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 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 8005-001 - Intro to Environmental Humanities

Lisa Blackmore

Introduces the questions, methods, and arguments that organize work in the environmental humanities. The seminar's primary objective is to advance graduate student capacities to use skills, knowledge, and archives of the humanities to advance pluralist, integrated understandings of environmental issues. In support of that purpose, the seminar develops critical reflection on methodological questions in collaboration, and public engagement.
 

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 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.)