Graduate Course Descriptions Fall 2026

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 5500-001 - Prose and the Calendar

Emily Ogden

In this course, we'll consider fictional and nonfictional prose structured by the calendar (journals, ships' logs, letters, and other forms of daily entry). We'll ask about the affordances of these forms and what motivates writers to choose them. In addition to reading these forms, we'll also experiment with writing in them. Texts may include Henry David Thoreau's Journal, Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries, Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume, Derek Jarman's Modern Nature, Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne, J. A. Baker's The Peregrine, and Edgar Allan Poe's tales of shipwreck. MA, MFA, and PhD students are all welcome in this course; undergraduates are welcome by permission and should email the instructor describing their interest.
 

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 rebecca.rush@virginia.edu 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 5530-001 - Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction

Cynthia Wall

Other than that they are (mostly) long to very long prose fiction narratives, eighteenth-century British novels have little in common, formally speaking. From the dreamlike (or nightmarish) landscape that is Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, through Haywood’s shrewd amatory fiction, Defoe’s circling first-person narratives, the suffocating epistolarity of Richardson (that’s a compliment, btw), the self-reflexive irony of Fielding, the agonies of sensibility (not to mention punctuation) in Radcliffe, the psychological labyrinths of gothic, and the innovative interiorities of Austen, each new instance defines and patterns itself anew, and none bears much similarity to nineteenth-century descendants. We will read these novels in the contexts of other emerging or expanding genres (which they liked to cannibalize), such as biography, travel narratives, journalism, the familiar letter, literary criticism, and–crucially–typographical history, or “the hand-held theatre of the page.” Participation, short analytical commentaries, two 10-page papers, presentations, and a final take-home exercise.
 

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 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 - Other People's Stories

Kevin Moffett

A multi-genre course that will look at how writers incorporate research, interviews, and portraiture into their work. The inspiration comes from Orham Pamuk who said: “If writers are to tell their own story – tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people.” Conversely we’ll also discuss how writers tell other people’s stories as if they were their own. The texts will offer license and opportunities to explore expertise, vernaculars, and forms perhaps unfamiliar to you—oral histories, biographies of place, autofiction masquerading as magic realism, historical short stories—all with an eye toward telling your own inimitable story.