Course Descriptions Summer 2026

ENCW 2559-001 - Creative Prose Accelerator

Anna Beecher
Online Asynchronous

In this fast-paced course, students will read and create short stories, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, and experimental texts. You can expect to read widely, write a lot, uncover elements of literary craft, and emerge with a portfolio of exciting new work. No prior experience is required, only an open mind and willingness to play on the page.

ENGL 2508-001 - Austen and Adaptation

Cristina Griffin
In Person

When Jane Austen published Pride and Prejudice in 1813, the novel did not even bear her name as its author. In the over two centuries since then, Pride and Prejudice has become a tour de force, spawning countless film adaptations, conferences, festivals, tea cozies, action figures, and even a Mr. Darcy statue in Hyde Park. In this class, we will ask how and why this novel seeped into the zeitgeist and never left, changing the face of global literature and bookish culture. To do so, we will start by reading Pride and Prejudice with depth and care. Then we’ll take a global genre tour to investigate how the novel has been adapted, co-opted, misread, ignored, commercialized, rewritten, and repurposed. Along the way, we will take adaptation seriously as a mode of cultural critique. How do these twentieth- and twenty-first-century genres arise from their own moment of production and how do they reflect back on the nineteenth century? When and how do genres become gendered? How would Mr. Darcy perform on The Bachelor?

This class is designed for all majors. Whether you already sleep with a copy of Pride and Prejudice under your pillow or you’ve been living under a rock and this is the first you’ve ever heard of a lady named Jane Austen, you are welcome here. We will tackle Austen’s fiction and legacy rigorously and accessibly, making space for chemists, humanists, and everyone in between. All students should consider themselves forewarned: Pride and Prejudice may become your new favorite novel.

ENGL 2599-001 - American Environmental Autobiography

Mary Kuhn
In Person

ENGL 3540-001 - Monsters and Monstrosity

Mrinalini Chakravorty
Online Synchronous

Literature is rife with portraits of monsters and monstrosity. From Homer's The Odyssey, and Grimm's fairytales, to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Salman Rushdie's Shame, monsters challenge our everyday ideas about normality. Situated between the animal and the human, monstrous creatures are ciphers for difference that force us to consider what we regard as culturally abject or grotesque, as well as alluring. That these mythical figures continue to fascinate, even as they frighten, suggests their symbolic power in embodying both our latent desires and prohibitions. This course will explore the emergence of the monstrous aesthetic across several genres (epic, drama, novel, poetry, film), and periods (renaissance to contemporary) to probe the shifting terrains of sexual, racial, and cultural otherness that monsters represent. Along the way, we will ask critical questions that arise from the study of monstrosity. What, for instance, separates monsters from humans? How does monstrosity define our notions about beauty and ugliness, desire and disgust? Does the monster appear each time under a different guise? If so, to what extent does it reshape our sensibility about what is socially abnormal? What can monsters teach us about the hopes and apprehensions of the cultures and times to which they belong? Ultimately, we will seek to understand how and why these ferocious figures also elicit sympathy in us toward those markedly unlike ourselves. Our reading list may include works by William Shakespeare, R.L. Stevenson, Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, and Patricia Highsmith, among others.

This course is designed for advancing students in the major. Papers, short responses, and presentations will emphasize skills in argumentation, close reading, literary analysis, and critical thinking. Enthusiastic class participation is mandatory.

ENWR 2800-001 - Public Speaking

John Modica
Online Synchronous

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.

ENGL 2599-002 - The Vampires We Need

Charity Fowler
Online Synchronous

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.

ENGL 2599-003 - American Refugees: Migration as a Crisis of Representation

Joshua Miller
Online Synchronous

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.

ENWR 2520-001 - Writing about Work

Claire Chantell
Online Asynchronous

ENWR 2610-001 - Writing with Style

Keith Driver
In Person

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 3559-001 - Technical Writing and Games

Kate Natishan
Online Synchronous

Games play a central role in our social and private lives, whether we are spectators or players. They also have a 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. We will also apply technical writing principles to the development of game elements for a tabletop role-playing game, which we will then play-test as a class. 

ENGL 2590-001 - Celtic Myths and Legends

Stephen Hopkins
Online Asynchronous

This course presents a broad survey of medieval Celtic prose and poetic texts, surveying the vibrant tradition of medieval Irish and Welsh literature, including prose texts like The Mabinogi, excerpts from the Táin Bó Cúailnge, and Irish lives of saints. The survey introduces students to standard medieval literary genres and forms, and also draws upon Post-Colonial criticism to emphasize the ways in which Ireland and Wales were marginalized by neighboring North Sea powers. 

ENGL 2599-004 - Brain Rot (1854-2026)

Piers Gelly
In Person

In this literature course, we will study the phenomenon known as “brain rot” by taking the long view. Although “brain rot” was Oxford University Press’s official word of the year for 2024, its first ever appearance was in Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden; or, Life in the Woods, in which Thoreau describes a year he spent living alone, more or less, in a small house in the woods, attempting to better understand modern society by stepping away from it. Thoreau asks his reader, “While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” If Thoreau diagnosed this problem in 1854, perhaps he can offer us some solutions we can use in the present day. To that end, we’ll spend the four weeks of summer session reading, discussing, and writing about Walden. We will also attempt to live Walden, within reason: class will be held entirely outdoors, and with minimal technology. This course satisfies the Second Writing Requirement, and therefore will include two major essays, one substantial revision, and a number of shorter writing exercises. I will provide students with physical copies of Walden.

ENWR 1510-001 - Writing about Science & Tech

Rhiannon Goad
In Person

ENWR 1510-002 - Writing about Culture/Society: Writing in Popular Culture

Sarah Richardson
Online Synchronous

This class uses a rhetorical approach 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. You will also learn how to research, compose, and revise ethical and effective arguments to address specific audiences. In order to develop these skills, the course theme is popular culture and how writing impacts popular culture and how popular culture influences our writing. We will analyze songs, social media, movies, and podcasts to see how events and communities are portrayed. 

ENWR 2520-002 - Writing about Sports

Rory Sullivan
Online Synchronous

Whether dismissively calling any sport “sportsball,” or telling players to “shut up and dribble,” there is an impulse to section off sports as separate from the “real” world. This course explores the futility of that impulse, as we will examine the various ways that sports are an essential force in shaping culture and human relations. We will use writing as a way to unpack this relationship, analyzing how writing that surrounds sporting events, athletes, and fans reveals sports’ social power, even as they function as entertainment. By composing game summaries, audio podcasts, and research papers, we will identify narratives within sports and connect them to their social and political impacts.

ENWR 2800-002 - Public Speaking

Ethan King
In Person