ENCW 2559-001 - Creative Prose Accelerator

Anna Beecher
Online Asynchronous

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

ENGL 2508-001 - Austen and Adaptation

Cristina Griffin
In Person

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

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

ENGL 2599-001 - American Environmental Autobiography

Mary Kuhn
In Person

ENGL 3540-001 - Monsters and Monstrosity

Mrinalini Chakravorty
Online Synchronous

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

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

ENWR 2800-001 - Public Speaking

John Modica
Online Synchronous

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

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

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

ENGL 2599-002 - The Vampires We Need

Charity Fowler
Online Synchronous

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

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

Joshua Miller
Online Synchronous

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

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

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

ENWR 2520-001 - Writing about Work

Claire Chantell
Online Asynchronous

ENWR 2610-001 - Writing with Style

Keith Driver
In Person

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

ENWR 3559-001 - Technical Writing and Games

Kate Natishan
Online Synchronous

Games play a central role in our social and private lives, whether we are spectators or players. They also have a massive cultural impact, sometimes in ways we don’t expect. In this class, we will examine the role games play in our lives and our culture. We will also apply technical writing principles to the development of game elements for a tabletop role-playing game, which we will then play-test as a class. 

ENGL 2590-001 - Celtic Myths and Legends

Stephen Hopkins
Online Asynchronous

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

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

Piers Gelly
In Person

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

ENWR 1510-001 - Writing about Science & Tech

Rhiannon Goad
In Person

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

Sarah Richardson
Online Synchronous

This class uses a rhetorical approach to help students improve critical reading and writing skills and craft effective arguments. Rhetoric is the study of persuasion, and we’ll spend time analyzing arguments to determine why audiences might be persuaded by them. You will also learn how to research, compose, and revise ethical and effective arguments to address specific audiences. In order to develop these skills, the course theme is popular culture and how writing impacts popular culture and how popular culture influences our writing. We will analyze songs, social media, movies, and podcasts to see how events and communities are portrayed. 

ENWR 2520-002 - Writing about Sports

Rory Sullivan
Online Synchronous

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

ENWR 2800-002 - Public Speaking

Ethan King
In Person

ENCW 5559-001 - Small Press Publishing

Brian Teare

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

ENCW 7310-001 - MFA Poetry Workshop

Kiki Petrosino

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

ENCW 7610-001 - MFA Fiction Workshop

Micheline Marcom

ENGL 5060-001 - The Sonnet Revised & Revisited

Clare Kinney

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

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

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

ENGL 5500-001 - Prose and the Calendar

Emily Ogden

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

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

Alison Booth

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

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

ENGL 5500-003 - Milton and Shakespeare

Mark Edmundson

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

ENGL 5520-001 - Renaissance and Reformation

Rebecca Rush

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

–Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2

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

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

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

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

ENGL 5530-001 - Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction

Cynthia Wall

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

ENGL 5560-001 - Contemporary Jewish Literature

Caroline Rody

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

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

ENGL 5700-001 - Contemporary African-American Literature

Lisa Woolfork

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

ENGL 5810-001 - Books as Physical Objects

David Vander Meulen

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

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

ENGL 5900-001 - Literature Pedagogy Seminar

Cristina Griffin

“Counterpoint Seminar in Teaching Modern Literature”

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

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

ENGL 8520-001 - Ancient and Medieval Drama

John Parker

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

ENGL 8540-001 - The One and the Many: 19th-Century Narratives of Collectivity

Victoria Baena

Nineteenth-century Britain has often been considered to embody the age of individualism: an ideology reflected in reigning fictional narratives that emphasize the growth and progress of a single protagonist. But this was also an era that saw the revolutionary overthrow of monarchs, the rise of a democratic ethos, and a corresponding skepticism regarding what came to be known - following Thomas Carlyle - as the great man theory of history. This course considers the tensions between the one and the many as a problem of historiography as well as narrative theory. In one part of the course, we’ll trace the relation between heroes and masses from Victorian thinkers like Carlyle to Caribbean writers like C.L.R. James, before surveying a wide range of portrayals of two classic nineteenth-century “heroes,”  Napoleon Bonaparte and Toussaint Louverture. We’ll also consider a number of recent literary and cultural theorists on the topic of character and collectivity, including Alex Woloch, John Plotz, Amanda Anderson, Oren Izenberg, and Jennifer Fleissner. Finally, we’ll turn our attention to fictional narratives that diverge from the Bildungsroman model, whether through their multi-plot structure, multiplication of narrators, or revolutionary themes: authors may include Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Victor Hugo, Harriet Martineau, Leo Tolstoy, and Virginia Woolf. 
 

ENGL 8559-001 - Readings in Pedagogy

Jim Seitz

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

 

ENGL 8560-001 - Fiction in the Age of Modernism

Stephen Arata

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

ENGL 8570-001 - American Cinema

Sylvia Chong

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

ENGL 8580-001 - Cultural Rhetorics

Tamika Carey

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

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

Taylor Schey

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

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

ENGL 8596-001 - The Poetics of Ecstasy

Lisa Spaar

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

ENGL 8598-001 - Other People's Stories

Kevin Moffett

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

ENCW 2100-001 - Intro to Creative Writing

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

ENCW 2300-001 - Poetry Writing

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

ENCW 2559-001 - Introduction to Environmental Writing

Brian Teare

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

ENCW 2600-001 - Fiction Writing

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

ENCW 3310-001 - Intermediate Poetry Writing I

Sumita Chakraborty

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

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

Lisa Spaar

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

ENCW 3350-001 - Intermediate Nonfiction Workshop: The Sensorium

Jane Alison

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

ENCW 3500-001 - Screenwriting

Kevin Moffett

This course examines the art and craft of screenwriting, the short film in particular. You'll read short scripts and excerpts from longer ones and learn the conventions of the form--by the end of the semester, through drafting and revision and close analysis, we'll aim to take your work to new levels of dramatic force and visual and emotional complexity. 
 

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

Jesse Ball

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

ENCW 3500-003 - 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 she fuses her body with his. A woman grieves the loss of her children until she becomes a weeping stone. 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 into beautiful, strange, small objects. In this workshop we’ll look at several such stories each week, drawing first upon Ovid’s Metamorphoses, then branching out to other world mythologies. We’ll explore each ancient story deeply and think about what made it last so long. Why does it still speak to us? It’s patently fabulist, so what makes it feel true? Alongside weekly myths, we’ll read contemporary stories that tap similar subterranean currents, and you will  create your own cycle of new myths or fabulist stories inspired by what you’ve read.
 

ENCW 3610-001 - Intermediate Fiction Writing: Habit & Behavior

Jesse Ball

In this class we will focus on the ways in which our rituals and habits influence our sight and perception. We will practice forming and breaking habits in order to change our thoughts, and thereby change our writing. The course will draw from various religious, philosophical and radical traditions from Lucid Dreaming to the Situationist derive to Buddhist sitting. 
 

ENCW 3610-002 - Intermediate Fiction Writing

Anna Beecher

Open to anyone who has passed a 2000 level creative writing course (e.g. ENCW 2100,2300 or 2600) or those with some prior writing experience (if the latter please email am2aw@virginia.edu with a writing sample).  

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

ENCW 3610-003 - Intermediate Fiction Writing

Anna Beecher

Open to anyone who has passed a 2000 level creative writing course (e.g. ENCW 2100,2300 or 2600) or those with some prior writing experience (if the latter please email am2aw@virginia.edu with a writing sample).  

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

ENCW 4550-001 - Topics in Literary Prose: Substance and Space

Corinna Vallianatos

This class will examine fragmented and short narratives with an eye toward identifying the scaffolding that supports the short form (structural, thematic, syntactic); the larger story short forms tell; and the breadth and expansiveness that the specificity and compression of short forms are, perhaps seemingly paradoxically, able to yield. Texts will include The White Book, 300 Arguments, Aug 9-Fog, Bluets, What Kingdom, Microscripts, and assorted stories and essays. Students will respond to what they read both critically and creatively.
 

ENCW 4810-001 - Advanced Fiction Writing I

Corinna Vallianatos


 

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

Sumita Chakraborty

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

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

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

Kiki Petrosino

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

Instructor permission is required to enroll in this workshop and approvals will be considered on a rolling basis. To request permission, enter a request on SIS and e-mail Prof. Kiki Petrosino (cmp2k@virginia.edu) a single Word attachment containing: 1) a brief letter of interest, listing your previous experiences with creative writing workshops at UVA or elsewhere; 2) a group of 3-5 recent poems.  
 

ENCW 5559-001 - Small Press Publishing

Brian Teare

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

ENGL 2500-002 - Intro to Literary Studies

John O'Brien

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

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

ENGL 2500-003 - Tales Retold

Kate Stephenson

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

Potential texts:

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

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

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

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

Alison Booth

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

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

ENGL 2506-002 - Poems, Poets, Poetry

Emily Ogden

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

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

ENGL 2508-001 - Nineteenth-Century Speculative Fiction

Stephen Arata

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

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

 

ENGL 2508-003 - The Novel of Upbringing

Dan Kinney

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

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

ENGL 2508-004 - Island Fiction

Alison Cotti-Lowell

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

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

ENGL 2527-001 - Text and Performance

Katharine Maus

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

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

ENGL 2599-001 - Beauty and Monstrosity

Jon D'Errico

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

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

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

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

ENGL 2599-002 - Monuments and the Aesthetics of Power

Ian Grandison

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

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

ENGL 2599-003 - How to be Ethical?

Nasrin Olla

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

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

ENGL 2599-006 - 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.
 

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

ENGL 2599-007 - The Vampires We Need

Charity Fowler

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

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

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

Joshua Miller

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

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

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

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

ENGL 3001-100 - History of Literature in English I

Rebecca Rush

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

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

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

ENGL 3271-100 - Shakespeare: Histories & Comedies

Katharine Maus

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

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

ENGL 3320-001 - Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literatures

Brad Pasanek

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

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

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

Victoria Baena

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

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

ENGL 3510-001 - Feminist Chaucer

Courtney Watts

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

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

ENGL 3530-001 - The Global Eighteenth Century

John O'Brien

The eighteenth century was an era of globalization, as commerce and diplomacy linked region of the world that to that point had been only occasionally interacted. It was also a period when many new literary and cultural forms and movements emerged: the novel, the memoir, sentimentalism, the Gothic. In this course, we will read works from this period from around the world. The places we visit may include Britain (through, for example, Samuel Richardson's epistolary fiction Pamela and Mary Wortley Montagu's The Persian Embassy Letters), colonial America (Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography), Russia (Nikolay Karamzin's story "Poor Liza"), Germany (Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther), China (part of Cao Xueqin's massive The Story of the Stone), Vietnam (Du Nguyen's The Song of Kieu), and Japan (Ueda Akinari’s Tales of Moonlight and Rain). All works will be read in English translation. Two written exercises, midterm and final examinations.

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

ENGL 3545-001 - US Lit and Social Justice

Victoria Olwell

Exploring U.S. literature from the antebellum period through the Progressive Era, this course asks, what strategies did literary authors use to influence public debates about social, economic, and political justice? Beneath this question lie two more:  What underlying conceptions of justice did U.S. literature advance, and how might we assess them? Literature during the era we’ll consider spanned the full political spectrum, but our focus will be primarily on literature invested in the extension of rights, equality, and protections to dispossessed people, as well as in the amelioration of politically induced suffering. We’ll examine literary protests against slavery, Jim Crow law, Chinese exclusion, urban poverty, women’s status, and the conditions of industrial labor. Course requirements include several short papers, class participation, and a final exam.

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

ENGL 3559-001 - Reading AI

Matthew Kirschenbaum

We will explore ways to "read AI" as a product of the literary imagination, as a vehicle for new forms of creative and experimental writing, and as an actual technology. We will read critical writing about the current state of artificial intelligence and the issues it raises for students of language and literature; representations of AI in literary fiction from the 18th century to the present; and experimental texts actually generated by AI in order to see how some of our most innovative writers and artists are exploiting the technology creatively. Requirements will include multiple short papers (both with and without the technology), a midterm, and a final exam. 
 

ENGL 3560-001 - Modern Poetry

Mark Edmundson

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

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

Joshua Miller

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

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

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

ENGL 3570-001 - The Broadway Musical in American Culture

Lisa Goff

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

ENGL 3570-002 - Jim Crow America

Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross

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

ENGL 3572-001 - Black Protest Narrative

Marlon Ross

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

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

ENGL 3791-001 - American Cinema

Sylvia Chong

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

ENGL 3915-001 - Point of View Journalism

Lisa Goff

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

ENGL 4500-001 - Literature of the South

Jennifer Greeson


 

ENGL 4500-002 - Gothic Forms

Cynthia Wall

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

ENGL 4510-001 - Medieval Romance

Clare R Kinney

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

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

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

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

ENGL 4520-001 - Shakespearean Identities

Dan Kinney

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

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

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

Brad Pasanek

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

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

ENGL 4540-001 - Romanticism

Taylor Schey

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

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

ENGL 4559-002 - Language Models Small & Large

Matthew Kirschenbaum

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

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

ENGL 4560-001 - Modern Love and US Fiction

Victoria Olwell

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

ENGL 4561-001 - Literature and Human Rights

Christopher Krentz

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

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

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

John Parker

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

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

ENGL 4998-001 - Distinguished Majors Program

Caroline Rody

ENGL 5060-001 - The Sonnet Revised & Revisited

Clare Kinney

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

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

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

ENGL 5500-001 - Prose and the Calendar

Emily Ogden

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

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

Alison Booth

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

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

ENGL 5500-003 - Milton and Shakespeare

Mark Edmundson

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

ENGL 5520-001 - Renaissance and Reformation

Rebecca Rush

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

–Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2

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

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

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

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

ENGL 5530-001 - Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction

Cynthia Wall

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

ENGL 5560-001 - Contemporary Jewish Literature

Caroline Rody

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

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

ENGL 5700-001 - Contemporary African-American Literature

Lisa Woolfork

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

ENGL 5810-001 - Books as Physical Objects

David Vander Meulen

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

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

ENGL 5900-001 - Literature Pedagogy Seminar

Cristina Griffin

 “Counterpoint Seminar in Teaching Modern Literature”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

047 -- Writing about Culture and Society
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 332)
John T. Casteen IV
 
048 -- TBA
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
049 -- Writing about Science & Tech
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 330)
Cory Shaman
 
052 -- TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
053 -- TBA
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (CAB 207)
TBA
 
055 -- Writing about Identities - Writing about Writing and Literacy
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 332)
Kate Kostelnik
 
056 -- TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 330)
TBA
 
057 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Sports
TR 11:00AM-12:45PM (CAB 044)
Rory Sullivan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ENWR 1520 - Writing and Community Engagement (4 sections)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ENWR 2510 - Advanced Writing Seminar (3+ sections)

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

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

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

ENWR 2520 - Special Topics in Writing (6 sections)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ENWR 2610 - Writing with Style

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

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

ENWR 2640 - Writing as Technology

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

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

ENWR 2700 - News Writing

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

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

ENWR 2800 - Public Speaking

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

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

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

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

ENWR 3500 - Topics in Advanced Writing and Rhetoric

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

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

ENWR 3640 - Writing with Sound

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

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

ENWR 3665 - Writing about the Environment

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

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

ENWR 3680 - Writing and Documentary Film

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

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

ENWR 3740 - Black Women's Writing & Rhetoric

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

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

ENWR 3900 - Career Based Writing and Rhetoric

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

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