagination. To begin working towards some understandings of that signifier we will undertake readings of "AI" in multiple registers: current critical writing that allows us to consider not only how today’s generative AI technology works but what work—political, social, aesthetic—we are calling upon it to do; representations of AI in literary fiction, from the 18th century to the present; and writing actually written by AI in the form of creative and experimental texts whose provenance and agency is indeterminate. While the focus of the course will be critical and theoretical (with no technical background required or assumed) we will also engage in some hands-on experimentation of our own. And while pedagogy will not be our focus, the course will offer a conceptual grounding for those who plan to teach in a world where AI is prevalent. Requirements will include leading discussion, a short reflective paper, and a longer semester project which could be either critical or creative. 
 

ENGL 8520-001 - Staging the Renaissance City

Katharine Maus

English Renaissance drama was an urban phenomenon, specifically a London phenomenon, since a repertory theater performing in a fixed location required a large population base to support it. So, unsurprisingly, many plays consider the exigencies of urban life both in London and elsewhere. In this course we will read plays sited in Rome, Venice, and London, three cities with strikingly different traditions of representation in and out of the theater.
 

ENGL 8540-001 - Predictive & Unforeseen Jane Austen

Alison Booth

In the surge of AI, we turn to the current Jane Austen, in print and remediated forms, in scholarship and general-interest modes. Are genres like training sets for machine (reader) learning? We will be careful readers of the texts, combining narrative theory with formal and stylistic interpretation. How has “Austen” changed since her death over two hundred years ago? What significant cultural issues do her novels confront and temporarily resolve? She has shaped novels and ideas of narrative in many languages and upped the stakes for costume and dance in historic productions (including series or feature films about queens, or Bridgerton and earlier versions of “the Regency"). 

Methods and theories will range widely. We will be careful readers of hard copies of the novels published in her lifetime and other texts. Everyone in the class will try out digital tools on the Austen corpus and we will note varied efforts (before and after computers) to explore Austen’s style with quantitative or keyword approaches. Collaborative and solo research projects; periodic short response papers shared in class discussion. Short and long essay. Students may take this as an elective for the Graduate DH Certificate.  
 

ENGL 8559-002 - Education, Human Capital & the Novel

Chad Wellmon

In this course, we will read both 19C novels and philosophy, focusing on the relationship of development and education (Bildung), economic and social systems, and the novel. 
 

ENGL 8560-001 - Poetry in a Global Age

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.
 

ENGL 8580-001 - Creative/Critical, Medieval to Modern

Bruce Holsinger

This seminar will explore the mutually clarifying capacities of creative and critical modes of writing. Is it useful to distinguish between these two modes, or think about them in conjunction? How do poets and novelists practice critique, and in what ways does criticism draw on fictive styles and poetic techniques? We'll work with a number of base texts from the medieval and modern worlds to think through categories of transhistorical invention--adaptation, translation, autography/autotheory/autofiction, revision, and so on--and participants will be encouraged to experiment in their own writing with and between various modes. We'll visit Special Collections for some object-based inspiration. 

The course may be used to satisfy the pre-1700 requirement or the literary theory/history of criticism requirement.

ENGL 8596-001 - What is Lyric?

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.” Along the way, we will ask ourselves how we came to understand what “lyric poetry” means, what it means to see yourself as a writer or a scholar of lyric, and other meta-theoretical questions about the role of poetry in the broader literary landscape and in the broader world; we will also interrogate assumptions (our own and others’) about the “exemplarity” of poetry. MA, MFA, and PhD students are all most welcome: this course is designed for practitioners of craft, practitioners of scholarship, and practitioners of both. 
 

ENGL 8900-001 - Writing Pedagogy Seminar

Jim Seitz

This course prepares graduate students in English for the teaching they will do here at UVA, specifically first-year writing and other writing-enhanced courses. Covers topics such as classroom management, leading discussion, writing assignment design, incorporating writing instruction, responding to student writing.
 

ENGL 8900-002 - Writing Pedagogy Seminar

Kate Stephenson

This course prepares graduate students in English for the teaching they will do here at UVA, specifically first-year writing and other writing-enhanced courses. Covers topics such as classroom management, leading discussion, writing assignment design, incorporating writing instruction, responding to student writing.
 

ENGL 8900-003 - Writing Pedagogy Seminar (MFAs)

Kiki Petrosino

This course, designed for first-year MFA students, prepares you for the teaching you will do in the Creative Writing Program. We'll cover topics such as syllabus design, lesson planning, managing the classroom, leading workshops and discussions, grading, and more. We'll also review University policies relevant to your roles as instructors. Your grade will be based on attendance, participation, a live teaching demonstration, and an original teaching portfolio, among other assignments.
 

ENGL 9545-001 - American Renaissance

Jennifer Greeson

This course will provide at once a survey of the “classic U.S. literature” of the antebellum decades, and a survey of how the idea of “classic U.S. literature” itself was constructed and contested in the decades just previous to our own. Grappling with this period and assimilating it into our own scholarly worldviews—whether we are nineteenth-century Americanists, or working in adjacent specialties—remains an important and relatively high-stakes professional endeavor, due to the nationalist pressures and expectations often brought to bear upon “American Renaissance” literature. Authors likely will include Emerson, Poe, Douglass, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Whitman, Jacobs, and Dickinson. Requirements likely will include two short response essays, two short class presentations, and a 3000-4000-word critical essay. Ideally, we will achieve as solid and useful a field competency as is possible in a single semester.
 

ENGL 9995-001 - Dissertation Seminar

Joshua Miller

ENCW 2300-001 - Poetry Writing

An introductory course in poetry writing, with a primary focus on creating new poems in a workshop setting. Students will study basic poetic terms and techniques and revise and arrange a series of poems for a final portfolio. The course will also have extensive outside reading and non-creative writing requirements.
 

ENCW 2500-001 - Introduction to Environmental Writing

Brian Teare

The more-than-human world has always been a central subject of both poetry and creative nonfiction. But environmental writing does not mean only writing about nature. Whether wild or settled, natural or built, pristine or polluted, all environments are worthy of deeper exploration. In conversation with literary texts and traditions that center the relationship between place and language, we’ll train ourselves to be more perceptive readers of landscapes both literal and linguistic. In our study of poetic form and its relation to the natural world, we’ll begin with the classical haiku tradition, a form of Japanese literature that registers human relation to the more-than-human world in seasonal and bioregionally specific ways. We’ll begin building our writing practices by using our notebooks to capture time and the seasons as winter turns to spring in central Virginia and on Grounds. We’ll also read contemporary American poetry that uses acute outward attention to build place-based networks of relation between the human and more-than-human world. Using both research and physical movement through built and natural spaces, we’ll take notes on what we notice when we’re informed by established fact and our own bodies in place. When we turn to creative nonfiction, we’ll focus on how both trained and amateur scientific research drives both essayistic and memoiristic environmental writing, and through study of the tools of essay and memoir, we’ll train ourselves to integrate observation, argument, narrative, facts, and self-reflection into our prose. Through generative writing prompts, we’ll produce poems and short essays. Through structured editorial sessions, we’ll learn to practice deeper creative inquiry and to offer and receive constructive critical feedback on writing about the environment.
 

ENCW 2559 - Poetics of Joy

Tola Sylvan

In this workshop-style course, we will examine and experiment with joy in the craft of poetry. Attending to a wide poetic tradition, as well as investigating joy in our daily lives through critical reflection and play, we will ask how joy might serve as impetus, objective, and mode in lyric writing. How have poets captured joy on the page through prosodic techniques—from rhythm and rhyme to twists and turns of thought? Can joy be a risk, a weapon, a political act? How might joy interact with other emotions, such as grief, irony, or surprise?  ‘Joy’ shares an etymological root with ‘gaudiness’—we will look at how ornament and even cliché might be harnessed to serve the lyric. Some poets we will read include Frank O’Hara, Ross Gay, Mary Ruefle, Charles Simic, Sylvia Plath, Mary Jo Bang, Sei Shonagon, Leila Chatti, and Louise Glück. Coursework will consist of close readings, maintaining an ongoing notebook practice, and sharing extensive feedback on each other’s work.
 

ENCW 2600-001 - Fiction Writing

An introductory course in fiction writing, with a primary focus on creating short stories in a workshop setting. Students will study basic narrative terms and techniques and revise several short stories for a final portfolio. The course will also have extensive outside reading and non-creative writing requirements.
 

ENCW 3310-001 - Intermediate Poetry Writing I: Serious Play

Kiki Petrosino

Serious Play

In this intermediate poetry workshop, we’ll connect with playfulness as an approach to composition and revision, and as a key concept for expanding our toolbox of techniques. We’ll read published works of poetry by writers for whom formal experimentation is key. We’ll also think about & explore the physical space of Grounds as a site for reading, writing, & sharing poems. Students in this course will engage in a regular writing practice and will take seriously the processes of composition, critique, and revision. We’ll spend a significant portion of the semester “workshopping” student poems, but we also will devote time to discussing assigned reading and to performing independent & in-class writing challenges. These activities, plus attendance, participation, & a final portfolio, will inform the grading policy. [Note: this course is designed for students with experience in poetry writing. If you have not taken a poetry workshop before, please contact Prof. Kiki Petrosino via e-mail (…) about your interest before enrolling.] 
 

ENCW 3310-002 - Intermediate Poetry Writing I: The Big Themes

Lisa Spaar

THE BIG THEMES 

In this workshop for intermediate-level poets, the aim of our collective project will be to generate poems that dare to embody, explore, provoke, illuminate, refute, and manifest “large” traditional poetic themes—Eros, Thanatos, Truth, Beauty, God, & Time­—in fresh, original ways.  In addition to writing about a poem a week, students will also be responsible for choosing a trio of “core poets” to read closely throughout the semester: one poet born before 1920, one poet born after 1965, and a poet on the faculty of the University of Virginia.  We will be incorporating these readings into our assignments, poems, and class discussion.   
 

ENCW 3500-001 - Rage Against the Machine! Tech refusal and/as creative practice

Piers Gelly

Angry at AI? Furious with your phone? Driven to distraction by data centers? Then this course is for you! In this prose workshop, we will experiment with low-tech/no-tech modes of reading and writing as we explore the hatred of technology. In service of this inquiry, we will read texts, old and new, that use or theorize creative practice as a form of tech refusal, and vice versa, borrowing some of their techniques for our own compositions. Texts may include Aeschylus’ PROMETHEUS BOUND, Plato’s PHAEDRUS, Henry David Thoreau’s WALDEN, Annie Dillard’s THE LIVING, Maxim Loskutoff’s OLD KING, Jenny Odell’s HOW TO DO NOTHING, L. A. Kauffman’s HOW TO READ A PROTEST, and Andreas Malm’s HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE.
 

ENCW 3500-002 - New Mythologies

Jane Alison

A girl runs from a man who wants her, but she can’t run fast enough and becomes a tree to escape. A young woman craves a boy so much she wraps herself around him and holds him so tightly their two bodies fuse. A man is so greedy that the spirit of hunger infests him, and he can’t stop eating until there’s nothing but his own flesh to eat. An old couple who adore each other can’t bear the idea of being parted, and just as they’re about to die, they turn into trees, entwined . . . These are ancient stories about primary feelings, primal feelings, caught in the amber of literary myth: turned by art into beautiful, strange, small objects. In this workshop we’ll consider closely several such stories each week. We'll draw first from the Greco-Roman tradition as filtered through Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and, alongside the weekly myths, we’ll read contemporary stories that tap similar subterranean currents. Later in the term, you will provide the myths we work from, whether Maya or Ibo or Iroquois or Celtic . . . Along the way, you'll create your own cycle of new myths inspired by what you’ve read, a tiny story that isn’t “fantasy” but springs from these myths’—and your own—secret truths.
 

ENCW 3610-001 - Intermediate Fiction Writing: The Very Short Story

Anna Beecher

The Very Short Story

A fast-paced fiction workshop for writers who have completed an introductory ENCW course. Focusing on flash fiction and the literary miniature, we will explore how writers can tell expansive stories in compressed space. Expect to write a lot and share your work frequently, and to closely examine published stories from writers including Franz Kafka, Amy Hempel, Miranda July, Julio Cortazar, Lydia Davis, Lucy Corin and Yasunari Kawabata. This workshop is for any writer ready to pay sentence-level attention to literary craft, whether you aspire to writing longer works or stories which fit in the palm of the hand. 
 

ENCW 3610-002 - Intermediate Fiction Writing: Our Fictional Selves

Helen Chandler

In this class, we will take the truth as our starting point in making fiction. We will play with the boundary between truth and fiction by creating fictional proxies for ourselves—your fictional proxy is a person very like yourself who narrates your work for you, and onto whom you can project imagined experiences. In class, you'll complete writing exercises, you'll engage in lively discussion, and you'll share snippets from a daily diary practice which we'll establish at the beginning of the semester. You'll consume stories in various forms—novels, short stories, films, essays—and examine how they play with the boundary between autobiography and fiction. Expect to read (and watch) work by James Baldwin, Yiyun Li, Ben Lerner, Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, Abbas Kiarostami, and others. You will write either one long story or two shorter stories, to be workshopped by your peers. This class is for students who have taken creative writing classes before and are ready to deepen their writing practice and work in community with other writers.  
 

ENCW 3610-003 - Intermediate Fiction Writing: Our Fictional Selves

Helen Chandler

In this class, we will take the truth as our starting point in making fiction. We will play with the boundary between truth and fiction by creating fictional proxies for ourselves—your fictional proxy is a person very like yourself who narrates your work for you, and onto whom you can project imagined experiences. In class, you'll complete writing exercises, you'll engage in lively discussion, and you'll share snippets from a daily diary practice which we'll establish at the beginning of the semester. You'll consume stories in various forms—novels, short stories, films, essays—and examine how they play with the boundary between autobiography and fiction. Expect to read (and watch) work by James Baldwin, Yiyun Li, Ben Lerner, Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, Abbas Kiarostami, and others. You will write either one long story or two shorter stories, to be workshopped by your peers. This class is for students who have taken creative writing classes before and are ready to deepen their writing practice and work in community with other writers. 
 

ENCW 4350-001 - Advanced Nonfiction Writing

Jesse Ball

This is an unusual class on habit and thought. Students will work to change the nature of their day to day lives through a variety of philosophical, ascetic, and creative practices.
 

ENCW 4550-002 - Boxcutters: Narrative Experiments

Jane Alison

In this studio-seminar we’ll explore writing that punctures “traditional” envelopes and ignores the expectations and illusionism of, say, classic realist prose. A memoir of unlinked sentences; a novel in a box whose chapters you read in any order; an essay in verse; a novella in numbered lines . . . How can windows open in what we write, whether working closer to the truthful or the imaginative end of the spectrum, whether creating literature that’s more like music or more like a painting? When are experiments unreadable or soulless? In addition to weekly reading, you’ll write-play with regular exercises and produce a final critical-creative project. We'll like read works by Helene Bessette, Anne Carson, Anne Garreta, B.S. Johnson, Han Kang, John Keene, Dorthe Nors, Raymond Queneau, Marie Redonnet, Alejandro Zambra, and others.

Unless you are in the Literary Prose Concentration, send me a short note saying why you're interested in the class (jas2ad).
 

ENCW 4720-001 - Literary Prose Thesis

Anna Beecher

This course is only open to 4th year students in the Literary Prose Concentration of the English Major.

You will work closely with the instructor and other mentors to create a 40–60-page work of original fiction or creative nonfiction. Extensive revision and meticulous attention to craft are expected. This should be your most ambitious work to date.
 

ENCW 4810-001 - Advanced Fiction Writing I

Jesse Ball

A writing class in which we focus on analyzing the human writing of the individuals in the group. We will devise and utilize a variety of workshop apparatus, testing them to see what they offer. 
 

ENCW 4820-001 - Poetry Program Poetics: The Poetics of Ecstasy 

Lisa Spaar

The Poetics of Ecstasy 

The Greek word ekstasis signifies displacement, trance—literally, “standing elsewhere.” In this seminar class, serious makers and readers of poems will explore the poetry of fervor—erotic, visionary, psychosomatic, negative, social, religious, mystical.  When the precincts of poetry and rapture intersect, what transpires? What is possible? What is at stake and why does it matter? We will read widely and deeply across cultures and time, including work by Dickinson, Carson, Hopkins, Sappho, Keats, Rilke, Mirabai, Rumi, Ginsberg, Teare, Laurentiis, Kapil, Brock-Broido, and other ancient, modern, and contemporary writers who have explored the experience of being beside one’s self in the transport of ecstasy.   
 

ENCW 4830-001 - Advanced Poetry Writing I

Rita Dove

This workshop is for advanced undergraduate students with prior experience in writing and revising poetry. The class will involve discussion of student poems and of assigned reading, with particular attention to issues of craft. Students will be expected to write and revise six to eight poems, to participate in class discussion and offer detailed notes in response to other students’ work, to complete two assignments generated by writing prompts, to attend and provide a written response to one poetry reading (in person or virtual), to turn in close-reading reviews of two assigned poetry books, and to complete one “wild card” assignment.

Instructor Permission is required for enrollment in this class: please apply for instructor permission through SIS. APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS: a writing sample of 4-5 poems with a cover sheet including your name, year, email address, major, prior workshop experience and grade, and other workshops to which you are submitting. Submit your application IN A SINGLE DOCUMENT to Prof. Dove at …. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis once registration opens. For full consideration, email your application as soon as possible.

The instructor will let all applicants know of their acceptance status before spring classes begin.”
 

ENCW 4920-001 - Poetry Program Capstone

Brian Teare

The Capstone offers graduating Poetry Writing Concentration students time and pedagogical space to think beyond the realization of single poems toward the realization of a book-length poetry manuscript. With support from the Concentration Director, a graduate student mentor, and most importantly from our poetry colleagues, each of us will gather together a draft collection of our poems for a semester of intensive collaborative editorial work that will encourage us to become more deeply aware of our poetic ambitions and evolving aesthetics. In conversation with editorial feedback, each of us will organize and revise our existing poems and write new work in order to fully realize what poet and critic Natasha Sajé calls the “dynamic design” of our first manuscripts. The course schedule will begin with weekly discussion of assigned readings, followed by collaborative editorial sessions of our Capstone Project drafts. This means that, for the first three quarters of the semester, we will meet as a group, but the latter quarter of the semester will largely consist of independent work and one-on-one meetings. After mid-term, each of us will be assigned a graduate student mentor who will conference with us and offer our Capstone Project draft a close reading. After that, each of us will meet with the Director to discuss the feedback and devise a final revision strategy. The course will culminate in our Capstone Projects – revised, polished manuscripts of the poetry only we could write – which we will celebrate together at the graduation reading on May 5th.

ENGL 1500-001 - Vikings: Myths and Sagas

Stephen Hopkins

This course introduces students to Old Norse mythology and cosmology, and their adaptation into later medieval prose sagas, such as Egil's Saga, Gunnlaug's Saga, and more. We will begin with Prose and Poetic Eddas, examining their mythic poems and learning essential historical and cultural contexts necessary to appreciate these bodies of myth and legend. We will then consider how the conversion to Christianity (in the summer of 999) changed Iceland’s literary landscape. Yet the heathen myths survived the advent of this new faith, and even thrived. In the back half of the course, we will focus on texts composed well within the Christian era to investigate the various ways in which medieval Icelanders reckoned with the heathen past of their ancestors while working out their own identity in verse and prose.

*This course fulfills the AIP requirement.*
 

ENGL 2500-001 - Intro to Literary Studies: Responses

Victor Luftig

We will study stories, poems, plays, songs, and essays created in response to previous works—after we’ve studied what those works are responding to. The goal will be to understand how the different kinds of literature operate (especially since we’ll be reading fiction that responds to drama, songs that respond to poems, etc) and how literature responds to political and cultural circumstances. So, for instance, after we read Sophocles’s Antigone, we’ll study a musical adaptation, Antigone in Ferguson, that was created in response to the police killing of Michael Brown, and Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire, which focuses on a Muslim family in England; we’ll discuss Alice in Wonderland before seeing a musical on Grounds, Alice By Heart, set during World War II; and we’ll view one of the film adaptations of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing in conjunction with going to see the play at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton. As the previous sentence suggests, the works will be from long ago to the present, from ancient Greece to Phillis Wheatley to Kendrick Lamar and Drake. The course is meant to serve those who are interested in improving their reading and writing, for whatever reason, who seek an introductory humanities or Second Writing Requirement course, and/or who may wish subsequently to major or minor in English. We’ll discuss the works in class, and there will be in-class quizzes, three papers, and a final exam.
 

ENGL 2502-001 - Jane Austen Jumps the Shark

Bradley Pasanek

This study of Jane Austen’s afterlife finds the Regency author on water-skis. An introduction to the major, the course aims at formal analyses of the novel, queries the concept of fiction, and presents the rudiments of literary theory. The student must be prepared to consume unpardonable adaptations of adaptations of adaptations. Beware: common side effects may include Darcymania, zombification, fandom, and queer theory. To be sure, we will be reading Austen meticulously; our other authors closely, but more quickly and in greater bulk. Of prevailing concern will be contemporary reworkings of Austen: her screen adaptations, her commodification, and the many parodic uses to which her fictions have been put, online and off. Readings will include Austen’s juvenilia, four of the six major novels, a YA rewrite of Pride and Prejudice, an offering from Quirk Press, Lost in Austen, selections from a squat volume of mass-marketed pulpy filth, and samplings of fan efforts.

This course satisfies the English major prerequisite, the second writing requirement, and the AIP disciplines requirement.
 

ENGL 2502-002 - Four Centuries, Four Texts, Four Genres

John O'Brien

We will read devote our time together to studying four great masterpieces, four works produced over the last four centuries, each in a different genre: a play (William Shakespeare’s King Lear, first staged in 1606); a novel (Jane Austen’s Emma, published in 1816); a poem (T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922); and a film (Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968). We will consider each of these works slowly and carefully. We will also use them as case studies for exploring the strategies that scholars in the disciplines of literature and film criticism have developed to achieve rich understandings of their objects of study. These will include (among other strategies) close reading, source study, comparison of variant editions, and historical contextualization. Our objective is to emerge at the end of the semester with expertise in these four works, and with experience in using different critical strategies to analyze other works in these genres. This course serves as a prerequisite for students who wish to major in English. This course also fulfills the College’s second writing requirement and the AIP Discipline. And of course anyone with an interest in these works or in literature in general is welcome to join us. Four writing assignments, midterm and final examinations.
 

ENGL 2502-003 - Monsters and Marvels in Medieval Literature

Viola Cozzio

What makes a monster? What do monsters tell us about the world that made them? Where does fear bleed into amazement? And when does the monstrous become wonderful, and vice versa? In this course, we will see how medieval literature horrifies, thrills, and dazzles its readers from the medieval period to the present day. We’ll meet the almost-human monsters at the edge of the map of Wonders of the East and the Book of Monsters, the strange and seductive fairies of Sir Orfeo, Lanval, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the bloodthirsty devourers of heroes in Beowulf. We will also consider wonders of human creation in Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale,” the Arabian Nights, and other tales of medieval robots. Over the course of this semester, we’ll find out how monsters, marvels and the sensations of fear and wonder helped medieval readers make sense of the world – and how they might do the same for us. 

Requirements: Regular attendance and lively participation in discussion; a mix of critical and creative writing assignments of varying length, totaling 20 pages; occasional multiple-choice reading quizzes; a final exam. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement. 
 

ENGL 2506-001 - Introduction to Poetry

Hodges Adams

This class aims to strengthen the skills of close reading and analytical thinking through evaluating poetry. Discussion is the primary format; we will explore various poetic forms and movements and pay close attention to language. Students will read individual poems across a wide variety of styles and time periods. There will be four in-class writing exercises, one midterm essay, and one final project in the form of a presentation; students should expect to write and share some poems of their own as part of these assignments. We may take field trips to some places around Grounds such as the Special Collections Library.
 

ENGL 2506-002 - Why Poetry?

Paola Mendez-Garcia

In this increasingly high-tech world, why do people still read and write poetry? Why take the time to consider and study it, even as a non-poet or non-scholar of the poetic? We’ll address these questions (and many more) as we read poetry spanning centuries. In this course, we will consider Poetry as a form, and through studying the work of a variety of poets across time and place, we will consider poetry's distinctive significance in the expression and communication of human experience, in both the formation of identity and orientation in the world. 

Tentative Reading List: Poems organized by historical and/or genre/thematic distribution (ranging from Shakespeare’s Sonnets to Mary Oliver’s ecological poems) and a handful of critical texts, such as Jon Stallworthy’s “Reading Poems.”   

Requirements: Regular attendance and lively class participation; shorter and longer writing assignments, totaling 20 pages; & a final exam. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement. 
 

ENGL 2506-003 - Poetry and the Global Imagination

Adnan Zarif

English spread across the globe as a language of empire, carried by soldiers, missionaries, and colonial schoolteachers. In the hands of poets, it has been bent, broken, creolized, and remade. This course explores modern and contemporary poetry from diverse global contexts, including the Caribbean, Africa, India, Ireland, and Indigenous America. 

What happens to the English lyric when it absorbs Jamaican Creole, Igbo ritual, Acholi song, Irish place-lore, or Muscogee chant? Can a poem belong to more than one place at once, or to no place at all? How do poems remember histories that official records have erased, and how do they imagine futures beyond the nation and its borders? 

Along the way, we’ll encounter poems that are furious, funny, elegiac, and defiant. The course also serves as a hands-on introduction to reading poetry: we’ll learn the basics of meter, rhythm, and rhyme, the workings of forms like the sonnet, the ghazal, and free verse, and the vocabulary for talking about image, voice, and line. No previous experience with poetry is required, only curiosity and a willingness to read closely. 

Tentative Reading List; poems by Louise Bennett, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison, Grace Nichols; Christopher Okigbo, Okot p’Bitek, Wole Soyinka; A. K. Ramanujan, Eunice de Souza, Agha Shahid Ali; Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon; Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie; Les Murray, Michael Ondaatje. 

Requirements: Regular attendance and lively participation in discussion; shorter and longer writing assignments together totaling 20 pages; a final exam. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement. 
 

ENGL 2506-004 - Movements of 20th Century American Poetry

Deven Philbrick

In the 20th century United States, poets have had a tendency to move in groups. Oftentimes, it seems that the groups to which poets belong shape their works just as much as their individual sensibilities. In this introductory course, we will examine how a range of American poets in the 20th century developed their works in relation to other poets with similar commitments, aesthetics, and aims. We will explore the relationship between individual poet and poetic community, between particular poems and literary history, and between ideas about poetry and poetry itself. We will question how poetry both is and is not a social enterprise. No previous experience with poetry is required, as we will study (and question) the basic skills and procedures of developing an interpretation of a poem. In doing so, we will inspect the ways authorial intention, reception history, reader response, and socio-politics work to construct poetic meaning.

Tentative Reading List: We will sample poetry by three or four representative poets from each movement. Movements will be: Imagism, Objectivism, The Harlem Renaissance, The Black Mountain School, The Beat Generation, The Black Arts Movement, and the Deep Image Movement. Secondary materials (essays, manifestoes, literary scholarship) will supplement our readings, but your main reading assignments will be the poetry.

Requirements: Regular attendance and active participation in discussion; approximately 20 pages of writing in the form of a midterm essay on an assigned question, a final essay on a student-chosen topic, and short reading responses; a brief oral presentation.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement. 

 

ENGL 2508-001 - The Novel of Upbringing

James Kinney

How does the fictional representation of upbringing reflect on the cultural uses of fiction in general as well as the actual work of becoming adult? Works to be studied: Jane Austen, Emma; Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn; Tom Perrotta, Joe College; Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Perfectly Fine. Class requirements: Lively participation including including 8 brief email responses, one short and one longer essay, and a final exam.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement. 
 

ENGL 2508-002 - Science Fiction

Charity Fowler

This survey of the science fiction genre is a seminar that will start with examining the genre's roots in 18th and 19th century “proto-science fiction.” We’ll then trace its development through the genre’s distinct temporal and cultural eras from the late-19th century to the present day. We’ll be reading a mix of novels and short stories and watching a few adaptations of these texts into movies and TV shows. Though we’ll touch on many themes and tropes, from space travel to AI, we’ll primarily focus on examining and writing about the social and cultural possibilities of the genre, along with the technological and scientific advancements it has inspired. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
 

ENGL 2508-003 - The Novel of Upbringing

Tom Williams

What does it mean to become a person in the world, and why are so many novels obsessed with this question? You may have noticed that there are a lot of novels about growing up and about how our sense of self is shaped by the world around us. But what is it about the novel that makes it good (or bad) at addressing this complicated process? 

Together, we will survey nearly two centuries of fiction, reading some of the most canonical books ever written in English, to explore how novels tell stories about growing up. We’ll ask questions about the ways that novels represent upbringing, what changes when different kinds of people are at the centre of their narratives, and why the novel is such a useful form for telling these kinds of stories. 

Requirements: The goal of this class is to give you experience reading texts closely and then translating your thoughts about them into good writing. You’ll have to come to class regularly, pay careful attention to the text on the page, think critically about what the novel is trying to do, and ask questions about the kinds of language being used. Crucially, you’ll have to gather your ideas and articulate them through class discussions, regular writing exercises, one short essay, one long essay, and a final exam. Please note: This is a laptop-free class (exceptions can be made for students with accommodations). 

Here’s a tentative reading list: Emma by Jane Austen, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, In the Castle of My Skin by George Lamming, and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement. 
 

ENGL 2508-004 - Science Fiction

Patricia Sullivan

Like to sink into a book that challenges the ways we think about ourselves by imagining other worlds, speculative futures, aliens, artificial intelligences, cyborgs, technology and society at its best and possible worst, and more? We will read novels (mostly) that are classified loosely as science fiction, though there may be some overlap with other genres such as speculative fiction or climate fiction.

We will also practice close reading strategies, reflect on acts of literary interpretation through brief references to critical essays, inquire into some of the functions and effects of fictional narratives, and practice constructing reflective, analytical, and argumentative essays. Generally, students can expect to write regular reading responses and exploratory pieces, participate in and lead seminar discussions, write one or more essays, and take a brief midterm and final exam (along with unannounced reading quizzes). The majority of our readings will be novels (entire books), with the occasional story, novella, or film.

This course fulfills the second writing (and writing-enhanced) requirement and the AIP (artistic, interpretative, and philosophical inquiry) requirement. ENGL2508 also prepares students interested in the English major for upper-level coursework in literature, though all majors are welcome.
 

ENGL 2527-001 - Queer Shakespeare

Spencer Grayson

In Shakespeare’s plays, characters regularly transgress modern understandings of how sexuality, gender, and family structures functioned in “the olden days.” To name but a few (seeming) transgressions: a merchant pledges his love to his male friend in front of his friend’s wife; a woman seduces another woman on behalf of the man she loves; male actors perform female roles; and fathers assume the social roles of mothers. This course will explore representations of queer desire, gender variance, and nonnormative family bonds in several Shakespearean works and modern performances and adaptations. What does it mean to be queer, or act queerly, in the Shakespearean canon? How might Shakespeare offer us new insights into sexuality, gender, and kinship today? We’ll address all these questions (and more) as we read Shakespeare and consider how modern readers and performers queer the work of the Bard. 

Tentative reading list: William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and The Tempest; Christopher Marlowe, Edward II; and various filmed performances and adaptations. 

Requirements: Regular attendance and participation in discussion; shorter and longer writing assignments together totaling 20 pages; a final exam. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP (Artistic, Interpretive, and Philosophical) Disciplines Requirement. 
 

ENGL 2527-002 - Reading and Reinventing Hamlet

Clare Kinney

Hamlet is the most celebrated Shakespearean play; it is also perhaps the most mysterious and elusive. It has been reinterpreted, appropriated and adapted by many people to serve very different agendas at various historical moments. In this seminar we will first read the play very slowly and carefully before exploring its afterlife in a variety of media.  We’ll look at dramatic reinventions (e.g. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead), novelistic reinventions (e.g. Matt Haig’s The Dead Fathers Club), and several film adaptations of the play; we’ll also glance at global Hamlets. Our governing question: just why does this particular play provoke so many creative—and subversive--reinventions?   

Course requirements: Regular attendance and lively participation in discussion; shorter and longer writing assignments together totaling 20 pages; a final exam. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement. 
 

ENGL 2560-001 - 21st-Century American Literature

John Modica

The twenty-first century is a time of unprecedented global emergencies. Ecological devastation on a world-historical scale. Rampant, unchecked wealth inequality. War, genocide, mass disabling, and forced displacement. Anti-democratic forces on the rise—and, in the face of all these problems and more, growing feelings of hopelessness, disenchantment, alienation, and fear.

What, in all of this, is the role of literature? Why should we bother to read and write literature now? How have contemporary writers, in writing about the problems of the twenty-first century, redefined our understanding of these problems, and literature’s place in confronting them? How can we use literature to set a new, better direction for the world?

This course offers a unique introduction to the study of literature and culture through an examination of twenty-first century American literature. In the first part of the course, students and the instructor will work together to devise a reading schedule that reflects the interests, questions, and backgrounds of the students in the class. We will then embark on a journey through an exciting and diverse set of contemporary writings with the goal of defining for ourselves the possible meanings of “American literature” as an active and ongoing project. In doing so, we will develop skills and knowledge that can enable us to use literature as a tool for enriching, reflecting on, and transforming our everyday lives.

This course satisfies the English major and minor prerequisite, the second writing requirement, and the AIP disciplines requirement. No background in literary studies is expected or necessary.
 

ENGL 2560-002 - Contemporary Latinx Literature

Jordan Norviel

In the US, we often hear about “the Latino vote” or read news stories about changing demographics. We see terms like Hispanic, Latino, Latinx, and Latine used interchangeably but what do these terms mean and what are their limits? This course takes a literary approach to this question and more. We will focus on Latinx literature, artworks, and films from the late 20th and 21st century. We will focus on works from Puerto Rican, Chicanx, and Salvadoran writers and artists through a range of mediums and genres. Tentative class materials include Under the Feet of Jesus by Helena María Viramontes, Solito by Javier Zamora, Before Island, Volcano by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Bad Bunny’s music video El Apagón, and selected art from Jay Lynn Gomez. The question I pose to the class is how, through these works, do our writers and artists speak back to power?  

Students will write two short papers and one long final paper in addition to weekly discussion posts.  

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement. 
 

ENGL 2572-001 - Black Women Writers

Lisa Woolfork

This seminar uses Black women’s writings from mid-century to the present to introduce new English majors to important concepts in literary analysis. To better understand genre, themes, and assorted literary conventions, we will focus closely on a range of literary styles.  We will also consider patterns of representation established in the 1950s and watch how they develop, disintegrate, or evolve into the present day.  Do certain issues or themes remain important in Black women’s writing of the last eighty years?  How has the literature adapted in response to specific cultural or historical moments? Writers include Gwendolyn Brooks, Deesha Philyaw, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde and more. This course satisfies the English major prerequisite, the second writing requirement, and the AIP disciplines requirement. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the Artistic, Interpretive and Philosophical Disciplines Requirement.
 

ENGL 2599-001 - The Contemporary Essay

John Casteen

This course will examine literary prose in contemporary literature, ranging from more topical nonfiction to the personal, lyric, and experimental essay; it will also include two essay-films.  The idea of the essay—the attempt—requires uncertainty and poise.  How do writers and artists use the expressive potential of this elastic form to navigate the situation of the present?  Students will explore critical approaches to the essay and compose new work of their own.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
 

ENGL 2599-002 - King Arthur in Time

Courtney Watts

King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table are a romanticized staple in nostalgic notions of the medieval past. But who is King Arthur, and where did his legend come from? This course will chart the history of King Arthur in literature, from his early Welsh origins through medieval chronicle and romance, modern poetry and novel, and contemporary film. Along the way, we will consider how the changing historical context and conventions of genre shape and transform the Arthurian mythos. Whenever they were written, texts about King Arthur are always set in the mythic past, shrouded by the mists of half-forgotten history. How does the past function in the world of literary imagination? And what are the political uses of the imagined past? As we read famous works of literature, whether from the twelfth century or the twentieth, we will explore not only medieval narrative but also narratives about the Middle Ages. As writers, we will step into the unfolding history of Arthurian narrative to speak back to these texts and the critics who read them.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
 

ENGL 2599-003 - Queer Harlem Renaissance

Marlon Ross

Why was the Harlem Renaissance so queer? We answer this question by examining the queer authors and works published during the Jazz Age, the 1920s and '30s, internationally known as the "Harlem" or "New Negro" Renaissance. Given the outlaw status and social stigma against same-gender attraction in this period, how did Renaissance writers, musicians, and artists negotiate their sexuality in everyday life, and how did they express their relation to queerness, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, in their works. We explore four queer-themed novels: Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1928), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Langston Hughes’s quasi-autobiographical coming-of-age narrative Not Without Laughter (1932), and George Wylie Hernderson’s Jule (1946). We’ll also examine poetry by Hughes and artwork by Bruce Nugent, as well as the life and music of blues pioneers Gertrude Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, along with other queer music known as "sissy-boy" blues and "bulldagger" blues. We study the life and work of jazz composer Billy Strayhorne, the gay protegee and collaborator of Duke Ellington. We’ll read some scholarly articles on the topic and several recent movies that have attempted to capture the queerness of the Harlem Renaissance movement: Rodney Evans’ Brother to Brother (2004), Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989), Deondray and Quincy LeNear Gossfield’s Congo Cabaret (2018), and Cas Sigers-Beedles’ Bessie Shows Her Ass (2026). Several short papers, midterm and final exams, team presentations, and a term project.
 

ENGL 2599-004 - The Lives of Monsters

Hyeona Park

In this course, we will examine the journeys of monsters from the moments of their births to the end of their lives, or to the present times if they are still very much alive in our cultures, and reimagine these moments as various worlds’ attempts to respond to and reconcile with peculiar crises. As we consult three major works (reading selectively), their film and TV adaptations, and theoretical works, we will treat these monsters as the depositions of our societies’ anxieties and concerns and consider the evolution of their physical and psychological portrayals as testimonial witnesses to our societies’ fears and values and changes in modes of alienation.  

Primary works: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus; Bram Stoker’s Dracula; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde  

Requirements: attendance and participation in discussion, three 5-6 page papers, and a final examination. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement. 
 

ENGL 2599-005 - The Literature of Everyday Life

Taylor Schey

What could be more boring than ordinary, everyday life? And yet, since the late eighteenth century, the realm of the quotidian has been an extraordinary source of interest and inspiration for many different writers, some of whom have followed William Wordsworth in “awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us,” others of whom have been more drawn to what Joan Didion describes as “the peril, unspeakable peril, of the everyday.” This course will explore how various authors have mined and imagined the everyday, from Jane Austen, W. H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop to Ross Gay, Frank O’Hara, and Christina Sharpe. As we learn to attend to language as students of literature, we’ll hone our skills of close reading and apply them to our own everyday lives. Plus, through working on a variety of both analytical and creative assignments, we’ll become stronger writers. Readings will include poems, a novel, essays, other prose writings, and at least one film.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
 

ENGL 2599-006 - Monuments and the Aesthetics of Power

Ian Grandison

We generally understand monuments as commemorating people and events that are regarded as significant to shaping public knowledge, sense of identity, and social cohesion. We consider the processes by which monuments are proposed, promoted, funded, planned, designed, and erected as politically neutral and communal in their spirit. They are regarded as objects of beauty or even majesty--promoted as “works of art,” a notion that reinforces the perception that they unite and uplift individuals, communities, nations, and even empires. And yet the rupture associated with Confederate monuments that long had pride of place in landscapes North and South betrays the instability of the common perception of monuments as salutary and caused many to view them as apparatuses of ongoing warfare. We consider the role of monuments and memorials, whether public or private, in shaping collective ways of knowing, feeling, acting, and interacting as citizens in relation to state authority. To unearth this politics, we will explore the physical and historical contexts of monuments as well as their aesthetic qualities that are located on campus, in Charlottesville, and beyond--from ancient times to the present, from the Age of Exploration to colonial imperialism to modern nation-building. A few examples include: the Elmina Castle, built in the 1480s, which eventually became a "point of no return" for kidnapped captives in the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; Cleopatra's Needle, moved from Alexandria, Egypt to London's Victoria Embankment in 1878; the 1921 Stonewall Jackson Confederate Monument that once stood in Charlottesville's Court Square Park; and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, 2011, on the U.S. National Mall. Is Carlos Simon’s 2022 “Requiem for the Enslaved” (which was commissioned by Georgetown University to reckon with the role of slavery in its development) a monument? We will explore how monuments are used to shape local and national landscapes to affect social hierarchies, imperialist ambitions, and struggles for liberation. There will be a midterm and final exam, each including identification items and a critical essay, and a final team research project.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
 

ENGL 3002-100 - History of Literatures in English II

Joshua Miller

William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway,  T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, and Louise Erdrich: these are some of the authors that we’ll read and study together in this survey of literature in English from around 1800 to the present day. Along the way, we’ll trace the emergence of English as a global language and literature in a colonial and decolonizing world. Literary movements to be covered include Romanticism, Victorianism, Realism, Modernism, Postmodernism, and beyond. This course is part of the two-semester sequence of the history of literature in English (along with ENGL 3001) that is required of English majors, but is open to anyone interested in exploring some of the most incredible literary works from the last two-plus centuries. You do not need to have taken ENGL 3001 first; the courses can be completed in any order that works best for you.
 

ENGL 3220-001 - The Seventeenth Century

Rebecca Rush

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,

The element of fire is quite put out;

            –John Donne, The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World

There was but one course left, therefore, to try the whole thing anew upon a better plan, and to commence a total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge upon the proper foundations.

            –Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration

In 1611, Donne argued that the “new philosophy” of the previous century had “called all in doubt”—all inherited visions of human nature, the natural world, and political legitimacy had been shaken at their foundations. In this course we will consider how English poets and philosophers such as Shakespeare, Bacon, Hobbes, and Milton responded to these intellectual tremors by asking what is fundamental to human nature and imagining how people might act in a “state of nature.” Were we born free or in a state of war of all against all? What is revealed about character when a king is stripped of the trappings of royalty or London puritans are set loose in a fair? Are people defined by their higher longings or baser instincts, and which is the proper basis for a political regime? Is the mind warped by biases and customs, and is there any reliable method by which we can proceed from doubt to knowledge? Readings will include selections from Bacon’s New Organon and New Atlantis, Donne’s religious satire and love poetry, Jonson’s lyrics and Bartholomew Fair, Milton’s Areopagitica and Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Shakespeare’s King Lear, and poems by Herrick, Lovelace, Philips, Cowley, Marvell, and Cavendish.

No prior knowledge of seventeenth-century literature or history is required or expected. The only prerequisite is a willingness to read with the utmost attention—and a dictionary.

This course satisfies the pre-1700 requirement for the English major.
 

ENGL 3273-100 - Shakespeare: Tragedies and Romances

Katharine Maus

This course deals with the second half of Shakespeare's career as a playwright, in which he was mainly writing tragedies and romances.  ENGL 3271, the fall semester course, deals with the first half of Shakespeare's career, in which he was mainly writing histories and comedies.  You may take either or both courses; neither is a prerequisite for the other.
2 50-minute lectures and 1 50-minute discussion section per week.

Requirements: 3 five-page papers, a final exam emphasizing material covered in lectures and section meetings, and regular short assignments made by section leaders.

Satisfies the pre-1700 requirement for the major.  This course does not automatically fulfill the Second Writing Requirement, but it may be tweaked to do so.  See me in the first few weeks of the semester if you are interested in this option.
 

ENGL 3500-001 - Literary Games

Bradley Pasanek

This course in “extra-literary” criticism tasks English majors and other students with investigating the ways video games are available for interpretation and formal analysis. We will read game studies and literary theory, play games, and—take note!—learn to build them. Students will be introduced to the narrative scripting language Ink, the Python-based visual novel engine Ren'Py, and the Bitsy and Godot game engines. (No prior experience with programming required.) Our main effort is to check and test literary theory in "defamiliarized" ludic contexts, designing sprites and worlds and complicating traditional intuitions about narrative, characters, and fiction by means of game experiences. Students will prototype a literary game for their final assignment.
 

ENGL 3500-002 - The Ode from Pindar to Keats

Rebecca Rush

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

                        –Keats, “Ode on Grecian Urn”

The ode has long been a place for poets to test their own mettle and the meaning of greatness. Starting with Pindar and Horace, this course will explore how generations of poets reinterpreted the ode and its traditional celebration of athletic beauty and valor. We will look closely at poems that praise (or blame) particular people such as Cleopatra, Brutus, Cromwell, and Napoleon; call upon abstractions such as wit, solitude, and liberty; and address such non-human listeners as nightingales, Greek urns, and western winds. We will ask how each ode reckons with the idea of heroism and the purpose of praise. How do they imagine and depict greatness, fame, knowledge, beauty, good fortune, and strength? Do they see these as consistent with goodness, justice, and delicacy? How do poets ironize and criticize—both their objects of praise and bygone views of greatness? When and why do odes shift to meditating rather than praising, and do these meditative odes still respond to the heroic tradition? What do odes have to say about the distinctive tools and aims of poetry and about poetry’s role in immortalizing? We will approach the thought of each ode with seriousness and its language with rigor, but we will also enjoy the unique sonic pleasures of poets such as Keats, Spenser, Cowley, Wordsworth, Marvell, Gray, and Milton.

No prior knowledge of Greek, Roman, or English poetry is required or expected. The only prerequisite is a willingness to read with the utmost attention—and a dictionary.

This course satisfies the pre-1700 requirement for the English major.
 

ENGL 3510 - Chaucerian Dream Poems

Elizabeth Fowler

The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, and The Legend of Good Women are poignant, wildly surreal, funny, philosophical, emotionally intense, feminist, and visually overstimulated story-poems that are even more interesting now because of their complex virtual reality; dreams seem to provide Chaucer with a way of thinking about what it is to have the out-of-the-body experience of reading. So that’s what we’ll do. This is a course on those four poems together with bits of some poems he had read and some others that his poems engendered; it’s a good course for beginners and for Chaucer adepts alike.  (It’s fine to take this if you’ve already had ENMD 3250 or 3260.) We’ll meet outside in camp chairs on the grass whenever possible.

This course fulfills the pre-1700 requirement.
 

ENGL 3530-001 - The Women Who Made Jane Austen

Kelly Fleming

Before Jane Austen’s place in the literary canon was a truth universally acknowledged, she was just another woman novelist writing at the turn of the nineteenth century. In fact, while her work was very well received, she was not as popular in her own time as other women writers. This course re-positions Austen’s novels within the context of eighteenth-century women writers whose work her novels are indebted to. Alongside some of the novelists Austen read, we will read the novels that influenced her plots that propriety would not permit her to read. We will also consider the impact women’s poetry, literary criticism, and interventions in Enlightenment and Romantic debates about education, the rights of women, and the abolition of slavery had on her novels. The course will conclude with the happy ending of Sense & Sensibility. Placed in the context of the eighteenth century, Austen’s novels stand out, provoking new and exciting questions about the novel, women’s writing, and poetic justice. Why do women writers before Austen refuse to call their works “novels”? Does Austen handle issues of gender, class, and race similarly or differently from her foremothers and contemporaries? Why doesn’t Austen describe women getting revenge, dueling in breeches, or being envious of corpses?

This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement for the English major.
 

ENGL 3540-001 - Dangerous Women

Cristina Griffin

When the phrase “nasty woman” rose to the forefront of our cultural discourse a decade ago, the label rested on a long-standing conception that women can be dangerous just by being women. In this class, we will look at the particular formations of dangerous women that materialized in the nineteenth century, an era in which women simultaneously remained held down by the law and yet unbound by newly possible social roles. Across texts by Jane Austen, Mary Prince, Christina Rossetti, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, and Thomas Hardy, among others, we will consider what precisely made women dangerous as well as the other side of the coin: what put women in danger? What forms of female agency, sexuality, or sociability generate power and which engender fear? And what do we make of men’s roles: what does it look like to be a dangerous man or a man in danger? By reading texts across genres—some novels, short stories, poems, essays, and a play—we will immerse ourselves in the particular history of gender, fear, and power articulated by nineteenth-century writers while also avidly seeking out points of connection between these Victorian conceptions of dangerous women and those of our own twenty-first century.

This course satisfies the 1700–1900 requirement for the English major, and is also open to non-majors. Students in this course are forewarned that they will be in danger of reading dangerously fascinating texts, and will be expected to generate dangerously fascinating ideas in response.

 

ENGL 3560-001 - Global Anglophone Fiction

Stephen Arata

The themes of this course are migration, exile, displacement, and (sometimes) return. Our primary readings will consist of 21st century anglophone fiction drawn from around the globe. Likely candidates include Helen Oyiyemi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Teju Cole, Michael Ondaatje, NoViolet Bulawayo, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Ruth Ozeki, Nakita Lalwani, Kiran Desai, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Aleksandar Hemon, and Dinaw Mengestu. We will also engage with the lively current debate on the status of world literature as a field of study by way of selected critical pieces. Requirements will include two essays, an in-class midterm, and a handful of shorter writing assignments.
 

ENGL 3560-002 - Contemporary Multiethnic Women Writers

Caroline Rody

Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich

This course will give students the opportunity to read closely works by three stunningly gifted contemporary fiction writers: Toni Morrison (1931-2019), Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940), and Louise Erdrich (b. 1954), arguably the greatest African American, Chinese American, and Native American novelists of our era. In class discussion, we will tease out their distinctive and collective takes on women’s lives, family, history, language, culture, race, community, migration, politics, and spirituality, while also grappling with their exciting experiments in realism, magical realism, and narrative form. Texts will probably include Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Beloved; Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and China Men; and Erdrich’s Tracks, Four Souls, and The Night Watchman. As a bonus, we will also attend to these novelists’ contributions to the public sphere in essays, video interviews and talks, and the website of Erdrich’s community bookstore. Requirements: all reading on time, active class participation, frequent in-class writing assignments, co-leading of a class discussion, final essay abstract composed in class, final essay. We will read books and not screens in this class.
 

ENGL 3560-003 - Kafka and His Doubles

Lorna Martens

The course will introduce the enigmatic work of Franz Kafka: stories including "The Judgment," "The Metamorphosis," "A Country Doctor," "A Report to an Academy," "A Hunger Artist," "The Burrow," and "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk"; one of his three unpublished novels (The Trial); the Letter to His Father; and some short parables. But we will also look at Kafka's "doubles": the literary tradition he works with and the way in which he, in turn, forms literary tradition. Thus: Kafka: Cervantes, Kafka: Bible, Kafka: Aesop, Kafka: Dostoevsky, Kafka: Melville; Kafka: O'Connor, Kafka: Singer; Kafka: Calvino, Kafka: Borges. Readings will center on four principal themes: conflicts with others and the self (and Kafka's psychological vision); the double; the play with paradox and infinity; and artists and animals.

ENGL 3570-001 - American Civil Wars

Stephen Cushman and Caroline Janney

No moment in United States history has received more recent scrutiny than the American Civil War. Nearly half of the respondents to a 2022 poll believe another such war “at least somewhat likely” to break out in the next decade. Comparing the events of 1861-1865 to the divisive politics of the 2020s has become commonplace. Against this fraught backdrop, our course will focus on the conflicting voices and perspectives behind the coming, fighting, and aftermath of war. Among those we read are Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Ulysses S. Grant, Louisa May Alcott, Susie King Taylor, Walt Whitman, Robert Gould Shaw, Alexander Gardner, and Stephen Crane. While wartime figures and artifacts will absorb much of our attention, we will also look at more recent representations, such as the film Glory.  Finally, we will sample recent discussions of prospects for another civil war, with examples drawn from mainstream journalism, online alternatives, and creative media.  The class will visit UVA Special Collections several times .  Work for the course will consist of active participation and short writings.  Professors Caroline Janney (History) and Stephen Cushman (English) will teach this course together.
 

ENGL 3570-002 - The Personal, the Political, and the Poetic

Sumita Chakraborty

“The personal is the political.” It’s a phrase that has resounded through American culture since the middle of the twentieth century and continues to resonate today. In this course, we’ll explore the history of the phrase alongside the parallel history of the popularity of conspicuously autobiographical poetry, which, similarly, begins in the middle of the twentieth century with the rise of Confessional poetry and continues into the present day. What makes a “personal” poem? What makes a “political” poem? How, when, and why have poets found each category constricting rather than freeing, or sought to complicate these categories? We’ll begin with the work of twentieth-century poets such as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde, among others, and make our way forward to contemporary poets like Danez Smith, Donika Kelly, Sam Sax, Ada Limón, Jennifer Chang, Natalie Diaz, and more. 
 

ENGL 3572-001 - Intro to Black Feminist Literature

Nasrin Olla

What does it mean to think, create, and thrive through a Black feminist lens? This course traces the revolutionary insights of Black feminist thought — from the Combahee River Collective to the poetics of Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks. We’ll explore how Black women writers, theorists, and artists have reimagined the meaning of freedom, care, sexuality, labor, and community, and how their work continues to shape contemporary movements for justice. Screenings will include Paris Is Burning and A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde, alongside readings that consider how Black feminisms imagine both survival and joy.
 

ENGL 3740-100 - Intro to Asian American Studies

Sylvia Chong

An interdisciplinary introduction to the culture and history of Asians and Pacific Islanders in America. Examines ethnic communities such as Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Asian Indian, and Native Hawaiian, through themes such as immigration, labor, cultural production, war, assimilation, and politics. Texts are drawn from genres such as legal cases, short fiction, musicals, documentaries, visual art, and drama.
 

ENGL 3783-001 - American Short Novel

Christopher Krentz

The short novel offers us a convenient way to sample some of the most celebrated authors in American history since 1855, from Melville and James to Larson and Roth.   We will read about one short novel a week, exploring whatever topics come up, including language and narrative form; the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States; gender relations; love and its complications; small towns and urbanization; our relationship with the natural environment; and notions of Americanness.  The class will emphasize the development of critical thinking and writing skills.  Requirements will include thoughtful preparation and participation, short writing assignments, a three-page and a four-page essay, a midterm, and a final exam.
 

ENGL 3840-001 - Contemporary Disability Theory

Christopher Krentz

Over the last several decades, thinking about people with physical, cognitive, and sensory differences has moved from a mostly pathological medical-based understanding to a more rights-based framework, although both models persist and overlap.  In this course we will consider how conceptions of disability have (or have not) changed, considering such matters as how a disability is defined; disability in American history; autism and neurodivergence; deaf culture and medical interventions; disability and race, gender, class, and sexual orientation; and much more.  The class will also consider how these theories relate to the depiction of disabled people in literature and film.  Possible texts include Goffman’s Stigma; Wells’ “The Country of the Blind”; Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians; Desai’s Fasting, Feasting; Nussbaum’s Good Kings, Bad Kings; Novic’s True Biz; and the films Unrest and Crip Camp.

The class will feature a range of learning strategies, from whole-class discussion to smaller-group discussion to short lectures.  Requirements will include two papers, quizzes, and active informed participation.
 

ENGL 3910-001 - Satire

John O'Brien

What is satire? Most of us think that we can more or less identify a satire when we see it, but beyond that, defining satire and talking it about meaningfully have often proven elusive. In this course, we will work to figure out not only what satire is, but what it does, socially and politically. We will read satires from the ancient world to the present, from authors like the Roman poet Juvenal, the Irish cleric Jonathan Swift, the Norwegian novelist Gerd Brandenberg, and the American writer Paul Beatty. We will read about theories of humor and satire: where it comes from, and what it can and cannot do in the world. We will also consider film and video satires, as well as what crops up in the media in the course of the semester—because we know that something will. This course fulfills the College’s AIP Discipline requirement. Midterm and final exams; two writing exercises; participation.
 

ENGL 3924-001 - The Vietnam War in Literature & Film

Sylvia Chong

It has been over 40  years since the Fall of Saigon in 1975, marking the end of a war that claimed the lives of an estimated 58,260 American troops and over 4 million Southeast Asians across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. In the U.S. today, “Vietnam” signifies not a country but a lasting syndrome that haunts American politics and society, from debates about foreign policy to popular culture. But what of the millions of Southeast Asian refugees the War created? What, in this moment of commemoration and reflection, are the lasting legacies of the Vietnam War / American War for Southeast Asian diasporic communities? We will examine literature and film (fictional and documentary) made by and about Americans and Southeast Asians (Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmong) affected by the Vietnam War, spanning the entirety of this 40 year period. Texts may include Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now; Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried; Peter Davis, Hearts and Minds; Yusek Komunyakaa, Dien Cia Dau; Tiana Alexander, From Hollywood to Hanoi; Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer; Duong Thu Huong, Paradise of the Blind; Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino; Socheata Poeuv, New Years Baby.
 

ENGL 4500-001 - The Sonnet Revised and Revisited

Clare Kinney

“The collision of music, desire and argument”; “a chamber of sudden change”; “a game with mortal stakes”: these are some of the ways that poets and critics have described the sonnet. Starting with the experiments of Renaissance Europe and extending our reach through the Romantics & the modernists to Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Diane Seuss, Terrance Hayes, and others, we will consider the persistence and metamorphoses of the form. Sonnet writers construct a “a moment’s monument” for religious, political, philosophical and meta-poetical purposes as well as to dissect desire, and when they write 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 set thought and feeling in a new dialogue, talk back to tradition, make the dead speak again, 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’ll consider the craftiness of craft and the 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 various scholars and poets.

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

This course can satisfy the pre-1700 requirement with a very small tweak in requirements: contact instructor for more information.
 

ENGL 4510-001 - Analog Chaucer (forthcoming in SIS)

Bruce Holsinger

This seminar will be devoted to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, one of the most fascinating and perplexing works of literature to survive from the medieval world. With patience and attention, we will read most of the Tales in the original Middle English, concentrating on pronunciation, form and style, and interpretation. We'll also spend a lot of time with the manuscript contexts of Chaucer's works, with visits to Special Collections and a focus on the role of hard copy (manuscript and print) in the transmission and meaning of the Tales. The course satisfies the pre-1700 requirement for the English major.
 

ENGL 4520-001 - John Milton and Civil War England (forthcoming in SIS)

James Kinney

In this course we will study the the interconnections between Milton's literary career and the culture wars of his own era, the pervasive political and cultural ferment of Civil War England. We will sample the dizzying range of generic innovations and experiments that inform Milton's work from short early lyrics and prose pamphlets through Paradise Lost. Class requirements, lively participation, one short and one longer paper, and a final exam.

This course satisfies the pre-1700 requirement for the English major.
 

ENGL 4540-001 - Predictive and Unforeseen Jane Austen 

Alison Booth

How has “Austen” changed since her death over two hundred years ago? What significant cultural issues do her novels confront and temporarily resolve? Further, what happens to her works in the era of digitization and large language models (AI)? She has shaped novels and ideas of narrative in many languages and upped the stakes for costume, courtship ideals, and dance in historic productions (including series or feature films about queens, Bridgerton, etc.). 

We will be careful readers of hard copies of the texts, individual writers in class and outside of it. Yet we will also explore computational approaches to digitized texts of the novels and the efforts (before and after computers) to explore Austen’s style with quantitative or keyword approaches.

Periodic writing in class (reading check-up); attendance and participation; two essays; research assignments; short presentation; blue-book exam.

This course satisfies the 1700-1900 literature requirement for the English major.
 

ENGL 4560-001 - American Novels & Controversies

Victoria Olwell

When novels are published, they enter the public sphere, joining in the whole buzzing cacophony of contemporary culture. Often, novels step into ongoing public discussions about things that are not novels – political issues, contemporary developments in the social world, ideas about history, social inequality, scientific advances, and the like. Novels do this in a wide variety of ways, but, always, they operate through the specific formal characteristics of the novel (plot, character, narrative, the premise of fiction, etc.) and carry with them the distinctive history of the novel as a genre. In this course, we’ll consider contemporary U.S. novels that explicitly take up current issues in the public sphere. We’ll read these novels on their own terms, but also in the context of two other genres:  contemporary non-fiction on the same issues and literary criticism on the form and history of the novel. We’ll ask, what are the distinctive ways in which novels add to public discussion? By the way, I chose novels that meet two requirements. First, they have received a great deal of critical attention and acclaim, meaning that we can consider them to be novels with a hearty public presence. Second, I select only novels I find aesthetically compelling and intellectually enchanting, because one way that novels engage the public is by grabbing readers’ interest.
 

ENGL 4561-001 - Poetry in a Global Age

Jahan Ramazani

In this seminar, we explore world poetry in English. To understand the global dimensions of modern and contemporary poetry, we closely read the vibrant anglophone poetries of India, Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, Ireland, Black and Asian Britain, and Indigenous and diasporic 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 techniques of the global North. Issues to be discussed 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. 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.
 

ENGL 4580-001 - Structure, Sign, Power, Play (forthcoming in SIS)

Taylor Schey

You’ve probably been introduced in your coursework to various theoretical approaches to literature and culture. You may have heard of thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Sylvia Wynter, and you might even have read some of their works. But chances are good that you haven’t yet studied them together and learned what they have in common. This course offers you the opportunity to do so. We’ll trace the development of the field of Theory through structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, and Black studies, paying special attention to the relations between language, power, and identity. As an in-depth introduction to some of the most influential theorists in the humanities, this course will be of interest to students across areas and disciplines. A premium will be placed on clarity rather than obfuscation, and no previous knowledge will be presumed, just a willingness to be intellectually challenged.

Authors include J. L. Austin, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Lee Edelman, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Saidiya Hartman, Luce Irigaray, Roman Jakobson, Barbara Johnson, Paul de Man, Laura Mulvey, Hortense Spillers, Jacques Lacan, Ferdinand de Saussure, Christina Sharpe, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Frank Wilderson, and Sylvia Wynter.
 

ENGL 5190-001 - The Bible

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. (4th ed. is okay, too), which people should buy ahead of time.  (Inexpensive used copies abound online.) All are welcome. No previous knowledge of the Bible needed or assumed.
 

ENGL 5500-001 - Forward to the Basics: Reinventing the Liberal Arts

Walter Jost

In our time colleges and universities still advertise “the liberal arts” as their educational ideal, although in truth these arts are honored more in the breach than in any studied observance of them; meanwhile, on the rough ground where we mortals live, they are seldom spoken about, and when they are, they are usually mentioned as historical curiosities, remnants of an ancient tradition displaced by modern subject matter “fields” and specialized “studies.” In this class, inquiry begins from an alternative premise: the arts of grammar (and hermeneutics), rhetoric, and logic/dialectic name enduring, even inexpungable arts of communicative discourse that all of us engage in whenever we interpret texts, construct arguments, organize evidence, deliberate about competing claims, and attempt to understand how different disciplines make the world more intelligible.

Designed for highly-motivated 4th years and M.A. students, this course examines these discursive arts primarily as intellectual practices. Although we will study important moments in the history of these arts from antiquity through medieval and modern transformations, our principal and sole concern will be what they enable people, what they enable all of us, to do better. Accordingly, we inquire into these intellectual practices as exemplified in literature, law, history, philosophy, and religion/theology. We will ask, for example, how literary critics establish plural approaches to poems or novels; how different philosophers construct and test arguments; how lawyers and judges reason among texts, precedents, facts, and competing interpretations; how historians turn surviving evidence into explanatory narratives; and how religious traditions negotiate relations among authoritative texts, interpretation, doctrine, and argument. Such comparisons will reveal both recurring intellectual operations and significant differences among disciplinary practices.

Admission by application email to the instructor (Walter Jost, Dept. of English) at ….
 

ENGL 5500-002 - Lyric and Lyric Theory

Elizabeth Fowler

So much of the most brilliant poetry in English is brief, intricate, emotional, musical, and written between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. We’ll study Middle English to Early Modern verse (amorous, comic, elegiac, devotional, etc.), refining our sense of what language can do in its most intense, witty, ornate, gorgeous, and sweet moments. We’ll consider poems as part of the built environments of their uses (castles, candles, beds, roads, doors . . . ), think of them as scripts for experiences we might define, notice their sensory overload and their orientation towards knowing things, puzzle over their participation in everyday life. We’ll test important strands of current lyric theory against this material, wondering whether we can revise or challenge what scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries are saying. You’ll become a skillful “close reader,” get some experience with researching material culture and entangling that in your literary criticism, and work out some tentative theoretical or philosophical positionings for yourself. Readers and poets welcome! This class will meet in camp chairs on the grass whenever the weather gods allow. Enthusiastic raw beginners with poetry and/or Middle English are welcome. This course happens to fulfill pre-1700 and the graduate literary theory requirements as well as the (“4000”) seminar requirement for the undergraduate English major.
 

ENGL 5510-001 - Old Norse Language & Literature

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). 

The one thing I'm not sure about is whether the Old Norse course fulfills the pre-1700 requirement or the language requirement. I was told at summer advising this July that Dr. Melissa Frost would definitely consider a class like this as fulfilling the foreign language requirement, especially if, as I'll be doing for Old English in 25-26, it's a two-semester sequence. 
 

ENGL 5530-001 - The Literature of British Abolition

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 literature requirement.
 

ENGL 5560-001 - James Joyce's Ulysses

Victor Luftig

This course is designed for first-time readers of Ulysses and is meant to provide a pleasurable introduction to it. We’ll explore the novel’s difficulty and its usefulness, tracking both which of the many available resources for reading it are helpful and what kinds of applications might justify the effort Ulysses summons. Prior to the first class session, please read as much as you can of an annotated edition of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (The Viking edition with notes by Anderson, which you can easily find used, would be fine.) There will be two papers, one offering the class an account of a resource you’ve sampled and another asking you to think about what contemporary situation you think Ulysses might apply to most meaningfully. There may also be some in-class and/or take-home worksheets focused on contextual information and stylistic particulars. At the end of the course we’ll have a taste of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to prepare you for future explorations of that book—which too is challenging, rewarding, and “lovesoftfun.”
 

ENGL 5580-001 - Material Culture: Theories and Methods

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, parks and monuments, 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; anthropologists such as 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.
 

ENGL 5805-001 - What is Postcolonial Critique?

Nasrin Olla

What is postcolonial critique? Is it a way of reading a text? Does it refer to the processes of historical decolonization in places like Africa, India, and the Caribbean? Or is it a practice of critical thought that can be used to think across multiple spaces and times? In this course, we will approach these questions by reading a wide range of writers including Gayatri Spivak, Edouard Glissant, Achille Mbembe, Susan Buck-Morss, and C.L.R. James.
 

ENWR 1506 - Writing and Critical Inquiry: The Stretch Sequence

Offers a two-semester approach to the First Writing Requirement. This sequence allows students to take more time, in smaller sections and with support from the Writing Center, practicing and reinforcing the activities that are central to the first-year writing course. Like ENWR 1510, ENWR 1505-06 approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Students contribute to an academic conversation about a specific subject of inquiry and learn to position their ideas and research in relation to the ideas and research of others.  Instructors place student writing at the center of course, encourage students to think on the page, and prepare them to reflect on contemporary forms of expression.  Students read and respond to each other’s writing in class regularly, and they engage in thoughtful reflection on their own rhetorical choices as well as those of peers and published writers.  Additionally, the course requires students to give an oral presentation on their research and to assemble a digital portfolio of their writing.

001 - Writing about Culture/Society
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
John Modica

002 - Writing about Culture/Society - Work and the Good Life
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM
Claire Chantell

003 - Writing about Culture/Society - Work and the Good LifeIn this class, we will practice critical inquiry and hone our writing skills by engaging with one of the most familiar aesthetic forms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the television show. As we read, watch, discuss, and write about television together, our goal will be to approach this familiar form with a fresh perspective, not taking anything about television for granted. How do the formal elements of television shows—their genres, storytelling capacities, narrative features, and serial formats—build compelling worlds? How can we approach these tv worlds analytically while also valuing the emotional impact of television? How do television shows critique and generate culture? Over the course of the semester, we will read scripts that turned into episodes, read critical writing about television, and of course we will also watch a variety of tv episodes.But more than anything, we will write about television: we will build up our capacity to analyze television and then turn that inquiring perspective onto our own writing. If television shows build worlds out of words—and if those worlds can and do have a giant impact, for better or worse, on the world we live in—then we will take seriously how we can develop our own writing and re-approach our practices of world-building and meaning-making through our words.​
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM
Claire Chantell

004 - Writing about Culture/Society - Language and Culture: Brain Rot or Demure​
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
Patricia Sullivan

005 - Writing about Culture/Society - Writing About Mental Health and Well-Being in College Life
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Ethan King

College life can often feel like a balancing act between ambition and exhaustion, connection and isolation, thriving and just getting by. This course invites you to explore how college culture—from the pressure to achieve and the pull of perfectionism to the desire for belonging—shapes emotional, social, academic, and physical well-being. We’ll use writing to investigate what it means to “do well” and “be well” in college through exploratory, analytical, and public-facing projects.

006 - Writing about Culture/Society
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM
John Modica

007 - Writing about Culture/Society - Writing About Mental Health and Well-Being in College Life
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
Ethan King

College life can often feel like a balancing act between ambition and exhaustion, connection and isolation, thriving and just getting by. This course invites you to explore how college culture—from the pressure to achieve and the pull of perfectionism to the desire for belonging—shapes emotional, social, academic, and physical well-being. We’ll use writing to investigate what it means to “do well” and “be well” in college through exploratory, analytical, and public-facing projects.

008 - Writing about Culture/Society - Language and Culture: Brain Rot or Demure
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM
Patricia Sullivan  

ENWR 1510 - Writing and Critical Inquiry (70+ sections)

Approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Students contribute to an academic conversation about a specific subject of inquiry and learn to position their ideas and research in relation to the ideas and research of others.  Instructors place student writing at the center of course, encourage students to think on the page, and prepare them to reflect on contemporary forms of expression.  Students read and respond to each other’s writing in class regularly, and they engage in thoughtful reflection on their own rhetorical choices as well as those of peers and published writers.  Additionally, the course requires students to give an oral presentation on their research and to assemble a digital portfolio of their writing.

001 - Writing about Digital Media - Writing about Attention
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
Tyler Carter

002 - Writing about Digital Media - Writing about Attention
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
Tyler Carter
 
003 - Writing about Culture/Society
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM
Alison Cotti-Lowell

004 - TBA
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM
TBA

005 - Writing about the Arts - Reading for Pleasure
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM
Hodges Adams

In our busy collegiate lives, reading for pleasure falls easily by the wayside. This course seeks to help students make time to broaden and cultivate their reading, directed by each student’s individual interests; this course also seeks to challenge each student in their reading and thinking by exposing them to texts across a variety of genres. How do we encounter texts that we don’t enjoy or don’t understand? What strategies can we develop for reading more attentively, thinking more deeply, and writing with greater curiosity? The primary mode of inquiry will be in-class group discussion and in-class writing exercises. Reading, writing, researching, and revising carefully and with intention are the aims of this course. Student papers will be peer reviewed and revised multiple times during the semester. 
 
006 - TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM
TBA
 
007 - Writing about the Arts - Writing about Music
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM
Kamau Walker
 
008 - Writing about the Arts - Writing about Music
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM
Kamau Walker
 
009 - TBA
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM
TBA
 
010 - Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Food
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
Keith Driver

011 - Writing about Culture/Society - Writing Environments
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
John Casteen

012 - Multilingual Writers
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM
Davy Tran

This section is designed specifically for undergraduate multilingual students who use English as a second or additional language, including international students. Students will develop academic writing skills for success at U.S. universities, including paraphrasing and summarizing, organizing paragraphs and essays, using research databases, and applying APA citation and reference conventions. Readings, discussions, and writing assignments will center on topics students choose, which allows them to explore their interests while developing critical thinking and academic writing skills. Students who use only English at home and at school are strongly discouraged from enrolling, even if the class fits their schedule.
 
013 - TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM
TBA

014 - Writing about Culture/Society - Assessing Performance, Risk, and Reward
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM 
Jon D'Errico
 
015 - TBA
MW 08:30AM-09:45AM
TBA
  
016 - TBA
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM
TBA
 
017 - TBA
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM
TBA
 
018 - TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM
TBA
 
019 - Writing about Identities
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM
devin donovan
 
020 - Writing about Culture/Society
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Kate Natishan

021 - TBA
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM
TBA
 
022 - Writing about Digital Media - Factions and Digital Culture: Crafting Social Media Commentary
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM
Dana Little

In this course, we'll explore the ever-changing landscape of online communication and its profound impact on how we interact in the modern world. Think of it as your guide to navigating the digital realm—from the latest social media trends to the cutting-edge AI tools reshaping our online experiences.

We'll dive into the nitty-gritty of digital communication, examining how our language and visual expression have evolved alongside emerging technologies. You'll get hands-on experience with various digital platforms, analyzing everything from viral content to influential online campaigns. We'll also tackle the big questions:

·       How is social media shaping public discourse?
·       What role does AI play in modern writing?
·       How can we become more discerning consumers and creators of digital content?

By the end of this course, you'll have a solid grasp of effective digital communication, a critical eye for online content, and the skills to navigate the complexities of our digital age.
  
023 - TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM
TBA
 
024 - TBA
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
TBA
 
025 - Writing about Culture/Society - Assessing Performance, Risk, and Reward
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM
Jon D'Errico
 
026 - TBA
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM
TBA
 
027 - Writing about Science & Tech
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Cory Shaman
 
028 - TBA​
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM
Kaitlyn Airy
 
029 - Writing about Digital Media
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
Jodie Childers
 
030 - TBA
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Courtney Watts
 
031 - Writing about Science & Tech
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
Cory Shaman
 
032 - Multilingual Writers
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM
Davy Tran

This section is designed specifically for undergraduate multilingual students who use English as a second or additional language, including international students. Students will develop academic writing skills for success at U.S. universities, including paraphrasing and summarizing, organizing paragraphs and essays, using research databases, and applying APA citation and reference conventions. Readings, discussions, and writing assignments will center on topics students choose, which allows them to explore their interests while developing critical thinking and academic writing skills. Students who use only English at home and at school are strongly discouraged from enrolling, even if the class fits their schedule.
 
033 - TBA
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM
TBA

034 - TBA
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM
TBA
 
035 - TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM
TBA
 
036 - TBA
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
TBA
 
037 - TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM
TBA
 
038 - TBA
MW 08:00AM-09:15AM
TBA
 
039 - Writing about Identities
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM
devin donovan
 
040 - Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Food
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Keith Driver
 
041 - TBA
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM
Kaitlyn Airy
 
042 - Writing about Digital Media
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Jodie Childers 
 
043 - TBA
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM
TBA
 
044- Writing about the Arts - Writing about Television
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
Cristina Griffin

In this class, we will practice critical inquiry and hone our writing skills by engaging with one of the most familiar aesthetic forms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the television show. As we read, watch, discuss, and write about television together, our goal will be to approach this familiar form with a fresh perspective, not taking anything about television for granted. How do the formal elements of television shows—their genres, storytelling capacities, narrative features, and serial formats—build compelling worlds? How can we approach these tv worlds analytically while also valuing the emotional impact of television? How do television shows critique and generate culture? Over the course of the semester, we will read scripts that turned into episodes, read critical writing about television, and of course we will also watch a variety of tv episodes.But more than anything, we will write about television: we will build up our capacity to analyze television and then turn that inquiring perspective onto our own writing. If television shows build worlds out of words—and if those worlds can and do have a giant impact, for better or worse, on the world we live in—then we will take seriously how we can develop our own writing and re-approach our practices of world-building and meaning-making through our words.

045 - Writing about Science & Tech - Writing about Medicine
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM
Rhiannon Goad

This course dives into the art and ethics of communicating about health. You'll dissect everything from dense medical studies to viral news, learning to translate complex science into clear, compelling language. With short essays, you will develop skills to evaluate diverse sources, including medical literature, health journalism, and patient narratives, and apply responsible communication principles in contexts such as reporting research findings without hype and explaining public health issues effectively. You'll practice these communication skills throughout the semester, culminating in a final project: the creation of a zine about medicine.
 
046 - Writing about the Arts - Reading for Pleasure
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM
Hodges Adams

In our busy collegiate lives, reading for pleasure falls easily by the wayside. This course seeks to help students make time to broaden and cultivate their reading, directed by each student’s individual interests; this course also seeks to challenge each student in their reading and thinking by exposing them to texts across a variety of genres. How do we encounter texts that we don’t enjoy or don’t understand? What strategies can we develop for reading more attentively, thinking more deeply, and writing with greater curiosity? The primary mode of inquiry will be in-class group discussion and in-class writing exercises. Reading, writing, researching, and revising carefully and with intention are the aims of this course. Student papers will be peer reviewed and revised multiple times during the semester. 
 
047 - Writing about Culture/Society
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
Kate Natishan
 
048 - TBA
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM
TBA
 
049 - TBA
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM
Deven Philbrick
 
050 - Writing about Culture/Society - Vampires
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Charity Fowler
 
051 - Writing about Culture/Society - Writing Environments
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
John Casteen
  
052 - TBA
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM
TBA
 
053 - TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM
TBA

054 - TBA
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM
TBA
 
055 - TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM
TBA
 
056 - TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM
TBA
 
057 - Writing about Digital Media - Factions and Digital Culture: Crafting Social Media Commentary
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM
Dana Little

In this course, we'll explore the ever-changing landscape of online communication and its profound impact on how we interact in the modern world. Think of it as your guide to navigating the digital realm—from the latest social media trends to the cutting-edge AI tools reshaping our online experiences.

We'll dive into the nitty-gritty of digital communication, examining how our language and visual expression have evolved alongside emerging technologies. You'll get hands-on experience with various digital platforms, analyzing everything from viral content to influential online campaigns. We'll also tackle the big questions:

·       How is social media shaping public discourse?
·       What role does AI play in modern writing?
·       How can we become more discerning consumers and creators of digital content?

By the end of this course, you'll have a solid grasp of effective digital communication, a critical eye for online content, and the skills to navigate the complexities of our digital age.
 
058 - TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM
TBA
 
059 - TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM
TBA
 
060 - TBA
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM
TBA
 
061 - Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Sports
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
Rory Sullivan

Dismissively calling any sport “sportsball” belies the essential role sports play in shaping culture and human relations. This powerful effect is perpetuated through the various media compositions that surround sports. In this class, we will explore these various composition modes to analyze the voices, genres, composition choices, and audiences that surround sports and make them such a powerful force in shaping culture and society. By composing game summaries, audio podcasts, and research papers, we will practice connecting sports to their social impact, all while developing our own voices as writers. 

062 - TBA
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM
Deven Philbrick
 
063 - TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM
TBA
 
064 - TBA
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM
TBA
 
065 - TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM
TBA
 
066 - Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Sports
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Rory Sullivan

Dismissively calling any sport “sportsball” belies the essential role sports play in shaping culture and human relations. This powerful effect is perpetuated through the various media compositions that surround sports. In this class, we will explore these various composition modes to analyze the voices, genres, composition choices, and audiences that surround sports and make them such a powerful force in shaping culture and society. By composing game summaries, audio podcasts, and research papers, we will practice connecting sports to their social impact, all while developing our own voices as writers. 
 
067 - TBA
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM
TBA

068 - TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM
TBA

069 - TBA
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM
TBA

070 - Writing about Culture/Society - Vampires
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM
Charity Fowler

071 - TBA
TR 05:00PM-05:15PM
TBA

072 - Writing & Community Engagement - Walking Charlottesville
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
Kevin Smith

073 - TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM
TBA

074 - TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM
TBA

075 - TBA
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
Courtney Watts

076 - TBA
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM
TBA

077 - TBA
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM
TBA

078 - TBA
MWF 4:00PM-04:45PM
TBA

079 - Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Native American Rhetoric
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
Sarah Richardson

Who writes history and how do we know if it is accurate? This course will focus on how Native American histories are written and analyze the impacts of the rhetorical choices made in writing Native histories. Students will learn concepts such as: colonization, rhetoric, dominant and counter narratives, and current and past representations in memory. Students will also learn how to research, compose, and revise ethical and effective arguments to address specific audiences.

080 - Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Native American Rhetoric
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Sarah Richardson

Who writes history and how do we know if it is accurate? This course will focus on how Native American histories are written and analyze the impacts of the rhetorical choices made in writing Native histories. Students will learn concepts such as: colonization, rhetoric, dominant and counter narratives, and current and past representations in memory. Students will also learn how to research, compose, and revise ethical and effective arguments to address specific audiences.

ENWR 1520 - Writing and Community Engagement (5 sections)

ENWR 1520 shares the same writing goals and approaches as ENWR 1510, but focuses on community engagement in pursuit of those goals. In ENWR 1520, students contribute to a conversation and learn to position their ideas, research, and experiential learning in community engaged projects. Students should expect to spend time outside the classroom interacting with community partners, either in person or virtually.

001 - Writing and Community Engagement - You and A.I.
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
Piers Gelly

In this course, we will practice the skills associated with college-level writing by asking a provocative question of one another: in the age of ChatGPT, do we still need writing courses like this one? 

004 - Writing and Community Engagement - You and A.I.
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
Piers Gelly

In this course, we will practice the skills associated with college-level writing by asking a provocative question of one another: in the age of ChatGPT, do we still need writing courses like this one? 

005 - Writing and Community Engagement - Writing about Food Justice
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
Kate Stephenson

Why do we eat what we eat? Do poor people eat more fast food than wealthy people? Why are Cheetos cheaper than cherries? Do you have to be skinny to be hungry? By volunteering at the UVA Student Garden, Morven Kitchen Garden, UVA Community Food Pantry, Loaves and Fishes, Feel Good, Food Assist or the PVCC Community Garden and using different types of writing, including journal entries, forum posts, peer reviews, and formal papers, we will explore topics like food insecurity, food production, hunger stereotypes, privilege, urban gardening, and community engagement.

ENWR 2510 - Advanced Writing Seminar

The course in highest demand for students on the FWR+ track is ENWR 2510, an Advanced Writing Seminar. Like ENWR 1510, ENWR 2510 approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Students contribute to an academic conversation about a specific subject of inquiry and learn to position their ideas and research in relation to the ideas and research of others.  Instructors place student writing at the center of course, encourage students to think on the page, and prepare them to reflect on contemporary forms of expression.  Students read and respond to each other’s writing in class regularly, and they engage in thoughtful reflection on their own rhetorical choices as well as those of peers and published writers.  Additionally, the course requires students to give an oral presentation on their research and to assemble a digital portfolio of their writing. While ENWR 2510 and ENWR 1510 share the same goals and practices, ENWR 2510 offers added rigor, often in the form of denser course texts and longer, more self-directed writing assignments.

001 - Writing about Digital Media - Writing in the Age of Generative AI
TR 3:30PM-04:45PM
Ethan King

In this humanities-based writing seminar, we will explore generative AI as a rhetorical and cultural force reshaping how we read, write, and think. Rather than treating AI simply as a professional tool or as a looming threat, we’ll approach it as a site of inquiry: asking who we become when we write with, through, or against machines that can simulate language. Our work will build layered AI awareness, including a functional understanding of how these systems operate, rhetorical insight into how they shape meaning, and ethical attention to their social and environmental impacts. Readings will span a range of perspectives, from those who see AI as a creative collaborator to its most critical opponents. Through a variety of writing projects, we will enter current debates about writing and technology and practice what it means to write deliberately in a world increasingly shaped by automated language.

002 - Writing about Culture/Society - Life Writing and Culture
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM
Tamika Carey

004 - Writing about the Arts - Chinese Documentary Film
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM
Charles Laughlin
This course is cross-listed with CHTR 2850

A “First Writing Requirement +” seminar exploring Chinese documentary filmmaking. The course introduces students to the history and general typology of documentary films in general and applies these concepts to Chinese-language works from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Extensive attention is paid to the development of students’ writing skills, including peer review, draft revision, and familiarizing students with academic writing in the humanities as well as other useful genres.

005 - Writing about Culture/Society - Visions of the Good Life
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
Penny Von Eschen
This course is cross-listed with HIST 1501

The course explores a range of Utopian thinkers and societies through reading and writing about literature, history, and philosophy.  How have humans thought about organizing their societies to balance the needs of the common good and social rights with the needs and concerns of the individual? 

006 - Writing about Culture/Society - Dangerous Bodies: Obscenity, Sex, and Censorship
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
Sarah Orsak
This course is cross-listed with WGS 2410

What distinguishes the artistic and educational from the pornographic? While one Supreme Court Justice famously declared “I know it when I see it,” this remains a highly contested question in American politics, shaping discussions about education, the internet, sexual violence, and reproductive healthcare.

In this course, we ask: what do different approaches to obscenity and pornography reveal about the politics of gender and sexuality in the US? How do we come to understand some bodies and acts as deviant or dangerous? The course moves thematically. First, we focus on art and visual culture, asking how race and gender shape how we “see” obscenity. Then we turn to histories of feminism, addressing how debates about pornography have shaped (and torn apart) feminist movements. The course ends by addressing the contemporary resurgence of obscenity as a site of political concern, focusing on the internet and reproductive healthcare.

In this exploration of obscenity as a concept, we will engage a range of texts; in addition to feminist and queer scholarship, readings include personal essays, historical documents, and news articles.

007 - Writing about Culture/Society - Environmental Justice in the Mid-Atlantic
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Alexandria Smith
This course is cross-listed with AAS 2605

008 - Writing about Culture/Society - The Ancient Roots of Modern Atheism
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM
Inger Kuin
This course is cross-listed with CLAS 2150

How do people come to doubt their religious beliefs? In what ways can doubt be part of religiosity, and when does it cause people to leave religion behind? These questions were as relevant in ancient Greece and Rome as they are today. Already in the sixth century BCE critics of the myths of Homer and early natural philosophers subjected the religious beliefs of their contemporaries to rigorous scrutiny. This course engages with the ideas of ancient Greek and Roman doubters, disbelievers, and atheists, and traces their strong influence from the Renaissance up to the present day. We will investigate the intellectual history of ancient criticisms of religion, and how ancient thinkers shaped modern atheism and secularity. We will read ancient authors like Plato, Aristophanes, Epicurus, Cicero, and Lucian, and post-classical authors ranging from Desiderius Erasmus to Richard Dawkins and Ali Rizvi. All texts will be read in English translation.
 

ENWR 2520 - Special Topics in Writing (8 sections)

001 - Walking Charlottesville
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
Kate Stephenson
This course is restricted to Echols students only

This seminar will explore the connections between walking, writing, social justice, and activism. There is a long history of walking as a means of igniting thought, creativity, and dialogue that dates back to the meanderings of Socrates and Aristotle and continues through the strolls of the Romantic poets, the city wanderings of the fictional J. Alfred Prufrock and Clarissa Dalloway, and the outdoor hikes of Wendell Berry. But walking isn’t just linked to creativity and conversation; it’s also clearly connected to social justice. Walking to freedom, as depicted in myriad slave narratives and immigration stories, as well as walking for freedom in the form of protest marches, both past and present, are important reminders that our footsteps matter.   In this class, we will consider how walking can be both a solo activity and a means of creating community. By walking together, we will learn about the places and histories around us.  The course will be structured around biweekly walks primarily themed around social justice. All walks and place-based visits will include time for reflective writing.

002 - Writing and Games
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM
Kate Natishan

Play is essential to our growth. Games teach us how to move, how to balance, how to coordinate our hands andeyes, how to take turns, how to share, how to read people, how to strategize, how to problem solve, how to work as a team... Without games, there is no us. 

Games play a central role in our social and private lives, whether we are spectators or players. They also have massive cultural impact, sometimes in ways we don’t expect. In this class, we will examine the role games play in our lives and our culture, and we will explore the ways in which others write about games while developing our skills to do the same.

003 - Audible Writing
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM
Jon D'Errico

Text meets audio. As a class, we'll explore, analyze, and produce audible writing about UVa and Charlottesville in a range of genres, from podcast-style scripts to hybrid multi-modal documents. Appropriate for students who combine strong writing with a lively and engaged intellectual curiosity.

004 - Writing Human Rights
T 06:00PM-08:30PM
Steve Parks

Students will study theories of human rights and work with global human rights advocates, as well as students located in International contexts.

005 - Writing about Virginia's Native Community
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM
Sarah Richardson

In this course, students will employ research skills, focus on critical engagement, reflect on how information is presented and written to craft effective arguments to address a public facing audience.  In particular, students will work with Virginia’s Tribal Nations to create a document that discusses the similarities and differences between the Tribal Nations socially, historically, and culturally.

006 - Writing about Medicine
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM
Rhiannon Goad
This course is restricted to Echols students only

This course dives into the art and ethics of communicating about health. You'll dissect everything from dense medical studies to viral news, learning to translate complex science into clear, compelling language. With short essays, you will develop skills to evaluate diverse sources, including medical literature, health journalism, and patient narratives, and apply responsible communication principles in contexts such as reporting research findings without hype and explaining public health issues effectively. You'll practice these communication skills throughout the semester, culminating in a final project: the creation of a zine about medicine.

007 - Writing Democratic Rights
M 06:00PM-08:30PM
Steve Parks
This course is restricted to Echols students only

Students will study theories of democracy and work with global democratic advocates, as well as students located in international contexts.

ENWR 2800 - Public Speaking

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM
devin donovan

An inquiry-based approach to the development of a confident, engaging, and ethical public speaking style. Beyond practical skills, this course emphasizes rhetorical thinking: what are the conventions of public speaking? Where are there opportunities to deviate from convention in ways that might serve a speech’s purpose? How might we construct an audience through the ways we craft language and plan the delivery of our speech?

ENWR 3500 - Topics in Advanced Writing & Rhetoric

001 - Environmental Justice Writing
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
Cory Shaman

Designed to offer students practice in engaged environmental writing, this course will focus on environmental justice (EJ) discourse in US and international contexts. While the class will be grounded in a study of established forms of EJ theory, special attention will be given to advancing an understanding of the entangled claims and interests of humans and non-humans together as a method to enable students to develop more expansive conceptions of justice and produce just forms of writing.

Course materials will draw heavily on texts associated with historical and contemporary environmental justice efforts at the grassroots level, but also in academic, governmental, and commercial contexts. Case studies in local EJ campaigns in Virginia may form a significant portion of the class. Students will gain experience as readers of these texts and apply insights to a variety of writing tasks shaped by their specific interests within the framework of environmental justice.

002 - Rhetoric of Crime
T 06:00PM-08:30PM
Rhiannon Goad

Sensational news headlines, tough-on-crime political campaigns, and gripping true crime narratives: how we talk about crime profoundly shapes our understanding of criminals, victims, justice, and social order. This course explores the rhetorical dimension of crime, examining the persuasive strategies used to define crime, influence public perception, and shape policy in contemporary culture. Together, we will critically analyze how language constructs our reality of crime and punishment. Through a series of analytic papers and a podcast, students will use rhetorical analysis to identify significant trends in crime discourse, identify agents shaping these narratives, and develop a critical perspective on the power of language in matters of law, order, and justice.

ENWR 3550 - Advanced Topics in Digital Writing & Rhetoric

001 - How now, Spirit! AI Satire and Public Discourse
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM
Dana Little

As generative AI tools become embedded in our devices, social media platforms, and word processing software, writers must develop new literacies to critically evaluate and engage with digital content. This course explores the rhetorical aspects of AI-generated communication, focusing on how these tools use (or misuse) satire, genre conventions, and rhetorical devices to persuade audiences and shape public discourse.

002 - Digital Public Writing
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Kevin Smith

ENWR 3550: Digital Public Writing examines the rhetorical, technological, and cultural dimensions of writing for public audiences with an emphasis on digital communities. Students will analyze and produce multimodal compositions meant to circulate beyond the classroom, developing rhetorical frameworks for understanding how (digital) texts address audiences and perform work in the world.

ENWR 3620 - Writing & Tutoring Across Cultures

TR 08:00AM-09:15AM
Rory Sullivan

In this course, we'll look at a variety of texts from academic arguments, narratives, and pedagogies, to consider what it means to write, communicate, and learn across cultures. Topics will include contrastive rhetorics, world Englishes, rhetorical listening, and tutoring multilingual writers. A service learning component will require students to volunteer weekly in the community.

ENWR 3640 - Writing with Sound

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Stephanie Ceraso

Trains students to become attuned, thoughtful listeners and sonic composers. In addition to discussing key works on sound from fields such as rhetoric and composition, sound studies, and journalism, we will experiment with the possibilities of sound as a valuable form of writing and storytelling. Students will learn how to use digital audio editing tools, platforms, and techniques for designing and producing sonic projects. (Meets second writing requirement.)

ENWR 3680 - Writing and Documentary Film

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM
Jodie Childers

Merging theory and practice, this course invites students to explore the writing process through the lens of documentary film. Through analyzing films and creating formal documentary film treatments, students explore the tension between artistry and pragmatism as they deepen their understanding of documentary film as a genre, confronting its affordances—both the possibilities and the constraints.

ENWR 3720 - Arguing Like a Scholar

TR 03:30PM-4:45PM
Tyler Carter

Arguing Like a Scholar examines how the linguistic and rhetorical features of argumentation might be adapted for academic and professional contexts. The course will make two primary movements: The first is an examination of how argumentation works through the lens of classical and contemporary rhetorical theory. Second, students will do original comparative research on the linguistic and rhetorical features of texts in two different disciplines.

ENWR 3740 - Black Women's Writing & Rhetoric

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM
Tamika Carey

A chronological survey of the persuasive communication and writing strategies Black women have used towards the project of empowerment and activism in speeches, essays, poetry, drama, and novels.

ENWR 3900 - The Forbes Seminar in Career-based Writing and Rhetoric

TR 05:00PM-06:15PM
Keith Driver

Develops proficiency in a range of stylistic and persuasive effects. The course is designed for students who want to hone their writing skills, as well as for students preparing for careers in which they will write documents for public circulation. Students explore recent research in writing studies. In the workshop-based studio sessions, students propose, write, and edit projects of their own design. (Meets second writing requirement.) 

ENCW 2100-001 - Intro to Creative Writing

ENCW 2100 is a workshop-based class that explores the craft of writing creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction at the introductory level. The class will also cover the basics of academic essays as they apply to literature and literary analysis. Students will participate in workshops to elicit early feedback on their work, examine various revision techniques, and submit a final portfolio of extensively revised material.

ENCW 2300-001 - Poetry Writing

An introductory course in poetry writing, with a primary focus on creating new poems in a workshop setting. Students will study basic poetic terms and techniques and revise and arrange a series of poems for a final portfolio. The course will also have extensive outside reading and non-creative writing requirements.

ENCW 2559-001 - Introduction to Environmental Writing

Brian Teare

The natural world has long been a central subject of both poetry and creative nonfiction. But environmental writing does not mean only writing about nature. Whether wild or settled, natural or built, pristine or polluted, all environments are worthy of deeper exploration. In conversation with literary texts and traditions that center the relationship between place and language, we’ll train ourselves to be  more perceptive readers of landscapes both literal and linguistic. Through generative writing prompts, we’ll produce poems and short essays. Through structured editorial sessions, we’ll learn to offer and receive constructive feedback on writing about the environment.
 

ENCW 2600-001 - Fiction Writing

An introductory course in fiction writing, with a primary focus on creating short stories in a workshop setting. Students will study basic narrative terms and techniques and revise several short stories for a final portfolio. The course will also have extensive outside reading and non-creative writing requirements.

ENCW 3310-001 - Intermediate Poetry Writing I

Sumita Chakraborty

In this intermediate poetry workshop, we will read widely from a range of (mostly) contemporary writers; we will talk about our poems, each other’s poems, and the poems by the authors on our reading list; and, most importantly, we will stretch our comfort zones and try new things in our poems while exploring the fundamentals of the craft through extended units on “Metaphor, Simile, and What We Mean When We Say ‘Image,’” “Revising Revision,” “Rhythm, Music, and Voice,” and “Form and Shape.” Along the way, informal assignments like Banana Peels will inspire you to defang the concept of “failure,” transforming it from something to be avoided at all costs and into a celebration of an attempt to try something new. You’ll get consistent feedback on your poems from your peers in regular workshops, and thrice in the semester, you’ll submit a packet of 3 poems to me for in-depth written feedback. At the end of the semester, you’ll create a chapbook of your own work. And during the entire semester, we’ll build camaraderie around our shared love of and dedication to our craft, and we’ll celebrate the ghosts and the shouts that show up in our poems.
 

ENCW 3310-002 - Intermediate Poetry Writing: The Poetry of Place

Lisa Spaar

Seamus Heaney has written that “one perceptible function of poetry is to write place into existence.” In this advanced poetry writing course, each writer will explore a personally crucial, resonant, haunted/haunting place, or places, perhaps literal, perhaps imaginary.  How have our important places been affected by forces both personal, environmental, cultural, and global?  Students will write a poem a week, many in response to assignments.  We will read a few shared texts, perhaps engage in something Marina Warner calls “memory mapping,” and generate new work about psychic, geographical, emotional, historical, nostalgic, and/or provocative places, those crucial landscapes by which, as Malcolm Cowley says of childhood, “all others are reckoned and condemned.”  
 

ENCW 3350-001 - Intermediate Nonfiction Workshop: The Sensorium

Jane Alison

A writing class for students who want to immerse themselves in their senses and explore ways that language can capture the glorious porosity that is the human body alive in a physical world. We’ll read brief texts about the (more than five!) senses and their intersections with language, and we’ll examine how other creative writers have let themselves be porous. You’ll cycle through studies of single subjects—a color or light effect, a smell, a tactile sensation, a sound, a sense of space, and so on—drawing upon close perception and your most associative mind to transform what you perceive into artful language. Working from these studies, you’ll develop longer pieces that will be literary sites of sensory exploration. Your projects might be several short essays, a series of linked fragments, a single extended work, an entirely new literary species . . . together with a discussion of texts and tactics that have inspired you.
 

ENCW 3500-001 - Playwriting

Anna Beecher

Uncover elements of playwriting craft, read and watch great plays, and learn by doing, in this fast-paced class. Students can expect to write a lot, both inside and outside of class, share their work, and build tangible skills over the semester. Together we will examine plays for one performer and for thirty, settings from the mundane to the absurd, the fundamentals of dramatic action and the constraints and opportunities inherent to live performance.
 

ENCW 3500-002 - The Day is a Thousand Worlds Long: Science Fiction and Thought

Jesse Ball

In this class we will read works of science fiction and consider in what ways human possibility is constrained by adventurousness in language and fiction. We will analyze marvelous works of the past, work on exercises and hypothetical situations, and even compose texts ourselves.
 

ENCW 3610-002 - Intermediate Fiction Writing

Helen Chandler

Open to anyone who has passed a 2000 level creative writing course (e.g. ENCW 2100,2300 or 2600) or those with some prior writing experience (if the latter please email the instructor with a writing sample).  

This workshop is for emerging writers who are ready to participate in a focused creative community, develop their craft and take their work further. You can expect to read and discuss a variety of works of (mainly short) fiction and to write a lot. You’ll create new work through short experimental exercises and submit two longer pieces to workshop for feedback. 
 

ENCW 3610-003 - Intermediate Fiction Writing

Piers Gelly

Open to anyone who has passed a 2000 level creative writing course (e.g. ENCW 2100,2300 or 2600) or those with some prior writing experience (if the latter please email the instructor with a writing sample).  

This workshop is for emerging writers who are ready to participate in a focused creative community, develop their craft and take their work further. You can expect to read and discuss a variety of works of (mainly short) fiction and to write a lot. You’ll create new work through short experimental exercises and submit two longer pieces to workshop for feedback. 

ENCW 3610-004 - Intermediate Fiction Writing

Helen Chandler

Open to anyone who has passed a 2000 level creative writing course (e.g. ENCW 2100,2300 or 2600) or those with some prior writing experience (if the latter please email the instructor with a writing sample).  

This workshop is for emerging writers who are ready to participate in a focused creative community, develop their craft and take their work further. You can expect to read and discuss a variety of works of (mainly short) fiction and to write a lot. You’ll create new work through short experimental exercises and submit two longer pieces to workshop for feedback. 
 

ENCW 4550-001 - Topics in Literary Prose: Weird Books 2

Weird Books 2: The Strange, the Obscene, the Banned and the Incomprehensible in Literature

Micheline Marcom

In this second iteration of weird books we’ll read an array of works of literature that have been, at different times, derided, banned, ignored, censored, and misunderstood—sometimes for their subject matter, sometimes for the style in which they are written—often for both. Plan to read a lot of strange and wonderful books, to write weekly creative responses, and to wrangle inside that beautiful dense wood we call literature. Some writers we may read: William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Bernhard, Clarice Lispector, Antonio Tabucchi, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Bohumil Hrabal, JG Ballard, and Georges Perec. And some of One Thousand and One Nights!
 

ENCW 4810-001 - The Secret Story: Advanced Fiction Workshop

Anna Beecher

 

ENCW 4820-001 - Poetry Program Poetics: "Form and Shape"

Sumita Chakraborty

In this course, we will explore the poetics of form and shape. How does the shape of a poem make meaning in ways that complement, complicate, subvert, or expand poems’ syntactic and emotional logic? How are contemporary poets from a range of subject positions inhabiting and transforming inherited forms, or inventing new ones? How can we analyze the rules any given poem establishes when the poem is in free verse or a more legibly experimental mode that seems to rely less on patterns? What histories do different forms hold and how do their practitioners transform or extend those histories? Our major contemporary authors will be Terrance Hayes, Natalie Diaz, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and M. NourbeSe Philip, although you should also expect to read single poems from anyone from Hafez to Sonia Sanchez. We will also rely on reference texts (which you’ll be encouraged to explore informally beyond our assigned reading list to give you an even broader immersion in a variety of forms) and incorporate a range of critical scholarship and craft essays.

As we read, you will be asked to take a poem of your own and translate it into the forms we are reading—or, if you find that it is truly impossible to do so, to write new poems in the new forms. That assignment will serve as the course’s main generative through-line and will build toward the final project.
 

ENCW 4830-001 - Advanced Poetry Writing I: Time Travel for Poets

Kiki Petrosino

When William Carlos Williams defined a poem as “a small (or large) machine made of words,” he forgot to add: it’s a time machine. In this advanced poetry workshop, we’ll focus on poetry’s unique relationship to time. Each week, we'll explore works of published and peer-generated verse. We’ll focus on how poets use lyric language to stretch, twist, and collapse time. Students will complete individual writing assignments, participate in discussions, and compose a Final Portfolio prefaced by a Portfolio Letter. The final grade will be calculated based on the above items, plus attendance. 

Instructor permission is required to enroll in this workshop and approvals will be considered on a rolling basis. To request permission, enter a request on SIS and e-mail Prof. Kiki Petrosino (…) a single Word attachment containing: 1) a brief letter of interest, listing your previous experiences with creative writing workshops at UVA or elsewhere; 2) a group of 3-5 recent poems.  
 

ENCW 5559-001 - Small Press Publishing

Brian Teare

Small press publishing is one of the major forms of literary labor undertaken by writers of all genres; it’s also one of the main means by which contemporary writers form community. As this course will show, a small press publisher has to possess and hone the skills that all writers need: as an editor, they have to be an excellent close reader; as a curator of a list of authors, they need to be an acute critic of their chosen genre; and as a bookmaker and/or typesetter, they have to pay attention to the details of book production. Through in-class tutorials in bookmaking, we’ll acquire some of the pragmatic skills of small press publishing. Through research into four small presses and selected readings from their lists, we’ll hone our curatorial acumen and gain a sense of the role small presses play in literary community. Through secondary readings we’ll gain a sense of the history and politics of the small press and the handmade object. Through writing and workshopping our own chapbook-length manuscripts and designs, we’ll practice our writerly and editorial skills. And finally, through collaborative publishing ventures that solidify the literary community we’ve created over the semester, we’ll bring our own chapbooks to life!   
 

ENGL 2500-002 - Intro to Literary Studies

John O'Brien

This course is an introduction to the study of literature, one where we will read great literary works, but also focus on the skills that you need to read, describe, critique, and write well about them.  We will also be pursuing the question of what constitutes literature in the first place.  We will read literary texts in a variety of forms (poetry, fiction, drama, essay), and also read what a number of critical thinkers have had to say. Our readings will include works by authors such as William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Italo Calvino, Terrance Hayes, and others. Some short in-class exercises; three written assignments, final examination. All students are welcome to join. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
 
 

ENGL 2500-003 - Tales Retold

Kate Stephenson

Why do authors choose to rewrite certain texts?  How does this influence the originality or authenticity of the later work?  What does it mean to rewrite a novel from the perspective of a minor character?  How does our reading of the “revision” influence our ideas about the earlier version?  In this course, we will read novels, short stories, plays, and poems that revise or embellish the work of earlier authors. Our reading will be divided into pairs of texts: the “original” and the “revision.”

Potential texts:

selected fairy tales (Brothers Grimm) and Transformations (Anne Sexton);  Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) and Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys); Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) and Longbourn (Jo Baker) or Emma (Jane Austen) and Clueless (movie); Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf) and The Hours (Michael Cunningham); “A Cup of Tea” (Katherine Mansfield) and A Cup of Tea (Amy Ephron); Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain) and James (Percival Everett).

Requirements: Regular attendance and active participation in discussion, biweekly discussion posts, short in-class writing activities, 3 papers (2000 words), and a final.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement. 
 
 

ENGL 2506-001 - The Lives and Works of Women Poets

Alison Booth

This discussion-based seminar welcomes undergraduates at any stage of practice with reading and writing about poetry (poets welcome), prospective majors or not. Together, we will refresh our awareness of poetic forms and traditions. In the U.S. and other English-speaking countries, poetry (and memorizing it) used to be both as popular as podcasts are now and central to education. While the ancient idea of “poet” resembled a male prophet, women in educated elites often wrote poetry as men did. By the 1800s, newspapers and periodicals included poetry (the writers might earn money!), and some women poets became acclaimed “poetesses.” Then as now, images and biographical profiles framed cultural celebrities according to social status, nationality, race, and other identities. How does the “life” of a woman poet shape interpretation, or should we try to ignore it? How did women poets address and respond to each other? Encountering a wide range of poets, we zoom in on some spectacular lives and works, British, American, white, Black or Indigenous: Mary Robinson (1757-1800), L. E.L. (1802-1838), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), Emily Brontë (1818-1848), Frances E. W. Harper (1825-1911), Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake; 1861-1913), and Anne Spencer (1882-1975). Where possible, we’ll consult historic anthologies and archival materials in Special Collections and explore digitized repositories and GenAI. The course will mostly be offline; laptops or accommodations with discretion. Requirements (some graded P/F) include: short writing in class; workbooks to guide your learning; contributing to a group “commonplace book” or anthology; a solo presentation of “the life” of a poet; a solo turn to present on a particular poem; one essay and a revision of it; an exam.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
 
 

ENGL 2506-002 - Poems, Poets, Poetry

Emily Ogden

What is poetry for and how do we approach it? What counts as a poem, and what is poetry’s place in the human experience? We’ll read poems in English written by around half a dozen poets, likely including William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and Gwendolyn Brooks.  We’ll read intensively and write carefully about these poems. In this course, we’ll work on paper, not on screens, in order to improve our attention to the poems. This course is appropriate for students with no prior knowledge of poetry, and also for those with significant prior interest in the form. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement. 
 

ENGL 2506-003 - Poems, Poets, Poetry

Emily Ogden

What is poetry for and how do we approach it? What counts as a poem, and what is poetry’s place in the human experience? We’ll read poems in English written by around half a dozen poets, likely including William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and Gwendolyn Brooks.  We’ll read intensively and write carefully about these poems. In this course, we’ll work on paper, not on screens, in order to improve our attention to the poems. This course is appropriate for students with no prior knowledge of poetry, and also for those with significant prior interest in the form. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement. 

ENGL 2506-004 - Introduction to Poetry

Hodges Adams

This class aims to strengthen the skills of close reading and analytical thinking through evaluating poetry. Discussion is the primary format; we will explore various poetic forms and movements and pay close attention to language. Students will read individual poems across a wide variety of styles and time periods, as well as reading one complete collection of contemporary American poetry. There will be three essays, one of which will be paired with an in-class presentation. Extensive revision of at least one essay is expected. We may take field trips to places around Grounds such as the Fralin Art Museum and the Special Collections Library.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2507-001 - Satirical Comedies

Jack Crouse

This course surveys a rather unsentimental kind of comedy that contains plenty of witty repartee, farcical situations, and irreverence for social conventions (especially those related to marriage). We’ll read and laugh together at plays that span three-and-a-half centuries, exploring how certain styles of humor have developed over the years and discussing the social issues that complicate them. Meanwhile, we'll cultivate the art of writing critically and carefully about works of drama (and literature in general).

Tentative reading list: William Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, William Congreve’s The Way of the World, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest, George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Noel Coward’s Private Lives, Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby

Requirements: Writing assignments totaling 20 pages and a final exam.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the Artistic, Interpretive and Philosophical Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2508-001 - Nineteenth-Century Speculative Fiction

Stephen Arata

The nineteenth century was an age of lively experimentation in narrative fiction. In this course we will read a range of texts that depart from conventional realism: Gothic tales, science fiction, stories of ghosts and the supernatural. Likely authors include Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oscar Wilde, George Eliot, J. S. Le Fanu, Vernon Lee, Robert Louis Stevenson, Margaret Oliphant, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Like all ENGL 2500 classes, this course is designed to help you read closely, think creatively, and write lucidly about literary and other texts. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

 

ENGL 2508-003 - The Novel of Upbringing

Dan Kinney

The Novel of Upbringing -- How does the fictional representation of upbringing reflect on the cultural uses of fiction in general as well as the actual work of becoming adult? Works to be studied: Jane Austen, Emma; Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn; Tom Perrotta, Joe College; Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Perfectly Fine. Class requirements: Lively participation including including 8 brief email responses, one short and one longer essay, and a final exam.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
 

ENGL 2508-004 - Island Fiction

Alison Cotti-Lowell

This course explores depictions of islands in prose fiction, from Thomas More's Utopia, to Herman Melville's Typee, to Alex Garland's The Beach, and beyond. Readings engage with themes including utopia/ dystopia and exploration, empire, and colonialism, as well human interiority and the imagination. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
 
 

ENGL 2508-005 - The Love Plot

Rachel Haines

Will they, or won’t they? Enemies to lovers. Grumpy/sunshine. Fake dating. Love is the force that keeps us reading—or at least it is in the contemporary romance genre. When we watch a romcom or read a romantasy novel, most of us know who’ll end up together. In fact, our enjoyment of the genre seems to depend on our knowing exactly how it will end. Why is that? What is it about a love story that has us, in the words of Taylor Swift, screaming “baby just say YES”? This introductory literature course takes the predictability of the love plot as a starting point for thinking about narrative and narrativity (i.e. how a novel or film structures its story). Through engagement with a diverse array of novels and films, we will chart the ways the love plot has (or has not) evolved over time. Our course will start with the 19th century marriage plot (Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice) and end with a contemporary romance novel (to be voted on by the class, probably Emily Henry). Along the way, we will watch romcoms (of the Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron variety), consider some biting social commentary on the marriage market (from Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence to Celine Song’s Materialists), and assess the possibility of queer romance as a genre (Todd Haynes’s Carol, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name). We will also engage with romance’s skeptics, including critiques of the genre as heteronormative, bourgeoise, and white. No prior experience in literary studies is required.

Requirements: Regular attendance and active participation in class (no laptops or screens barring instructor permission); a mix of short and long writing assignments totaling 20 pages; a final exam.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the Artistic, Interpretive and Philosophical Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2527-001 - Text and Performance

Katharine Maus

In this course we will read three Shakespeare plays and then see two or three film or live-theater versions of each one, considering various ways the directors and actors interpret the plays for a modern audience. Writing assignments are designed to help seminar participants consolidate the analytical and writing skills they need to succeed in college-level classes in English or other humanities fields. In addition to many short, informal writing assignments there will be two formal papers—one short, one longer.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
 

ENGL 2599-001 - Beauty and Monstrosity

Jon D'Errico

In this class we will read a selection of texts exploring the roots of contemporary attitudes toward beauty and monstrosity. The readings range from the mid-14th century to the present, and the genres include poetry, short fiction, drama, and novels. Although we will, in passing, consider some literary theory, our focus in this class will be on your close analysis of the texts, via class discussions and your written assignments.

We will explore in broad terms some of the major literary traditions that contribute to modern understandings of beauty and monstrosity. We will especially attend to two overlapping and evolving themes: understanding of the relationship between nature and human nature, and the boundaries between the natural and the unnatural.

Along the way, we'll provide guided practice in managing key elements of argument and style. 

This course satisfies the English major prerequisite, the second writing requirement, and the AIP disciplines requirement.
 

ENGL 2599-002 - Monuments and the Aesthetics of Power

Ian Grandison

We generally understand monuments as commemorating people and events that are regarded as significant to shaping public knowledge, sense of identity, and social cohesion. We consider the processes by which monuments are proposed, promoted, funded, planned, designed, and erected as politically neutral and communal in their spirit. They are regarded as objects of beauty or even majesty--promoted as “works of art,” a notion that reinforces the perception that they unite and uplift individuals, communities, nations, and even empires. And yet the rupture associated with Confederate monuments that long had pride of place in landscapes North and South betrays the instability of the common perception of monuments as salutary and caused many to view them as apparatuses of ongoing warfare. We consider the role of monuments and memorials, whether public or private, in shaping collective ways of knowing, feeling, acting, and interacting as citizens in relation to state authority. To unearth this politics, we will explore the physical and historical contexts of monuments as well as their aesthetic qualities that are located on campus, in Charlottesville, and beyond--from ancient times to the present, from the Age of Exploration to colonial imperialism to modern nation-building. A few examples include: the Elmina Castle, built in the 1480s, which eventually became a "point of no return" for kidnapped captives in the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; Cleopatra's Needle, moved from Alexandria, Egypt to London's Victoria Embankment in 1878; the 1921 Stonewall Jackson Confederate Monument that once stood in Charlottesville's Court Square Park; and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, 2011, on the U.S. National Mall. Is Carlos Simon’s 2022 “Requiem for the Enslaved” (which was commissioned by Georgetown University to reckon with the role of slavery in its development) a monument? We will explore how monuments are used to shape local and national landscapes to affect social hierarchies, imperialist ambitions, and struggles for liberation. There will be a midterm and final exam, each including identification items and a critical essay, and a final team research project.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
 

ENGL 2599-003 - How to be Ethical?

Nasrin Olla

How do novels, poetry, and philosophical texts teach us to relate ethically toward the stranger, the foreigner, or the other? How do we understand different cultures and peoples without reducing them to our already established frames of reference? How do we imagine otherness? This course approaches these big questions by exploring representations of the stranger and the foreigner in African and African diasporic literature. We will look at texts by Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon alongside reflections on the relation between ‘ethics and aesthetics’ by Immanuel Kant, Michel Foucault, and others.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement. 
 

ENGL 2599-005 - Appalachian Literature

Gabby Kiser

What is Appalachia? It’s a question that can't and shouldn't be answered easily. The popularity of books like Hillbilly Elegy and Demon Copperhead shows a national desire to understand the region, but these texts don't tell the full story! Central to this course is the sentiment that a region as complex as Appalachia can’t be distilled into one narrative. We’ll explore folk tales, canonical literary fiction, graphic novels, poetry, and memoirs to learn more about the mountains and the people that call them home. Whether you grew up in the holler or still pronounce it app-uh-LAY-sha, all are welcome on our journey through this region that's too often misunderstood and misrepresented.

Tentative reading list: Lee Smith, Black Mountain Breakdown; Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina; bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place; Robert Gipe, Trampoline; Neema Avashia, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place; excerpts from anthologies The Jack Tales, Back Talk from Appalachia, and Appalachian Reckoning; and poems by George Ella Lyon, Nikki Giovanni, Julia Kasdorf, and Crystal Wilkinson.

Requirements include regular attendance and participation, reading quizzes as needed, writing assignments totaling 20 pages, and a final exam.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the Artistic, Interpretive and Philosophical Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2599-007 - The Vampires We Need

Charity Fowler

In Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach presents a compelling argument that we, as a culture assume vampires are easy to stereotype and “we all know Dracula,” they are, in fact, not marginalized figures in literature and history but, rather, inherently mutable survivors who are central to history, politics, culture and humanity itself. Her seminal text offers a history of Anglo-American 19th and 20th century culture through the lens of the literary vampire, demonstrating that “every age embraces the vampire it needs, and gets the vampire it deserves.” This course takes this thesis and tests it, using Our Vampires, Ourselves as a framing text, starting with world legend and lore as catalogued by Montague Summers in the 1920s, visiting the poetry of Goethe and the historical vampire craze of the 18th century, journeying through the literary vampires of the 19th century, from Byron to Dracula, tracing the figure’s development through the 20th century, and pushing beyond Auerbach’s work to examine if the thesis holds true in the age of post-Rice vampire figures and 21st century adaptations of older figures like Dracula and Lestat.  Beyond Our Vampires, Ourselves, and relevant folklore anthologies, texts will include, Lord Byron and John Polidori’s Lord Ruthven in The Vampyre, Joseph Le Fanu’s lesbian Carmilla, Stoker’s Dracula, Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, and Smith’s The Vampire Diaries, along with film and television adaptations, where appropriate.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
 
 

ENGL 2599-009 - Introduction to Queer Literature

River Robins

What makes literature queer? This course seeks investigate the many ways we might come to answer this question. Starting as early as the 19th century and continuing to the present day, we’ll investigate shifting cultural understandings of what it means to be queer, and how writers, artists, and filmmakers respond to the call to create queer community. We’ll look to novels, short stories, poetry, comics, plays, and film discover queer literary communities—some carefully hidden and others loud and provocative.

Texts may include: Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray; excepts from Virginia Woolf, Orlando; Walt Whitman, “Live Oak with Moss”; excerpts from James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room; Ang Lee, The Wedding Banquet (film, 1993); Cheryl Dunye, The Watermelon Woman (film, 1996); Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy; Alison Bechdel, Fun Home, and more.

Requirements: Regular attendance and lively participation in discussion; shorter and longer writing assignments together totaling 20 pages; a final exam.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2599-013 - Frankenstein's Afterlives

Karthik Shankar

You enter a body building competition… Only to learn your opponent is Victor Frankenstein?

The struggle between the creator shaped by scientific arrogance and his patchworked humanoid creation in Mary Shelley’s enduring classic will provide the blueprint for reinventions of Frankenstein in this course.

In most versions, the creature reckons with a world where they are abandoned by their creator. Yet, the socio-political contexts of the literary and filmic adaptations in which this stark truth unfolds are startling different—from late Victorian Glasgow to an unnamed Caribbean island in the 1960s, and 2005 Baghdad in the wake of the Iraq War. The creature becomes a fertile symbol for questions around creation, artificial intelligence, colonialism, imperialism, race and gender. Also who can resist necromancy and murders galore!

Tentative Reading List: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 version); Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad ; Alasdair Gray, Poor Things; V.S Naipaul, “Flag on the Island”, Lee Kok Liang's “Five Fingers”; H.G Wells, The Island of Dr Moreau.

Tentative Viewing List: James Whale, Frankenstein (1931), Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer; Guillermo Del Toro, Frankenstein (2025)

Requirements: Regular attendance and lively participation in discussion; shorter and longer writing assignments together totaling 20 pages; a final exam.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2599-016 - American Refugees: Migration as a Crisis of Representation

Joshua Miller

Despite generations of critique, the national narrative of the US as a land of and for refugees is still frequently retold. However, the history and literature of the past century and a half tells a different story. Many different stories, in fact. The history of migration and immigration turns out to be an ongoing crisis of representation itself.

This course is an introductory seminar in literary studies with no prerequisites or prior knowledge required. It will provide historical and sociological contexts for understanding the rise of mass immigration and the varied waves of political and cultural responses. If we approach 21st-century US refugee fiction as an ongoing crisis of narrative (how to tell the stories of individuals who adopt a new culture and language of consciousness), it emerges as a rich tradition of literary innovation, subtle social critique, and transracial alliance-building.

After considering the historical trajectory of US migrant fiction since the 19th century, we’ll focus on contemporary novels that complicate borders, documentation, rights, community, and language. In reading a wide range of genres, we’ll consider recent narrratives that complicate what the term refugee means, the status of undocumented and stateless people, how borders shape literary narrative, migrant time, and the perils of translation.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.
 
 

ENGL 2599-017 - On Saying "I"

Victoria Baena

What does it mean to say "I"? Why are personal narratives so popular, and how do these narratives define the self? This course addresses these and other questions through a wide range of first-person narratives across literary history. We'll look at philosophical perspectives on the first person by Augustine, Emile Benveniste, Frantz Fanon, and Donna Haraway. We'll think about questions of lyric and narrative personhood through poets like Denise Riley and Claudia Rankine, and essayists like Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin. Then we'll turn to two novels that question the stability and coherence of the self: Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Nella Larsen's Passing. No prior knowledge of these topics is needed. Students will be encouraged both to write in the first person and to critically analyze first-person writing by themselves and others. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2599-018 - Becoming Frankenstein

Cynthia Wall

One dark and stormy weekend in 1816 young Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician John Polidori “crowded around a blazing wood fire,” read German ghost stories, and decided to write their own. Polidori’s “The Vampyre” became the inspiration for vamp lit ever since; Mary’s became Frankenstein (and she became Mary Shelley). This writing-intensive course will look at the kinds of literature they all read that influenced Frankenstein–ghost stories, poems, paintings, travel narratives, journals, letters, and  lectures on electricity and galvanism. Requirements: discussion, weekly “epistles,” and three short papers.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 3001-100 - History of Literature in English I

Rebecca Rush

The aim of this course is to introduce you to the rich and varied body of English literature written before 1800 and to the rigorous but rewarding art of close, attentive reading. Though these works can feel unfamiliar at first—full of dragons, wandering knights, singing shepherds, and fallen angels—they reveal strangely familiar portraits of ambition, anger, fidelity, desire, and pride. We begin our adventure with the Old English epic Beowulf, the tale of a Geatish warrior whose colossal wrath and hyge-þrymm (strength of spirit) spur him to grapple with the forces of envy and strife that lurk in misty fens and dragon lairs. Along the way we will meet a series of seekers: Chaucer’s lusty pilgrims, Spenser’s heart-sore heroine, Shakespeare’s wit-wielding lovers, and Milton’s unconquerable devil. Though we will wend our way across nearly a millennium of English literature, we will take the time to linger over the distinctive language of each book and the distinctive image each author sketches of human habits and longings.

Readings include Beowulf, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Much Ado about Nothing, Milton’s “Lycidas” and Paradise Lost, and shorter poems by Wyatt, Sidney, Donne, Jonson, Wroth, Herrick, Pope, Cowper, and Gray, among others.

This course is a prerequisite for the English major, but it assumes no prior knowledge of English literature. If you plan to major in economics or biology or computer science but want to study some great literature along the way, please sign up. The only prerequisite is a willingness to read slowly, attentively, and with a dictionary at hand.
 

ENGL 3271-100 - Shakespeare: Histories & Comedies

Katharine Maus

This course deals with the first half of Shakespeare's career as a playwright, in which he was mainly writing histories and comedies. ENGL 3272, in the Spring, deals with the second half of Shakespeare's career, in which he was mainly writing tragedies and romances.  You may take either or both courses; neither is a prerequisite for the other.

This course satisfies the pre-1700 literature requirement for the English major and the AIP Disciplines Requirement for the College.
 

ENGL 3320-001 - Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literatures

Brad Pasanek

In this course we survey English literature from 1660 to 1745 by closely and carefully reading six important texts. We focus on major authors and major genres: William Congreve will epitomize Restoration drama; Alexander Pope, Augustan poetry; John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, and Eliza Haywood, early prose fiction; Jonathan Swift, satire. This is an introductory course and meant help the English majors and others find their way in literary history from Shakespeare to Jane Austen. By the term’s end the student will be able to put pressure on formal elements in a text and produce a “reading” that connects the text to its historical context. He, she, or they will also be able to explain and use terms like satire, allegory, mock epic, novel, wit, Augustan, and Restoration. — Requirements include two papers, a memorization assignment, and a final exam.

This course fulfills the 1700-1900 literature requirement for the English major and the AIP Disciplines Requirement for the College.
 

ENGL 3480-001 - The English Novel II: Fictions of Mobility

Victoria Baena

This course traces the development of and experiments in the nineteenth-century novel under the guiding frame of “fictions of mobility.” As we read novels about social mobility, upward striving, emigration, empire, and historical change, we will also consider some of the fictions that we have learned to tell about mobility - in part through these very works of art: Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–1), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2), Henry James’s  The Portrait of a Lady (1881), and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). These books ask what’s at stake in leaving home and what it means to return (that is, if you ever really can go home again). They also register the weight of the Victorian period’s immense social, political, economic, and technological transformations on individual lives. Throughout the course, we'll spend a good deal of time thinking about wide-ranging questions of genre, literary technique, and comparative analysis. At the same time, we'll also master the art of slow, deep, and close reading. Assignments will include short reading reflections, a creative-critical adaptation assignment, an in-class essay, and a final exam. 

This course fulfills the 1700-1900 literature requirement for the English major and the AIP Disciplines Requirement for the College.

ENGL 3500 - The Irish Novel

Kelly Fleming

From frequently winning the Booker Prize competition to having their novels adapted into popular films and TV shows in recent years, Irish novelists are having a moment. How did we get here? This course offers a survey of the novel in Ireland from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. In addition to serving as an introduction to the novel, this course will explore how cultural, religious and political tensions in Ireland shape the novel’s form and conventions: we will examine genres such as the travel narrative, the historical novel, and the gothic novel, as well as techniques such as the epistolary form and stream of consciousness, in an Irish context. We will also consider how the different perspectives of the Irish and the Anglo-Irish inform the novel, particularly by reading a genre unique to Ireland: the Big House Novel. Authors will include, among others, Jonathan Swift, Maria Edgeworth, Sheridan Le Fanu, James Joyce, Edna O’Brien, and Claire Keegan. 

This course satisfies the AIP Disciplines Requirement for the College. 

ENGL 3510-001 - Feminist Chaucer

Courtney Watts

One of the most important authors of English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer is also notoriously difficult to pin down. His texts move through many genres, voices, and modes, and they experiment with received tradition and respond to Chaucer's own 14th century millieu. This course will explore Chaucer through a feminist lens, dipping into The Canterbury Tales, The Legend of Good Women, and his epic poem Troilus and Criseyde to discover what Chaucer (and his many narrators) has to say about gender. Along the way, we will consider the historical context of gender in the late Middle Ages and our own response as 21st century readers and critics.

This course satisfies the pre-1700 literature requirement for the English major and the AIP Disciplines Requirement for the College.
 

ENGL 3560-001 - Modern Poetry

Mark Edmundson

We’ll read and talk about some wonderful twentieth century poets. Possible authors: Robert Frost; Elizabeth Bishop; Robert Hayden; Robert Lowell; Sylvia Plath; Frederick Seidel.  We’ll seek (and no doubt find) pleasure and instruction.
 

ENGL 3560-002 - Visual Fictions: Photography and 20th-21st Century American Literature

Joshua Miller

The invention of photography in the mid-19th century transformed visual arts and media history as a whole. It also had an enormous impact on verbal/literary arts in ways that continue to resonate deep into the 21st century.

This course will provide an introduction to the emergence of photography as a popular and artistic medium in the 20th-century US in relation to literary and cultural movements. For most of the term, we’ll consider how late-20th and early-21st-century word-based arts changed—primarily narrative prose and the novel form—in response to the visualities generated by photography (as artistic expression, evidence, documentation, surveillance, etc.)

We’ll read key instances of photographic theory and ask how they also illuminate trends in 20th and 21st-century US novels. Some questions we’ll consider include: How did novels respond to the emergence of photography as a new visual medium? How might novels be read as competing and collaborating with photography? How did literary narrative inform the trends and techniques of photography? How did (and do, today) photography and literary narrative respond to the social tensions around immigration and racialization? Along with shorter essays, we’ll read narratives by a wide range of authors, including Norma Cantú, Theresa Cha, Sesshu Foster, Aleksander Hemon, Claudia Rankin, Ransom Riggs, and Richard Wright.
 

ENGL 3560-003 - Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and the Culture of Modernism

Michael Levenson

A course on the fiction of Virginia Woolf, the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and the wider cultural context of Modernism (in painting, film, and philosophy). Alongside the close reading of signature literary works, we address the conditions of intellectual modernity and political-technological modernization. The responsibility of students includes weekly comments, an oral report and a final essay. 

ENGL 3570-001 - The Broadway Musical in American Culture

Lisa Goff

Do you love musicals? In this class we’re going to watch musicals, talk about musicals, maybe even burst into songs from musicals. We’ll also study the history of American musicals, from the birth of Broadway to their starring role in American popular culture in the 20th century and their re-imagining and rebirth in the 21st. Our focus will be on the cultural history and meaning of musicals as opposed to their musical form and techniques—although we’ll explore that a bit as well. We’ll examine musicals for clues to shifting definitions of “America” and “American,” and probe the ways they both upheld and challenged shifting beliefs about race, class, and gender. Syllabus is still under construction, but candidates include Wicked, Showboat, Oklahoma, West Side Story, Rent, Dear Evan Hansen, Hamilton, something by Stephen Sondheim, and, if I can find a copy, A Strange Loop.
 

ENGL 3570-002 - Jim Crow America

Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross

Martin Luther King, Jr. famously called Sunday morning “the most segregated hour in the nation,” referring to church services. How, and to what extent, has racial separation changed since the height of the Jim Crow era, the 1890s through the 1950s? Despite some notable progress such as the military, why has Jim Crow persisted in various ways in so many areas of American life? This course examines how the Jim Crow regime was established in New England during the 1830s, how it was influenced by the institution of slavery, was nationalized after the Civil War, and how it has been perpetuated into the present, despite the passage of 1960s Civil Rights legislation. What have been the changing modes of maintaining Jim Crow, particularly in law (including law enforcement), education, housing, planning, public health, and mass media (newspapers, film, radio, and social media); and what strategies have been used to fight Jim Crow segregation, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and economic exclusion. Taking a place-specific approach to understanding the material practices and consequences of the Jim Crow regime, we’ll examine in depth the overlapping dimensions of everyday life where Jim Crow has been especially prominent, including: 1) personal and collective mobility; 2) the struggle over public education; 3) planning and access to public facilities; 4) housing and employment; and 5) the justice (or injustice) system. Course materials from various disciplines will include maps, planning documents, films, radio, and readings from literature, sociology, urban planning, history, political science, and journalism. Focus will be placed on Charlottesville, Richmond, and Washington, D.C. as case studies, as well as a comparison with South Africa’s apartheid system. Requirements include a midterm, final, a critical essay, and a term team project.
 

ENGL 3572-001 - Black Protest Narrative

Marlon Ross

This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements, and black postmodernism. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion, crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Either directly or indirectly, all of these narratives ask pressing questions about the meaning of American citizenship and racial community under the conditions of racial segregation and the fight for integration or black nationalist autonomy. What does it mean to be “Negro” and American? How should African Americans conduct themselves on the world stage, and which international identifications are most productive? What roles do the press and popular media play in the sustenance and/or erosion of a sense of community both within a racial group and in relation to the country? What are the obligations of oppressed communities to the nation that oppresses them? What role should violence play in working toward liberation? How do intersectional subjectivities like gender, sexuality, religion, class, immigrant status, and color factor into ideologies and strategies of protest? We begin our study with the most famous protest novel, Richard Wright’s Native Son. Then we examine other narratives in this tradition, including works by Angelo Herndon, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gwendolyn Brooks, Malcolm X, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker,

Joseph Beam, Marlon Riggs, and William Melvin Kelley. Films include Joseph Mankiewitz’s No Way Out, Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and The Watermelon Man, and Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied. Written assignments include an in-class midterm, a take-home midterm, a final exam.
 

ENGL 3572-002 - Intro to Black Feminist Literature

Nasrin Olla

What does it mean to think, create, and thrive through a Black feminist lens? This course traces the revolutionary insights of Black feminist thought — from the Combahee River Collective to the poetics of Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks. We’ll explore how Black women writers, theorists, and artists have reimagined the meaning of freedom, care, sexuality, labor, and community, and how their work continues to shape contemporary movements for justice. Screenings will include Paris Is Burning and A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde, alongside readings that consider how Black feminisms imagine both survival and joy.

ENGL 3690 - Memory Speaks

Lorna Martens

Cross-listed with GETR 3780

Memory is a crucial human faculty. Our ability to remember our own past is one of the things that make us human. Memory has long been thought to ground identity: without memory, one has no sense of self. Memory has been seen as fundamental to psychic health, and even as a remedy in times of trouble, as well as essential to our ability to imagine the future. Remembering has its delights. Certainly the idea of losing one’s memory, through shock or illness for example, is terrifying to contemplate. Yet having too many memories of the wrong kind is believed to endanger our equilibrium. Maddeningly, given its power to make us healthy or sick, memory often lies beyond our conscious control. It operates according to its own laws, giving us what we want only sometimes. Undeniably useful, it has also been seen as deceptive. It is demonstrably suggestible. It is not surprising, therefore, that memory is a subject of vital importance in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences alike.

This course will focus on individual memory and in particular on autobiographical memory (our memories of our own lives). We will read autobiographies and works of fiction, written from the early twentieth century to the present, by Patrick Modiano, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, and Marguerite Duras. We will also study two films on the theme of memory: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Inside Out. Concurrently, we will read psychological, psychoanalytic, and neuroscientific work on memory. Some attention will be paid to the issues of false memory, external memory, and mediated memory, as well.

Two short papers, presentations, exam.

ENGL 3791-001 - American Cinema

Sylvia Chong

This course provides an introduction to film studies through an examination of American film from throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. We will learn basic film techniques for visual analysis, as well as consider the social, economic, and historical forces that have shaped the production, distribution, and reception of film in the U.S. Examples will be drawn from various film genres: melodrama, horror, sci-fi, musical, Westerns, war films, documentary, animation, and avant-garde. Assignments include daily homework, post-discussion reflections, two optional projects, and a final essay.
 

ENGL 3915-001 - Point of View Journalism

Lisa Goff

This course examines the history and practice of “point-of-view” journalism, a controversial but credible alternative to the dominant model of “objectivity” on the part of the news media. Not to be confused with “fake news,” point-of-view journalism has a history as long as the nation’s, from Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century to "muckrakers" like Ida B. Wells Barnett and Ida Tarbell at the end of the nineteenth, and “New Journalism” practitioners like Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and Barbara Ehrenreich in the twentieth. Twenty-first century point-of-view practitioners include news organizations on the right (Fox News, One America News Network) and left (Vice, Jacobin, MSNBC, Democracy Now), as well as prominent voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Rebecca Solnit, Jia Tolentino, and Roxane Gay. We will also consider the work of comedians such as Jon Stewart,  Steven Colbert, and John Oliver, who pillory the news (and newsmakers) in order to interpret them.
 

ENGL 4500-001 - Literature of the South

Jennifer Greeson


 

ENGL 4500-002 - Gothic Forms

Cynthia Wall

With Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Gothic literature smashed into the literary landscape with a giant helmet, a ghostly portrait, a wicked tyrant, a princely peasant, and two damsels apparently in distress. Thus began the tradition of Gothic metaphors performing our deepest fears and fiercest resistances. This seminar will survey the history and genres of Gothic literature: the classic novels  Otranto, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1797), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818); eighteenth-century German vampire poetry and poems by John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Sylvia Plath; the plays of Matthew Lewis and Richard Brinsley Peake; and the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W. W. Jacobs, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King. And we will ask ourselves: What are we afraid of? Active participation, a presentation, weekly analytical commentaries, one short paper (5-7pp), and one longer research paper (10-12pp).
 

ENGL 4510-001 - Medieval Romance

Clare R Kinney

In this course we’ll address the literary practices and the cultural work of medieval romance. Our explorations will embrace narratives of questing and testing, of magic and wonder, of courtly love and chivalric violence. We’ll be paying attention to the gendering of romance and to the space it finds for female desire and female voices; we’ll also be considering romance’s representations of otherness and alienation and looking at the politics and poetics of a putatively aristocratic genre.

Tentative reading list (the French works will be read in translation): the Lais of Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot and Yvain; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Man of Law’s Tale; Sir Orfeo; excerpts from Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur; Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel (2021).

Requirements: regular attendance and lively participation in class discussion; one 6-7 page paper; a series of short pre-class responses to our readings; a longer term paper.

This course satisfies the pre-1700 literature requirement for the English major and the AIP Disciplines Requirement for the College.
 

ENGL 4520-001 - Shakespearean Identities

Dan Kinney

Reading 10 plays in all (R & J to The Tempest), we will survey a sequence of formal and thematic experiments leading up to and finally beyond some of Shakespeare's main tragedies. How are Shakespearean characters shaped on and offstage? How does Shakespearean staging negotiate public and private? How important are generic distinctions in shaping Shakespearean identities, and how do those distinctions reflect on identities generally?  A few major themes to consider, together or singly: successions and ordering schemas, dynastic and cosmic; the state and the scene of heroic performance; misrule and generic confusion, both festive and blighting; apt improvisation, rehearsal, and ripeness of purpose / apt timing. Class requirements: Lively participation including occasional email responses, one short and one longer essay, and a final exam.

This course satisfies the pre-1700 literature requirement for the English major and the AIP Disciplines Requirement for the College.
 

ENGL 4530-001 - Pre/Post-Modern:ism

Brad Pasanek

In this course we move back and forth between eighteenth-century and more contemporary literatures to gauge how texts are written and rewritten, one against another. Fiction and meta-fiction are two red threads; our reading, a braid or knot. We'll start with Cervantes’ rewritings (by means of Tobias Smollett’s translation) and let later quixotisms follow on. Complications ensue as we layer on readings and consider reenactment: Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Borges’ “Pierre Menard,” Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Ignatius Sancho’s letters, and Michael Winterbottom’s cinematic adaptation of the Sterne. Three doubles close the out the semester. We’ll read Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe. A second pairings tries Alexander Pope’s poetry against Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. A third considers Austen and Bridget Jones’s Diary. We’ll ask, Was ist Aufklärung? And whither parody? We’ll wonder also, as recent critics have, why literary periods mattered and if now is the time to militate against periodization. Theorists pose the Enlightenment and Postmodernity as antagonist paradigms, but the student may find by the conclusion of the term that eighteenth-century and postmodern writers overlap almost as much as they disagree.

This course fulfills the 1700-1900 literature requirement for the English major and the AIP Disciplines Requirement for the College.
 

ENGL 4540-001 - Romanticism

Taylor Schey

A time of revolution and reaction, the Romantic era (1785-1832) saw an explosion of literature that both witnessed and shaped new ideas about art, nature, politics, society, and the self, many of which are still with us today. This seminar will closely examine some of the best works of this briefest and most momentous period in British literary history. We’ll defamiliarize ourselves with the lyrical ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, listen carefully to the odes of Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, tarry with the darkly comic turns of Charlotte Smith’s sonnets and Lord Byron’s long poems, and spend time either with Mary Shelley’s “hideous progeny,” Frankenstein, or with one of Jane Austen’s masterpieces (we’ll decide collectively on the novel from the period that we most want to study). Of particular interest to us will be how Romantic literature not only registers different historical developments but also offers its own form of historical knowledge—as well as a unique, portable way of thinking about the world. Assignments include a reading journal, a creative project, and a final project. 

This course fulfills the 1700-1900 literature requirement for the English major and the AIP Disciplines Requirement for the College. 

ENGL 4559-002 - Language Models Small & Large

Matthew Kirschenbaum

This  studio-style course will be a hands-on exploration of two enormously consequential language technologies: moveable type letterpress printing, as introduced by Gutenberg in the West in the 15th century, and so-called "AI," or large language models (LLMs), which in just a few short years have altered many of our basic assumptions about what it means to write. While no technical knowledge is expected or assumed, you should be prepared for hands-on work with both letterpress printing and digital tools. We will learn to set traditional wood and metal type and print using wet ink on different kinds of printing presses. We will also experiment with a range of different digital tools and AI models for creative and critical purposes, and will look at how other writers and activists are doing the same. 

We will divide our attention between the two technologies roughly equally, and the course will also feature readings to help us conceptualize these two very different—but arguably comparable—moments in history. Requirements will include both a mix of short papers and a final project which makes use of letterpress and/or AI in a original and illustrative way. There will be several excursions both on and off Grounds. Please note this class meets only once a week and the nature of our work will mean much of it cannot be "made up." A commitment to an immaculate attendance record is absolutely essential.
 

ENGL 4560-001 - Modern Love and US Fiction

Victoria Olwell

Maybe love is eternal, but it’s also historical and ideological. Love is shaped by custom, law, and narrative, and it plays a central role in the formation of private and public life alike. This course examines romantic love in U.S. fiction from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth-first centuries. Our primary texts will cross genres as well as centuries as we examine romance, realism, modernism, post-modernism, and documentary. In addition, we’ll read archival and scholarly non-fiction. We’ll interpret fiction in light of historical changes in conceptions of love, based in factors including shifting economic conditions and changing conceptions of marriage, citizenship, queer sexualities, and modern psychology. We’ll discern the connections between romantic love and ideas of race, gender, nationhood, and empire. Students will be graded on two short papers, class participation, a 10-12-page final paper, and a final exam.
 

ENGL 4560-002 - Jewish American Literature

Caroline Rody

In this course we will explore a literature positioned between tradition and modern invention, between the spiritual and the mundane, and—as novelist Saul Bellow once put it—between laughter and trembling. Within this emotionally rich territory, Jewish people have lived a spirited, talkative, politically engaged, book-obsessed modernity in the face of violence and destruction. We will read mainly Jewish American texts but also some by Jewish writers from other countries, taking up short stories, essays, poems, jokes, Broadway song lyrics, and a few complete novels, as well as short videos clips and a film, surveying a diverse array of modern Jewish literary and popular cultural production. The first third of the course examines early-to-mid-twentieth century Jewish American writers, some from the immigrant New York milieu like Isaac Bashevis Singer and poets who wrote in Yiddish, and then heirs to Yiddish culture with bold American aspirations, such as Alfred Kazin, Grace Paley, Delmore Schwartz, Chaim Potok, Bernard Malamud, Elie Wiesel, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Lore Segal. For the rest of the term we will read fiction from the booming field of contemporary Jewish fiction, including authors such as Art Spiegelman, Allegra Goodman, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon, and David Bezmozgis.

The course will focus on the ways writers shape and reshape a new literature with roots in a formidable textual, cultural, and religious tradition. We will observe an evolving relationship to traditional and sacred Jewish texts, to Yiddish and the culture of Yiddishkeit; to humor as a social practice and imaginative force; to memory and inheritance as burdens or as creative touchstones. We will also consider changing conceptions of Jewish identity, of American identity, and of gender roles; the transformations wrought by assimilation and social mobility; socialist, feminist and other political commitments and visions; forms of engagement with history including the Holocaust, the founding of Israel and its ongoing conflicts; and life in multiethnic America. Requirements: reading, active class participation, co-leading of a class discussion, multiple short reading responses, a short paper, and a longer paper with a creative, Talmud-inspired option: a “scroll” of interlaced interpretations. This course may be used to satisfy the second writing requirement.

ENGL 4561-001 - Literature and Human Rights

Christopher Krentz

What does literature have to do with human rights, with the aspirational effort to ensure the protection of persons everywhere from persecution and deprivation?  In this course we will study the history of human rights, recent theory on the relationship of rights to literature, and a variety of relevant contemporary fiction in English from around the world.  These works often deal with difficult topics, but they do so with grace and occasionally unexpected beauty.  The syllabus is still under construction, but readings may include Abani's Song for Night, Freeman's Human Rights, Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale, Danticat's The Farming of Bones,  Gappah's The Book of Memory, Sinha's Animal’s People, and    Satrapi's Persepolis.

The class will feature a range of learning strategies, from brief lecture to whole-class discussion to smaller-group discussion to short student presentations.  Work will include active participation, a short (5 page) and a longer (8 page) paper, and quizzes.
 

ENGL 4901-001 - The Bible Part 1: Hebrew Bible / Old Testament

John Parker

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 / Old Testament, from Genesis through the prophets, 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.

PLEASE NOTE: A course on the New Testament is offered in the spring, but you do not have to take the fall course as a prerequisite for the spring one. This course satisfies the pre-1700 literature requirement for the English major.
 

ENGL 4998-001 - Distinguished Majors Program

Caroline Rody
 

ENGL 5500-002 - The Lives and Works of Women Poets

Alison Booth

This discussion-based seminar serves majors and graduate students at any stage of practice with reading and writing about poetry (poets welcome). Together, we will refresh our awareness of poetic forms and traditions and feminist literary criticism. In the U.S., U.K., and other English-speaking countries, poetry (and memorizing it) used to be both as popular as podcasts are now and central to education. While the ancient idea of “poet” resembled a male prophet, women in educated elites often wrote poetry as men did. By the 1800s, newspapers and periodicals included poetry (the writers might earn money!), and

some women poets became acclaimed “poetesses.” Then as now, images and biographical profiles framed cultural celebrities according to social status, nationality, race, and other identities. How does the “life” of a woman poet shape interpretation, or should we try to ignore it? How did women poets address and respond to each other? We will look at newspapers and periodicals as well as anthologies over time to consider how readers in previous eras found the poems they read, and what kinds of biographical framing accompanied that reading. Encountering a wide range of poets, we zoom in on some spectacular lives and works, British, American, white, Black or Indigenous: Mary Robinson (1757-1800), L. E.L. (1802-1838), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), Emily Brontë (1818-1848), Frances E. W. Harper (1825-1911), Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake; 1861-1913), and Anne Spencer (1882-1975). Where possible, we’ll consult historic anthologies and archival materials in Special Collections and explore digitized repositories and GenAI. Requirements (some graded P/F) include: short interpretative essays in class and out; contributing to a group “commonplace book” or anthology; a solo presentation of “the life” of a poet; a solo turn to read aloud and present contexts (biography, era) and note features of a selected poem; one essay and a revision of it; an exam.
 

ENGL 5500-003 - Milton and Shakespeare

Mark Edmundson

What, if anything, is there to learn from Milton in the present?  What is there to learn from Shakespeare? We’ll read Paradise Lost and three or four Shakespeare plays: possibilities include, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Henry IV part one; Macbeth, Othello; Merchant of Venice.
 

ENGL 5520-001 - Renaissance and Reformation

Rebecca Rush

“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god—the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.”

–Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2

Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare inherited a double vision of human nature: was man noble in reason and admirable in form, or frail in flesh and swollen in pride? In order to understand how these sixteenth-century English authors wrestled with the tensions within humanism and the Reformation, we will read each work alongside an ancient or continental forerunner.

Readings will include sonnets by Petrarch, Wyatt, and Sidney, Luther and Erasmus’s debate on free will, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Aristotle’s Poetics, Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, Calvin’s Institutes, Aristotle’s Ethics, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Machiavelli’s Prince, and Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1. As we read each work with the utmost care, we will encounter questions such as, how free is the will? Are faith and reason reconcilable? Is the inner person better understood as a “self” or a “soul”? Do desire and corage (courage/spirit) prick people on to high adventures, or make them susceptible to seduction? Are honor and justice substantial ideas or “trim reckonings” that get in the way of effectual ruling or pleasant living? What is the best way to read—does good reading require learning ancient languages or seeking out the original manuscripts? What are the limits of human knowledge, and is it possible to know too much?

No prior knowledge of early modern literature or religion is required; the only prerequisite is a willingness to read slowly, attentively, and with a dictionary at hand. The course is a permission-only course: please request permission on SIS and write to me at … to persuade me of your interest in the core questions of the course and your willingness to read hard books with care.

This course satisfies the pre-1700 requirement for the English major.
 

ENGL 5560-001 - Contemporary Jewish Literature

Caroline Rody

In this course we will explore a literature positioned between tradition and modern invention, between the spiritual and the mundane, and—as novelist Saul Bellow once put it—between laughter and trembling. Within this emotionally rich territory, Jewish people have lived a spirited, talkative, politically engaged, book-obsessed modernity in the face of violence and destruction. We will read mainly Jewish American texts but also some by Jewish writers from other countries, taking up short stories, essays, poems, jokes, Broadway song lyrics, and a few complete novels, as well as short videos clips and a film, surveying a diverse array of modern Jewish literary and popular cultural production. The first third of the course examines early-to-mid-twentieth century Jewish American writers, some from the immigrant New York milieu like Isaac Bashevis Singer, and then heirs to Yiddish culture with bold American aspirations, such as Alfred Kazin, Grace Paley, Delmore Schwartz, Chaim Potok, Bernard Malamud, Elie Wiesel, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Lore Segal. For the rest of the term we will read fiction from the booming field of contemporary Jewish fiction, including authors such as Art Spiegelman, Allegra Goodman, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon, and David Bezmozgis.

The course will focus on the ways writers shape and reshape a new literature with roots in a formidable textual, cultural, and religious tradition. We will observe an evolving relationship to traditional and sacred Jewish texts, to Yiddish and the culture of Yiddishkeit; to humor as a social practice and imaginative force; to memory and inheritance as burdens or as creative touchstones. We will also consider changing conceptions of Jewish identity, of American identity, and of gender roles; the transformations wrought by assimilation and social mobility; socialist, feminist and other political commitments and visions; forms of engagement with history including the Holocaust, the founding of Israel and its ongoing conflicts; and life in multiethnic America. Requirements: reading, active class participation, co-leading of a class discussion, multiple short reading responses, a short paper, and a longer paper with a creative, Talmud-inspired option: a “scroll” of interlaced interpretations. This course may be used to satisfy the second writing requirement.
 

ENGL 5700-001 - Contemporary African-American Literature

Lisa Woolfork

In Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being (2021), theorist Kevin Quashie urges us to move beyond reading Black art solely through the lenses of Black suffering, white violence, or resistance. He asks: What becomes possible when we displace anti‑Blackness from the centerof our thinking about Black life, Black being, and Black worldmaking? How do we read for complexity, for interiority, for Black aliveness—an aliveness that persists even alongside social death?  Throughout this course, we will explore which texts invite this practice, how they do so, and what ethical or theoretical tensions arise when reading through frameworks like Black aliveness or Afropessimism. Our work will be to confront these questions as we study African American poetry and fiction. Works include Percival Everett, Tayari Jones, Imani Perry, Jason Mott and more. 
 

ENGL 5810-001 - Books as Physical Objects

David Vander Meulen

We know the past chiefly through artifacts that survive, and books are among the most common of these objects. Besides conveying a text, each book also contains evidence of the circumstances of its manufacture.  In considering what questions to ask of these mute objects, this course might be considered the "archaeology of printing"—that is, the identification, description, and interpretation of printed artifacts surviving from the past five centuries, as well as exploration of the critical theory that lies behind such an approach to texts. With attention to production processes, including the operation of the hand press, it will investigate ways of analyzing elements such as paper, typography, illustrations, binding, and organization of the constituent sections of a book.  The course will explore how a text is inevitably affected by the material conditions of its production and how an understanding of the physical processes by which it was formed can aid historical research in a variety of disciplines, not only those that treat verbal texts but also those that deal with printed music and works of visual art.  The class will draw on the holdings of the University Library's Special Collections Department, as well as on its Hinman Collator (an early version of the one at the CIA).

Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates. This course satisfies the Graduate English requirement for the history of criticism or literary theory.
 

ENGL 5900-001 - Literature Pedagogy Seminar

Cristina Griffin

 “Counterpoint Seminar in Teaching Modern Literature”

This seminar is about how and why teaching literature matters today. How do secondary school and college instructors teach literature in challenging times? How do teachers make tough decisions about what to teach and why? What responsibility do teachers have to promote inclusive excellence through the literature they teach and the methods they use? In this course, we will tackle these big questions together as we explore what it means to pursue a career in teaching literature to middle school, high school, or college students. Each week, we will weave together your existing knowledge of literature and your emerging knowledge of pedagogy. You will be introduced to theories of learning-focused, culturally relevant, and culturally responsive pedagogy, and you will put your newfound knowledge into practice as we work step by step through designing your own teaching philosophy and materials.

This course will bring together students who already have experience as classroom instructors, students who are in the process of teaching for the very first time, and students who have yet to step up to the front of a classroom in the role of teacher. We will build on this variety of experiences, learning together how to bring transformative pedagogies into our present and future classrooms.

ENWR 1505 - Writing and Critical Inquiry: The Stretch Sequence (8 sections)

Offers a two-semester approach to the First Writing Requirement. This sequence allows students to take more time, in smaller sections and with support from the Writing Center, practicing and reinforcing the activities that are central to the first-year writing course. Like ENWR 1510, ENWR 1505-06 approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Students contribute to an academic conversation about a specific subject of inquiry and learn to position their ideas and research in relation to the ideas and research of others.  Instructors place student writing at the center of course, encourage students to think on the page, and prepare them to reflect on contemporary forms of expression.  Students read and respond to each other’s writing in class regularly, and they engage in thoughtful reflection on their own rhetorical choices as well as those of peers and published writers.  Additionally, the course requires students to give an oral presentation on their research and to assemble a digital portfolio of their writing.

001 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Work & the Good Life
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 310)
Claire Chantell

002 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Work & the Good Life
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 310)
Claire Chantell

003 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about/with Attention/Distraction​
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 312)
Patricia Sullivan

004 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about/with Attention/Distraction​
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (SHN 109)
Patricia Sullivan

005 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing About Attention and Distraction
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 038)
Ethan King

006 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (SHN 111)
John Modica

007 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing About Attention and Distraction
TR 12:30-01:45PM (CAB 283)
Ethan King

008 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 191)
John Modica  

ENWR 1510 - Writing and Critical Inquiry (70+ sections)

Approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Students contribute to an academic conversation about a specific subject of inquiry and learn to position their ideas and research in relation to the ideas and research of others.  Instructors place student writing at the center of course, encourage students to think on the page, and prepare them to reflect on contemporary forms of expression.  Students read and respond to each other’s writing in class regularly, and they engage in thoughtful reflection on their own rhetorical choices as well as those of peers and published writers.  Additionally, the course requires students to give an oral presentation on their research and to assemble a digital portfolio of their writing.

001 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 334)
TBA

002 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (CAB 211)
TBA
 
003 -- TBA
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 312)
TBA

005 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Food
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (DL1 104)
Keith Driver
 
006 -- TBA
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 334)
TBA
 
007 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (CAB 068)
TBA
 
008 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (CAB 415)
TBA
 
009 -- Writing about identities
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 312)
Devin Donovan
(Transfer Students ONLY)
 
010 -- Writing about Science & Tech
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 330)
Cory Shaman
 
011 -- TBA​
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 332)
TBA

012 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Risk, Reward, Assessment
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 310)
Jon D'Errico
 
013 -- Writing about Science & Tech - Writing about Medicine
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (SHN 111)
Rhiannon Goad

This course dives into the art and ethics of communicating about health. You'll dissect everything from dense medical studies to viral news, learning to translate complex science into clear, compelling language. With short essays, you will develop skills to evaluate diverse sources, including medical literature, health journalism, and patient narratives, and apply responsible communication principles in contexts such as reporting research findings without hype and explaining public health issues effectively. You'll practice these communication skills throughout the semester, culminating in a final project: the creation of a zine about medicine.

014 -- Writing about Identities - Writing about Writing and Literacy
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 334)
Kate Kostelnik
 
015 -- Writing about Identities
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 334)
Charity Fowler
 
016 -- Writing about Identities
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 312)
Devin Donovan
(Transfer Students ONLY)
 
017 -- TBA 
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (KER 317)
TBA
 
018 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Food
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 332)
Keith Driver
 
019 -- TBA 
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
020 -- Multilingual Writers
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 310)
Davy Tran
(Multilingual/international students ONLY)

In this course, you will learn the academic writing skills essential for international and multilingual students to succeed at US universities. They are brainstorming, writing paragraphs and essays, and paraphrasing. Other skills include summarizing, using different databases for research, and using APA 7 correctly to cite in-text and create references. You will also read and discuss various topics to develop your critical thinking. 
 
021 -- TBA
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
022 -- TBA
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 312)
TBA

023 -- TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
024 -- Writing & Community Engagement - Writing Charlottesville 
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 068)
Kevin Smith

025 -- TBA
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (DL1 104)
TBA
 
026 -- Writing about Digital Media
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 330)
Jodie Childers
 
027 -- Writing about Digital Media - Writing about Attention
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (CAB 044)
Tyler Carter
 
028 -- Writing & Community Engagement - Writing Charlottesville
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 310)
Kevin Smith
 
029 -- Multilingual Writers
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (BRN 310)
Davy Tran
(Multilingual/international students ONLY)

In this course, you will learn the academic writing skills essential for international and multilingual students to succeed at US universities. They are brainstorming, writing paragraphs and essays, and paraphrasing. Other skills include summarizing, using different databases for research, and using APA 7 correctly to cite in-text and create references. You will also read and discuss various topics to develop your critical thinking. 

 
030 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Assessing Performance, Risk, and Reward
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 310)
Jon D'Errico
 
031 -- Writing about Digital Media - Factions and Digital Culture: Crafting Social Media Commentary
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (RTN 152)
Dana Little 
 
032 -- TBA
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
033 -- TBA
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (DL1 104)
TBA
 
034 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
035 -- Writing about Identities
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 334)
Charity Fowler
 
036 -- Writing about Digital Media
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 330)
Jodie Childers
 
037 -- TBA 
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (CAB 044)
TBA
 
038 -- Writing about Digital Media - Factions and Digital Culture: Crafting Social Media Commentary
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (AST 265)
Dana Little 
 
039 -- Writing about Science & Tech - Writing About Medicine
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (SHN 111)
Rhiannon Goad 

This course dives into the art and ethics of communicating about health. You'll dissect everything from dense medical studies to viral news, learning to translate complex science into clear, compelling language. With short essays, you will develop skills to evaluate diverse sources, including medical literature, health journalism, and patient narratives, and apply responsible communication principles in contexts such as reporting research findings without hype and explaining public health issues effectively. You'll practice these communication skills throughout the semester, culminating in a final project: the creation of a zine about medicine.

040 -- Writing about Digital Media - Writing about Attention
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 334)
Tyler Carter

041 -- TBA
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (DL1 104)
TBA
 
043 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
044 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Language, Policy, and Politics
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (DL1 104)
Kate Natishan

As Edward P.J. Corbett has observed, rhetorical analysis "is more interested in a literary work for what it does than for what it is." Rhetoric - how words are chosen and used - can impact everything from how we understand problems and create policies to how we engage in politics and create identity. It's never "just words." This class will explore how language use by public figures and citizens impacts how policies are created and written as well as how the political arena is changed by the use of
language. By nature of the subject matter, we will be discussing political, social, and policy issues both past and present.

045 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
046 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Language, Policy, and Politics
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (SHN 111)
Kate Natishan

As Edward P.J. Corbett has observed, rhetorical analysis "is more interested in a literary work for what it does than for what it is." Rhetoric - how words are chosen and used - can impact everything from how we understand problems and create policies to how we engage in politics and create identity. It's never "just words." This class will explore how language use by public figures and citizens impacts how policies are created and written as well as how the political arena is changed by the use of
language. By nature of the subject matter, we will be discussing political, social, and policy issues both past and present.

047 -- Writing about Culture and Society - Writing Travel
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 332)
John T. Casteen IV

This course offers students a structured series of writing assignments organized around readings that explore the concept of travel.  Fiction, nonfiction, and poems about travel—within and across cultures, by whatever means, and internal as well as external—imply narrative, discovery, and change.  Heraclitus says we never dip our foot in the same river twice; the river has changed, but so have we.  Students will not need to buy any textbooks for this course but will read widely: Louis Menand on going to college, James Baldwin in a Swiss village, David Foster Wallace on a cruise ship, Rebecca Mead on swimming across England.  Writing assignments will include reflective, narrative, argumentative, research, instructional, and associative pieces.  The course  emphasizes clear, effective, stylish prose for students’ academic and professional goals.
 
048 -- TBA
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
049 -- Writing about Science & Tech
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 330)
Cory Shaman
 
052 -- TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
053 -- TBA
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (CAB 207)
TBA
 
055 -- Writing about Identities - Writing about Writing and Literacy
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 332)
Kate Kostelnik
 
056 -- TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 330)
TBA
 
057 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Sports
TR 11:00AM-12:45PM (CAB 044)
Rory Sullivan

059 -- TBA
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 334)
TBA
 
060 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing Travel
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 310)
John T. Casteen IV

This course offers students a structured series of writing assignments organized around readings that explore the concept of travel.  Fiction, nonfiction, and poems about travel—within and across cultures, by whatever means, and internal as well as external—imply narrative, discovery, and change.  Heraclitus says we never dip our foot in the same river twice; the river has changed, but so have we.  Students will not need to buy any textbooks for this course but will read widely: Louis Menand on going to college, James Baldwin in a Swiss village, David Foster Wallace on a cruise ship, Rebecca Mead on swimming across England.  Writing assignments will include reflective, narrative, argumentative, research, instructional, and associative pieces.  The course  emphasizes clear, effective, stylish prose for students’ academic and professional goals.

061 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 330)
TBA
 
062 -- Writing about Identities - Writing about Writing and Literacy
TR 12:30-01:45PM (BRN 332)
Kate Kostelnik
 
063 -- TBA
TR 06:30PM-07:45PM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
064 -- TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 334)
TBA

065 -- TBA
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 330)
TBA
 
066 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
067 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (CAB 056)
TBA
 
068 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Sports
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 312)
Rory Sullivan
 
069 -- TBA
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
070 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (CAB 064)
TBA
 
071 -- TBA
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 330)
TBA
 
072 -- TBA
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
073 -- TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (DL1 104)
TBA

074 -- TBA
MWF 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 330)
TBA

075 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 310)
Kate Stephenson

076 -- TBA
MWF (09:00AM-09:50AM) (DL1 104)
TBA

077 -- TBA
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (BRN 312)
TBA

078 -- TBA
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (DL1 104)
TBA

079 -- TBA
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 334)
TBA

080 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 310)
TBA

081 -- TBA
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (BRN 330)
TBA

082 -- TBA
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (CAB 036)
TBA

083 -- TBA
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 332)
TBA

084 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (CAB 044)
TBA

085 -- TBA
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 312)
TBA

086 -- TBA
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (CAB 187)
TBA

087 -- TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (CAB 036)
TBA

ENWR 1520 - Writing and Community Engagement (4 sections)

001 -- Writing about Food Justice
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (RTN 152)
Kate Stephenson

Why do we eat what we eat? Do poor people eat more fast food than wealthy people? Why are Cheetos cheaper than cherries? Do you have to be skinny to be hungry? By volunteering at the UVA Student Garden, Morven Kitchen Garden, UVA Community Food Pantry, Loaves and Fishes, or the PVCC Community Garden and using different types of writing, including journal entries, forum posts, peer reviews, and formal papers, we will explore topics like food insecurity, food production, hunger stereotypes, privilege, urban gardening, and community engagement.  

Community engagement courses depend on creating pathways between different kinds of knowledge that enable us to learn with our minds, hearts, and bodies. The classroom is not a place where we find the answer; instead, it is a space for inquiry where process rather than product prevails. We will explore first-hand the ways in which academic conversations—and civic conversations—emphasize questions rather than answers. We will redefine knowledge—where it originates, who creates it, and how it circulates—by seeing the community outside the classroom as a site of knowledge production. 

Community Partners—UVA Student Garden, Morven Kitchen Garden, UVA Community Food Pantry, Loaves and Fishes, Food Assist, Feel Good, and PVCC Community Garden.

All students will have the opportunity to volunteer weekly at the UVA Student Garden (SG), Morven Kitchen Garden (MKG), UVA Community Food Pantry (FP), Loaves and Fishes (LF), Feel Good (FG), or PVCC Community Garden (PCG). Scheduling, including time slots and transportation, will be coordinated with the help of the professor and Madison House.  Students should complete their chosen number of hours by April 29th and submit their community engagement log on Canvas. We will receive training from the gardens and Madison House in preparation for our partnership. During those sessions, we will think deeply about the ethics of community engagement in both theoretical and practical terms in order to align our interactions with the following principles: co-production, responsibility, equity, authentic partnership, and mutuality.

002 -- You and A.I.
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (DL2 102)
Piers Gelly

003 -- Native American Rhetoric
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (KER 317)
Sarah Richardson

004 -- Native American Rhetoric
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (KER 317)
Sarah Richardson

ENWR 2510 - Advanced Writing Seminar (3+ sections)

002 -- Writing about Identities 
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (BRN 332)
Devin Donovan

004 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (RTN 152)
Penny Von Eschen

005 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (NAU 141)
Anri Yasuda

ENWR 2520 - Special Topics in Writing (6 sections)

001 -- Community Engagement with UVA's Indigenous History
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (CAM 108)
Sarah Richardson

This section of ENWR 2520, Community Engagement with UVA’s Indigenous History, will focus on using rhetorical approaches to help students improve critical reading and writing skills and craft effective arguments. Rhetoric is the study of persuasion, and we’ll spend time analyzing arguments to determine why audiences might be persuaded by them and the benefits and harm rhetoric has on indigenous communities. Students will also learn how to research, compose, and revise ethical and effective arguments to address specific audiences. In particular, this course will focus on applicable concepts to the Monacan Nation.

002 -- Writing and Games
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (RDL 123)
Kate Natishan

Play is essential to our growth. Games teach us how to move, how to balance, how to coordinate our hands andeyes, how to take turns, how to share, how to read people, how to strategize, how to problem solve, how to work as a team... Without games, there is no us. 

Games play a central role in our social and private lives, whether we are spectators or players. They also have massive cultural impact, sometimes in ways we don’t expect. In this class, we will examine the role games play in our lives and our culture, and we will explore the ways in which others write about games while developing our skills to do the same. Meets second writing requirement.

005 -- Writing and Generative AI
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 209)
Ethan King

006 -- Argumentation Across Disciplines
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (NAU 242)
Tyler Carter

Argumentation Across Disciplines examines how the linguistic and rhetorical features of argument vary from discipline to discipline. The course will make two primary movements: The first is an examination of what argument is through the lens of classical and new rhetorical theory, and second, students will do comparative research on the linguistic and rhetorical features of texts in two different disciplines. 

007 -- Writing from Research to Publication
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 312)
Rory Sullivan

008 -- Writing in a Global World
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 407)
Dana Little

ENWR 2610 - Writing with Style

TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 310)
Keith Driver

Investigates the role of style in the writing process. What does it mean to write with attention to style? How can attention to style be generative? Students will explore the variety, uses, and implications of a broad range of stylistic moves available in prose writing and build a rich vocabulary for describing them. Students will imitate and analyze exemplary writing and discuss each other’s writing in a workshop setting. (Meets second writing requirement.)

ENWR 2640 - Writing as Technology

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (TBA)
Patricia Sullivan

This course explores historical, theoretical, and practical conceptions of writing as technology. We will study various writing systems, the relation of writing to speaking and visual media, and the development of writing technologies (manuscript, printing presses, typewriters, hypertext, text messaging, and artificial intelligence). Students will produce written academic and personal essays, but will also experiment with multimedia electronic texts, such as web sites, digital essays/stories, and AI generated texts

ENWR 2700 - News Writing

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (GIB 142)
Kate Sweeney

This course focuses on the development of basic writing skills, with craftsmanship the emphasis. We will study, discuss, and rewrite old and new newspaper stories in a workshop setting. Readings will be taken from texts and various other sources. Progress from short hard-news pieces through speech stories, legislative and political coverage, the use of narrative and on to other news features. Repeated writing drills. Fair to good typing or word processing skills required. It will be essential to follow current events as well.

ENWR 2800 - Public Speaking

TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (CAB 191)
John Modica

In today’s digital world, public speaking isn’t just about standing at a podium; it’s all about social media, virtual talks, and global broadcasts. This course gives you the tools you need to really get what’s going on in modern public discourse.

Over the semester, you’ll dive into how public speaking is changing, looking at how tech, culture, and media all mix to change the way we communicate. We’ll focus on breaking down different types of speeches, from public addresses and TED Talks to viral videos on YouTube.

You’ll get to explore emerging concepts like social posting strategies, who your audience is, how to structure a speech for reach and engagement, and tips for content analysis. By examining contemporary speeches, you’ll learn how effective communication can shape opinions, spark social movements, and boost brands all while examining the growing role of artificial intelligence in shaping public discourse.

ENWR 3500 - Topics in Advanced Writing and Rhetoric

001 -- Rhetoric of Crime
MW 02:00PM-03:15 (SHN 111)
Rhiannon Goad

Sensational news headlines, tough-on-crime political campaigns, and gripping true crime narratives: how we talk about crime profoundly shapes our understanding of criminals, victims, justice, and social order. This course explores the rhetorical dimension of crime, examining the persuasive strategies used to define crime, influence public perception, and shape policy in contemporary culture. Together, we will critically analyze how language constructs our reality of crime and punishment. Through a series of analytic papers and a podcast, students will use rhetorical analysis to identify significant trends in crime discourse, identify agents shaping these narratives, and develop a critical perspective on the power of language in matters of law, order, and justice. 

ENWR 3640 - Writing with Sound

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (TBA)
Steph Ceraso

In this collaborative, project-based course, students will learn to script, design, edit, and produce an original podcast series. In addition to reading about and practicing professional audio storytelling techniques (e.g. interviewing, writing for the ear, sound design), each student will get to work with a team to produce an episode for the podcast series. No experience with digital audio editing is necessary. Beginners welcome!

ENWR 3665 - Writing about the Environment

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (SHN 119)
Cory Shaman

Focuses on creating meaningful, responsible, and engaged writing in the context of significant environmental issues. Analysis of representative environmental texts, familiarity with environmental concepts, examination of ethical positions in private and public spheres of writing, and sustained practice with form, style, medium, and genre will drive a variety of writing projects.

ENWR 3680 - Writing and Documentary Film

MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 334)
Jodie Childers

Merging theory and practice, this course invites students to explore the writing process through the lens of documentary film. Through analyzing films and creating formal documentary film treatments, students explore the tension between artistry and pragmatism as they deepen their understanding of documentary film as a genre, confronting its affordances—both the possibilities and the constraints.

ENWR 3740 - Black Women's Writing & Rhetoric

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (RTN 150)
Tamika Carey

This course explores how Black Women use writing, literacy, speaking, and performance rhetorically to build the worlds they want to live in and the lives they deserve. Specifically, the course will teach you how to understand: 1) rhetoric as techne, or an art, that members of this group use to take action towards their social and political needs; 2) rhetoric as a lens for analyzing and critiquing the choices and consequences of literature, communication, and discourse; and 3) rhetoric as a resource for developing voice, style, and flavor in writing. Projects are likely to include: a discussion-leading presentation, an analytical essay, and a final project.

ENWR 3900 - Career Based Writing and Rhetoric

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (WNR 113)
John T. Casteen IV

Develops proficiency in a range of stylistic and persuasive effects. The course is designed for students who want to hone their writing skills, as well as for students preparing for careers in which they will write documents for public circulation. Students explore recent research in writing studies. In the workshop-based studio sessions, students propose, write, and edit projects of their own design.

ENCW 5559-001 - Small Press Publishing

Brian Teare

Small press publishing is one of the major forms of literary labor undertaken by writers of all genres; it’s also one of the main means by which contemporary writers form community. As this course will show, a small press publisher has to possess and hone the skills that all writers need: as an editor, they have to be an excellent close reader; as a curator of a list of authors, they need to be an acute critic of their chosen genre; and as a bookmaker and/or typesetter, they have to pay attention to the details of book production. Through in-class tutorials in bookmaking, we’ll acquire some of the pragmatic skills of small press publishing. Through research into four small presses and selected readings from their lists, we’ll hone our curatorial acumen and gain a sense of the role small presses play in literary community. Through secondary readings we’ll gain a sense of the history and politics of the small press and the handmade object. Through writing and workshopping our own chapbook-length manuscripts and designs, we’ll practice our writerly and editorial skills. And finally, through collaborative publishing ventures that solidify the literary community we’ve created over the semester, we’ll bring our own chapbooks to life!   
 

ENCW 7310-001 - MFA Poetry Workshop

Kiki Petrosino

This graduate-level workshop, designed for MFA poets in the first two years of the program, invites students to continue developing their own writing practices while adding new critical and compositional techniques to their repertoires. We’ll move between peer review and generative modes in this class; we’ll also discuss published works, taking time to explore select craft topics. Students will compose several postings on CANVAS on relevant topics and, as a final project, prepare a portfolio collecting revised poetry & a portfolio letter. The final grade will be calculated based on the above items, plus attendance, one post-workshop office hours conference and participation. 
 

ENCW 7610-001 - MFA Fiction Workshop

Micheline Marcom

ENGL 5500-002 - The Lives and Works of Women Poets

Alison Booth

This discussion-based seminar serves majors and graduate students at any stage of practice with reading and writing about poetry (poets welcome). Together, we will refresh our awareness of poetic forms and traditions and feminist literary criticism. In the U.S., U.K., and other English-speaking countries, poetry (and memorizing it) used to be both as popular as podcasts are now and central to education. While the ancient idea of “poet” resembled a male prophet, women in educated elites often wrote poetry as men did. By the 1800s, newspapers and periodicals included poetry (the writers might earn money!), and

some women poets became acclaimed “poetesses.” Then as now, images and biographical profiles framed cultural celebrities according to social status, nationality, race, and other identities. How does the “life” of a woman poet shape interpretation, or should we try to ignore it? How did women poets address and respond to each other? We will look at newspapers and periodicals as well as anthologies over time to consider how readers in previous eras found the poems they read, and what kinds of biographical framing accompanied that reading. Encountering a wide range of poets, we zoom in on some spectacular lives and works, British, American, white, Black or Indigenous: Mary Robinson (1757-1800), L. E.L. (1802-1838), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), Emily Brontë (1818-1848), Frances E. W. Harper (1825-1911), Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake; 1861-1913), and Anne Spencer (1882-1975). Where possible, we’ll consult historic anthologies and archival materials in Special Collections and explore digitized repositories and GenAI. Requirements (some graded P/F) include: short interpretative essays in class and out; contributing to a group “commonplace book” or anthology; a solo presentation of “the life” of a poet; a solo turn to read aloud and present contexts (biography, era) and note features of a selected poem; one essay and a revision of it; an exam.
 

ENGL 5500-003 - Milton and Shakespeare

Mark Edmundson

What, if anything, is there to learn from Milton in the present?  What is there to learn from Shakespeare? We’ll read Paradise Lost and three or four Shakespeare plays: possibilities include, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Henry IV part one; Macbeth, Othello; Merchant of Venice.
 

ENGL 5520-001 - Renaissance and Reformation

Rebecca Rush

“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god—the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.”

–Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2

Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare inherited a double vision of human nature: was man noble in reason and admirable in form, or frail in flesh and swollen in pride? In order to understand how these sixteenth-century English authors wrestled with the tensions within humanism and the Reformation, we will read each work alongside an ancient or continental forerunner.

Readings will include sonnets by Petrarch, Wyatt, and Sidney, Luther and Erasmus’s debate on free will, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Aristotle’s Poetics, Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, Calvin’s Institutes, Aristotle’s Ethics, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Machiavelli’s Prince, and Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1. As we read each work with the utmost care, we will encounter questions such as, how free is the will? Are faith and reason reconcilable? Is the inner person better understood as a “self” or a “soul”? Do desire and corage (courage/spirit) prick people on to high adventures, or make them susceptible to seduction? Are honor and justice substantial ideas or “trim reckonings” that get in the way of effectual ruling or pleasant living? What is the best way to read—does good reading require learning ancient languages or seeking out the original manuscripts? What are the limits of human knowledge, and is it possible to know too much?

No prior knowledge of early modern literature or religion is required; the only prerequisite is a willingness to read slowly, attentively, and with a dictionary at hand. The course is a permission-only course: please request permission on SIS and write to me at … to persuade me of your interest in the core questions of the course and your willingness to read hard books with care.

This course satisfies the pre-1700 requirement for the English major.
 

ENGL 5560-001 - Contemporary Jewish Literature

Caroline Rody

In this course we will explore a literature positioned between tradition and modern invention, between the spiritual and the mundane, and—as novelist Saul Bellow once put it—between laughter and trembling. Within this emotionally rich territory, Jewish people have lived a spirited, talkative, politically engaged, book-obsessed modernity in the face of violence and destruction. We will read mainly Jewish American texts but also some by Jewish writers from other countries, taking up short stories, essays, poems, jokes, Broadway song lyrics, and a few complete novels, as well as short videos clips and a film, surveying a diverse array of modern Jewish literary and popular cultural production. The first third of the course examines early-to-mid-twentieth century Jewish American writers, some from the immigrant New York milieu like Isaac Bashevis Singer, and then heirs to Yiddish culture with bold American aspirations, such as Alfred Kazin, Grace Paley, Delmore Schwartz, Chaim Potok, Bernard Malamud, Elie Wiesel, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Lore Segal. For the rest of the term we will read fiction from the booming field of contemporary Jewish fiction, including authors such as Art Spiegelman, Allegra Goodman, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon, and David Bezmozgis.

The course will focus on the ways writers shape and reshape a new literature with roots in a formidable textual, cultural, and religious tradition. We will observe an evolving relationship to traditional and sacred Jewish texts, to Yiddish and the culture of Yiddishkeit; to humor as a social practice and imaginative force; to memory and inheritance as burdens or as creative touchstones. We will also consider changing conceptions of Jewish identity, of American identity, and of gender roles; the transformations wrought by assimilation and social mobility; socialist, feminist and other political commitments and visions; forms of engagement with history including the Holocaust, the founding of Israel and its ongoing conflicts; and life in multiethnic America. Requirements: reading, active class participation, co-leading of a class discussion, multiple short reading responses, a short paper, and a longer paper with a creative, Talmud-inspired option: a “scroll” of interlaced interpretations. This course may be used to satisfy the second writing requirement.
 

ENGL 5700-001 - Contemporary African-American Literature

Lisa Woolfork

In Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being (2021), theorist Kevin Quashie urges us to move beyond reading Black art solely through the lenses of Black suffering, white violence, or resistance. He asks: What becomes possible when we displace anti‑Blackness from the centerof our thinking about Black life, Black being, and Black worldmaking? How do we read for complexity, for interiority, for Black aliveness—an aliveness that persists even alongside social death?  Throughout this course, we will explore which texts invite this practice, how they do so, and what ethical or theoretical tensions arise when reading through frameworks like Black aliveness or Afropessimism. Our work will be to confront these questions as we study African American poetry and fiction. Works include Percival Everett, Tayari Jones, Imani Perry, Jason Mott and more. 
 

ENGL 5810-001 - Books as Physical Objects

David Vander Meulen

We know the past chiefly through artifacts that survive, and books are among the most common of these objects. Besides conveying a text, each book also contains evidence of the circumstances of its manufacture.  In considering what questions to ask of these mute objects, this course might be considered the "archaeology of printing"—that is, the identification, description, and interpretation of printed artifacts surviving from the past five centuries, as well as exploration of the critical theory that lies behind such an approach to texts. With attention to production processes, including the operation of the hand press, it will investigate ways of analyzing elements such as paper, typography, illustrations, binding, and organization of the constituent sections of a book.  The course will explore how a text is inevitably affected by the material conditions of its production and how an understanding of the physical processes by which it was formed can aid historical research in a variety of disciplines, not only those that treat verbal texts but also those that deal with printed music and works of visual art.  The class will draw on the holdings of the University Library's Special Collections Department, as well as on its Hinman Collator (an early version of the one at the CIA).

Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates. This course satisfies the Graduate English requirement for the history of criticism or literary theory.
 

ENGL 5900-001 - Literature Pedagogy Seminar

Cristina Griffin

“Counterpoint Seminar in Teaching Modern Literature”

This seminar is about how and why teaching literature matters today. How do secondary school and college instructors teach literature in challenging times? How do teachers make tough decisions about what to teach and why? What responsibility do teachers have to promote inclusive excellence through the literature they teach and the methods they use? In this course, we will tackle these big questions together as we explore what it means to pursue a career in teaching literature to middle school, high school, or college students. Each week, we will weave together your existing knowledge of literature and your emerging knowledge of pedagogy. You will be introduced to theories of learning-focused, culturally relevant, and culturally responsive pedagogy, and you will put your newfound knowledge into practice as we work step by step through designing your own teaching philosophy and materials.

This course will bring together students who already have experience as classroom instructors, students who are in the process of teaching for the very first time, and students who have yet to step up to the front of a classroom in the role of teacher. We will build on this variety of experiences, learning together how to bring transformative pedagogies into our present and future classrooms.
 

ENGL 8520-001 - Ancient and Medieval Drama

John Parker

The first portion of this course will cover the drama of classical antiquity in translation, beginning with Greek plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. We will move from there to the Latin plays of Terence and Seneca. The second portion of the course will consider the kinds of performance that displaced (and in some cases transformed) these ancient traditions after the Christianization of the Roman empire. We will likely read Tertullian and Augustine on pagan drama, Prudentius' Psychomachia and life of St. Hippolytus, some liturgical drama, morality plays, vernacular biblical drama, a saint play and a secular farce. One goal of the course will be to answer questions posed by historical period: what does it mean, in the context of this particular genre, to move from antiquity to the Middle Ages? What are the differences between classical and Christian drama? Are there shared points of contact?
 

ENGL 8559-001 - Readings in Pedagogy

Jim Seitz

This ungraded, credit/no credit course will offer graduate students a low-stakes opportunity to discuss pedagogy for an hour each week. Each discussion will make use of a single article or chapter related to teaching to launch reflection on graduate students’ current or future work in the college classroom. Special emphasis will be given to developing a set of values that can guide one’s decisions as an educator, be it in literature or writing courses. Students should emerge with a clearer sense of the role of teaching in their own careers and an enhanced ability to discuss teaching knowledgeably in job interviews or PhD program applications. Credit will be based on meeting minimal expectations for attendance and participation. PhD, MA, and MFA students are all welcome to enroll.

 

ENGL 8560-001 - Fiction in the Age of Modernism

Stephen Arata

The time period covered in this course is roughly 1890-1960: the age of Modernism in the literatures of Europe and the Americas. We will read novels and short stories from across a range of cultures and countries that explore the question of what makes a work of fiction not just “Modern” but “Modernist.” Likely authors include Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jorge-Luis Borges, Jean Rhys, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, Haldor Laxness, Franz Kafka, Fernando Pessoa, Machado de Assis, Knut Hamsen, Vladimir Nabokov, and Nella Larson. All the readings will be in English. Requirements will likely include 2-3 short responses to designated works of theory or criticism, 1-2 short class presentations, and a 15-20 pp essay.
 

ENGL 8560-002 - Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and the Culture of Modernism

Michael Levenson

A seminar on the fiction of Virginia Woolf, the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and the wider cultural context of Modernism (in painting, film, and philosophy). Alongside the close reading of signature literary works, we address the conditions of intellectual modernity and political-technological modernization. The responsibility of students includes weekly comments, an oral report and a final essay.

ENGL 8570-001 - American Cinema

Sylvia Chong

This course provides an introduction to film studies and film historiography through an examination of American film from throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. We will learn basic film techniques for visual analysis, as well as consider the social, economic, and historical forces that have shaped the production, distribution, and reception of film in the U.S. Examples will be drawn from various film genres: melodrama, horror, sci-fi, musical, Westerns, war films, documentary, animation, and avant-garde. Assignments include daily reading responses and a final research project involving a combination of archival research on production and reception alongside narrative and auteur criticism.
 

ENGL 8580-001 - Cultural Rhetorics

Tamika Carey

This seminar offers an introduction to the theories, methods, and pedagogies useful in the study and practice of Cultural Rhetorics. An interdisciplinary field that incorporates frameworks from Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Literacy Studies, and more, Cultural Rhetorics explores the practice of meaning and knowledge making within and across cultures through the understanding that all cultures are rhetorical and all rhetorics are cultural. During the three units of this seminar, we will examine the emergence of cultural rhetorics within Rhetoric and Writing studies, establish critical frameworks, and then zero in on various subfields of Cultural Rhetorics (e.g. disability rhetorics, African American rhetorics, queer/transgender rhetorics) and how they can be located and used in literature, media, public discourse, or the classroom. Assignments will include a discussion-leading presentation and a seminar essay.

ENGL 8580-002 - Structure, Sign, Power, Play

Taylor Schey

This course construes Theory less as a set of approaches or lenses than as a field and a genre, the development of which we’ll trace through structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, Marxism, and Black studies. Our focus will be on the trajectories and legacies of poststructuralism, one aim of which will be to gain a more robust, genealogical grasp of contemporary theory (e.g. to understand Spillers, Wilderson, and Marriott, it helps to study Lacan; to understand Lacan, you need to know how he is the right-hand side expression of Freud + Kojève + Saussure = x). Another objective will be to familiarize ourselves with how to do theoretical scholarship: not only sharpening our abilities to think with different paradigms but also learning how to work on the primary texts of Theory. As a chance to study some of the most influential thinkers in the humanities since WWII, this course will be of interest to students across periods, areas, and disciplines. A premium will be placed on clarity rather than obfuscation, and no previous knowledge will be presumed, just a willingness to be intellectually challenged.

Authors include Louis Althusser, J. L. Austin, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Lee Edelman, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Saidiya Hartman, Luce Irigaray, Roman Jakobson, Barbara Johnson, Paul de Man, David Marriott, Hortense Spillers, Jacques Lacan, Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Frank Wilderson, and Sylvia Wynter.
 

ENGL 8596-001 - The Poetics of Ecstasy

Lisa Spaar

The Greek word ekstasis signifies displacement, trance—literally, “standing elsewhere.” In this seminar class designed for practicing poets, we will explore the poetry of fervor—erotic, visionary, psychosomatic, negative, social, religious, mystical.  When the precincts of poetry and rapture intersect, what transpires? What is possible? What is at stake and why does it matter? We will read widely and deeply across cultures and time, including work by Carson, Dahlin, Dickinson, Ginsberg, Hopkins, Howe, Keats, Laurentiis, Mirabai, Mistral, Phillips, Rumi, Sappho, Teare, Whitman, and other ancient, modern, and contemporary writers who have explored the experience of being beside one’s self in the transport of ecstasy.  Key & related texts may include readings from Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, Michel de Certeau’s The Mystic Fable, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Lost Notebooks, Sharon Cameron’s Lyric Time, and Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse.

ENGL 8598-001 - Fields of Vision

Jane Alison

Every creative text lives inside an invisible frame: particular elements are inside that frame; everything else is kept out; and what’s inside the frame is seen via singular angles, sensibilities, degrees of focus. Authorial vision can be microscopic, telescopic, periscopic, kaleidoscopic . . . brutally focused or shifting, color-drenched or shadowed, clinical or extravagant or grotesque. In this seminar we’ll explore angles and forms of narrative vision, mostly in texts that take unusual points of view that puncture the mundane to glimpses of the extraordinary. Texts will range across the spectrum from truthful to fancied but will likely dwell in regions of extremity: death, the divine, auto-gynecology, historic cataclysm, the smallest and grandest particles of our physical world. Some books we might read:

Pär Lagerkvist: Barabbas / Graham Greene: The End of the Affair / Jamaica Kincaid: Mr. Potter / Annie Ernaux: Simple Passion / Edna O’Brien: Night / Tillie Olsen: Tell Me a Riddle / José Revueltas: The Hole / Alvaro Enrigue: You Dreamed of Empires / Jim Crace: Being Dead / Anne Carson: NOX / Cees Nooteboom: The Following Story / César Aira: An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter / Mieko Kanai: Mild Vertigo / Nicholson Baker: Mezzanine / Samantha Harvey: Orbital

In addition to contemplating scopes of vision, we’ll necessarily talk too about concomitant elements of narrative such as structure, movement, time, and—of course—language. You can expect to read a book plus one or two shorter pieces each week and to write both creatively and critically in response.

Unless you are in the MFA Creative Writing Program, please contact me (jas2ad) saying what interests you in the class.