ENGL 2599-001: Routes, Writing, Reggae

Online Synchronous
MTWRF 03:30PM-05:45PM
Njelle Hamilton

When most people think of reggae music, they think of lazing out on a Caribbean beach with a spliff and nodding to the music of Bob Marley. But what is the actual history of the music of which Marley is the most visible ambassador? How did the music of a small Caribbean island become a worldwide phenomenon, with the song “One Love” and the album Exodus named among the top songs and albums of the 20th century? In this course we will trace the history of reggae music and listen closely to Marley’s entire discography to understand the literary devices, musical structures, and social contexts of reggae songs. You will learn to analyze songs, poetry, and film and craft a range of critical and creative responses from album reviews to response (‘diss’) tracks.  You will also engage topical and controversial issues such as: misogyny and homophobia in reggae and dancehall; the place of religion and spirituality (and yes, marijuana) in reggae; reggae’s critique of oppression and racial injustice; cultural appropriation and the global marketplace; and the connections between reggae, dancehall, hip-hop, and reggaetón. (Fulfills: Second Writing Requiring; AIP Discipline).

ENGL 3010-001: History of English Language

In Person
MTWRF 10:30AM-12:45PM
Stephen Hopkins

This course is part of the Summer Technology Sabbatical: https://summer.virginia.edu/summer-technology-sabbatical

“Tasting HEL: A Language Lab History of the English Language” immerses students in the history of our language, from its origins as a dialect of Proto Indo-European, on through Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English. This journey will help students build up cognitive endurance as we work together to acquire and hone a suite of interdisciplinary skills to become philologists (lovers of language, but also literary linguists)—by tasting each stage of the language and reading them aloud together. We will draw from modern and historical linguistics, literary criticism, book history and paleography, lexicography, and more as we dive deep into each stage of the language to see what made it tick, and what made it different from what we speak now. 

ENGL 3500-001: Hacking for Humanists

Online Synchronous
MTWRF 10:30AM-12:45PM
Brad Pasanek

This is a course for English majors (and other students) that introduces the basics of computer programming, text analysis, text encoding, and statistics as experimental methodologies that promote new kinds of reading and interpretation. The aim is to move from "computation into criticism." We’ll work, primarily, with a Shakespeare play, poetry by William Blake, and a Jane Austen novel. No prior familiarity with coding or the language R required: we’ll be moving slowly, covering the basics. Advanced Computer Science majors will not be turned away, but they will be required to recite poetry aloud in front of their peers and show an interest in Emma Woodhouse’s misprisions.

ENWR 2610-001: Writing with Style

In Person
MTWRF 01:00PM-03:15PM
Keith Driver

Develops an understanding of the wide range of stylistic moves in prose writing, their uses, and implications. Students build a rich vocabulary for describing stylistic decisions, imitate and analyze exemplary writing, and discuss each others writing in a workshop setting.

ENWR 2700-001: News Writing

Online Synchronous
MTWRF 10:30AM-12:45PM
Amykate Sweeney

ENWR 3760-001: Studies in Cultural Rhetoric: The Cultural Work of Stories

Online Synchronous
MTWRF 01:00PM-03:15PM
Tamika Carey

This course will explore how cultural groups develop, use, and remix stories to build and reshape their worlds. With special attention to the social concepts and discursive techniques involved in these processes - concepts and techniques that may include master narratives, rhetorical listening, identification, testimony, and counterstory - we will deepen our understanding of how rhetoric influences the worlds in which we live. Projects may include: a course presentation, a brief analysis activity, and a storywork portfolio.

ENGL 2599-003: American Refugees

In Person
MTWRF 10:30AM-12:45PM
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 briefly viewing 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 can fulfill the College’s AIP discipline and second writing requirements.The course also satisfies the English major prerequisite and counts as one course toward the major.

ENWR 2520-001: Walking Nature, Writing Nature

Online Synchronous
MTWRF 10:30AM-12:45PM
Cory Shaman

ENWR 3550-001: Professional Communication in a Digital World

Online Synchronous
MTWRF 01:00PM-03:15PM
Heidi Nobles

In today’s professional world, strong communication isn’t just a bonus—it’s a core skill. In this interactive course, you’ll work with your classmates and professor to practice writing and collaborating in the kinds of situations you’ll encounter in your future career: team updates, client proposals, job applications, and more. Along the way, you’ll learn to write clearly, revise with purpose, and adapt your message to different audiences and platforms. We’ll also explore how generative AI tools (like MS Copilot and ChatGPT) can support your writing process—when to use them, how to use them well, and where your judgment as a communicator matters most. Expect daily hands-on activities, team projects, and a final professional portfolio of your own to take with you beyond the course.

ENWR 3660-001: Travel Writing

In Person
MTWRF 01:00PM-03:15PM
Kate Stephenson

This course will explore travel writing using a variety of texts, including essays, memoirs, blogs, photo essays, and narratives. We will examine cultural representations of travel as well as the ethical implications of tourism. Students will have the opportunity to write about their own travel experiences, and we will also embark on "local travel" of our own.

ENGL 2599-002: The Vampires We Need

In Person
MTWRF 10:30AM-12:45PM
Charity Fowler

ENGL 2599-004: The Contemporary Essay

In Person
MTWRF 03:30PM-05:45PM
John Casteen

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

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

ENGL 3559-001: Booms and Busts in US Culture

In Person
MTWRF 01:00PM-03:15PM
Laura Goldblatt

ENWR 1510-001: Writing about Science & Tech

In Person
MTWRF 10:30AM-12:45PM
Rhiannon Goad

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

Online Synchronous
MTWRF 01:00PM-03:15PM
Sarah Richardson

This course, Writing in Popular Culture, focuses on how popular culture influences media and writing. We will look at movies, tv shows, songs, newspaper articles and more to see how events and people are discussed and influence our writing.

ENWR 2800-001: Public Speaking

Online Synchronous
MTWRF 01:00PM-03:15PM
John Modica

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

ENCW 7310 - MFA Poetry Workshop

Sumita Chakraborty
M 2:00-4:30

In lieu of a traditional course description, I’d like to tell you a brief story. My first published poem is a poem I consider very unsuccessful. I’ve revised it for years post- (and pre-!) publication; it’s never quite right. It is no longer a poem that I try to “perfect.” Instead, it’s become a room in which I go to think and experiment. When I find myself itching to open it again, that means that I want to try out something I do not yet understand or yet know how to do. Very often, particularly as we take steps to professionalize in a discipline or an art, our lives become pitched toward the dream of success: to perfect the poem; to perfect the thesis; to perfect the manuscript; to “perfect,” most insidiously of them all, ourselves. We won’t be able to undo this entirely: after all, this is a poetry workshop in an MFA program, which means that we’re gathering together in an academic context to work on our craft. But through our conversations, readings, and exercises, this workshop will foreground how to embrace the magic of the mistake—the pratfall, the banana peel under the heel, the wrong turn, the swing and a miss—as a cherished companion in your regular writing practice rather than shying away from it as something to be shunned or renounced. Your primary responsibilities will be to write poems, share them with one another, and give each other feedback.

ENCW 7610 - MFA Fiction Workshop

Kevin Moffett
M 2:00-4:30

ENGL 5100-1 -- Introduction to Old English

Stephen Hopkins
TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm

ENGL 5500-1 -- Stories of Teaching

James Seitz
MoWe 5:00pm - 6:15pm

This course will examine a variety of ways in which the classroom has been represented through narrative—sometimes by teachers and sometimes by students—in memoir, fiction, scholarship, and film. We’ll work on sharpening both our critical resistance to the shortcomings of these narratives and our critical appreciation of their accomplishments. All narratives of teaching or learning are inevitably partial: nobody can say it all, even when representing a single class, much less when describing what happened during the course of a semester or year. Yet writers do try to portray their experience as a teacher or student over long as well as brief periods of time, and we can learn from their struggle to do so convincingly.

ENGL 5500-2 -- The Conflict of Interpretation in Literature, Law, and Religion

Walter Jost
TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm

Ours is an age of communication, and one of its hallmarks is the “conflict of interpretations” among schools of criticism, theory, and cultural study. This course requires no specialized background in these matters, for in fact we all know how to talk, read, interpret, and argue. The question is, how well do we do this, with how much control and discipline? how do we develop our abilities? The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer once wrote that “Where, indeed, but to rhetoric should the theoretical examination of interpretation turn? Rhetoric from oldest tradition has been the only advocate of a claim to truth that defends the probable, the eikos (versimile), and that which is convincing to the ordinary reason, against the claim of science to accept as true only what can be demonstrated and tested.” Together we will develop a basic but wide-ranging understanding of the arts of discourse called “hermeneutics” and “rhetoric,” through close reading and discussions of selected scholarly texts (chiefly essays and book chapters), testing our learning against literary, legal, and religious works. 

From Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, pp. 33 and 187: 

“Given the surge of interest in questions of reading . . . the neglect of the hermeneutic tradition in Anglo-American literary theory is little short of scandalous. Surely a correction of the record—and even some vigorous rebranding—is in order. Hermeneutics simply is the theory of interpretation . . . . The subject of this book, then, has been a specific genre of writing: the rhetoric of suspicious reading in literary studies and in the humanities and interpretative social sciences generally. Rather than being synonymous with disagreement, it is a specific kind of disagreement—one that is driven by the protocols of late-twentieth and twenty-first century academic argument. Critique, in this sense, is the hardening of disagreement into a given repertoire of argumentative moves and interpretative methods.”

ENGL 5510-1 -- Arthurian Romances

Elizabeth Fowler
TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm

We'll dive into what is probably the most viral fan-fiction canon ever: stories about Arthur, Guenevere, Lancelot, Gawain, Merlin, the Ladies of the Lake, and their friends and enemies and magical stage props. What makes this kind of narrative work? How do different authors transform it? The late medieval Morte Darthur by Thomas Malory will be at the core of our inquiry, and we'll include texts from Marie de France and Chaucer to contemporary film. We'll be looking to describe how (and why) the romance genre offers us experiences of philosophy, emotion, political thought, spirituality, and wit. This is a graduate course with room for undergraduates who have some coursework in Middle English. We will meet outside under the Scholar’s Tree by Dawson’s Row in camp chairs unless weather prohibits it. Contact Prof Fowler fowler@virginia.edu with questions.

ENGL 5559-1 --  Early Moderns & Throwbacks: Birth-Pangs of Modernity

James Kinney
TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm

This course will examine the ways in which cultural precursors ancient and medieval can both stall and inspire Renaissance innovation. To make sense of this perplexed cultural legacy we will also explore how Renaissance innovators revise and select from traditional models, especially religious and mythic models. Old and New World traditions confronted complete our survey of how moderns emerge from antiquity.

ENGL 5560-1 -- Contemporary Poetry

Jahan Ramazani
MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm

In this seminar, we will read and discuss some of the most influential poetry of the second half of the twentieth century and of the twenty-first century, mostly by American writers from various backgrounds. To hone our attention to poetics, we will focus on several specific genres and forms of poetry, including sonnets, elegies, persona poems, and poems about the visual arts. How do contemporary poets repurpose, transform, and revitalize poetic traditions? What is the value of poetry for writers of diverse ethnicities, races, nations, movements, social classes, and genders? What is distinctive about poetry as a means for addressing preoccupations such as the self, the environment, race, art, nationality, gender, sexuality, grief, violence, and historical memory?

ENGL 5560-2 -- James Joyce's Ulysses

Victor Luftig
TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm

For first-time readers of Joyce's _Ulysses_: we will be attentive not just to Joyce's novel but also to the ancillary materials that are available for illuminating it.  The first paper will be about one of those resources and the second about possible contemporary applications of the book.

ENGL 5700-1 -- Contemporary African-American Literature

Lisa Woolfork
TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am

ENGL 5810-1 -- Books as Physical Objects

David Vander Meulen
MoWe 9:30am - 10:45am

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 5900-1 -- Literature Pedagogy Seminar

Cristina Griffin
TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm

“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 8380 -- Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction

Cynthia Wall
MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm

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 look at a variety of historical and cultural contexts, such as emerging genres; changes in perceptions of space, time, things, narrative, typography; and literary criticism from the eighteenth century to the present.

ENGL 8540 -- US Literature and the Politics of Justice

Victoria Olwell
TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm

ENGL 8560 -- Literature in the Modern Period: Comparative Approaches to Long Modernisms

Joshua Miller
Tu 3:30pm - 6:00pm

Both modernist studies and American studies staked claims to having been made “new” in recent decades, thus participating in the discourse of exceptionality that has led these domains of thought and cultural production to produce both fascinating and, at times, troubling results. The inclusionary expansions of “New Modernisms” and the “New American Studies” fall under several rubrics: comparative studies, global/planetary cultures, new & mixed media, multiethnic literatures, and long modernisms, among others.

We’ll examine key trends shaping multiethnic modernist fiction in a broad historical context, starting with emergent U.S. imperial and racialist modernity, from 1890s views of U.S. immigration and territorial expansion to 1930s and 40s depictions of migration and racialized labor. Then we’ll pursue similar aspects of late-20th and early-21st narrative and transmedia experiments with the novel form to ask if modernisms endure not only in the postmodern period, but also in contemporary Information Age cultures.

We won’t be able to cover comprehensively the full range of methodologies and theoretical formulations that have emerged as exciting directions for modernist studies, so the variety of our readings will reflect the generative (and maddening) instability of this field. The goal of this course is not to develop a particular conception of either modernism or comparativism, but to work collaboratively to formulate original and compelling analytic questions and interpretive strategies.

ENGL 8596 -- Form & Theory of Poetry: Memory & Document

Kiki Petrosino
W 2:00-4:30

In this graduate seminar, we’ll examine what it means to compose poetry responsive to real places, times, events, and experiences. We'll read several works of contemporary poetry that take a variety of approaches to the concepts of "memory" and "archive," broadly (and capaciously!) defined. Readings will include craft texts and critical inquiry on documentary poetics and other compositional modalities. Coursework, including group learning experiences (one self-guided), will give students the opportunity to produce a critical or creative project engaging themes inspired by the course material. Though this is a readings-based course, students should be prepared and willing to participate in writing exercises, to exchange works-in-progress, and to offer constructive critique. These activities, plus attendance, participation, & the final project, will inform the grading policy.

This course is designed for first- and second-year MFA students in Creative Writing. Graduate students from other departments and programs are welcome, pending availability and instructor permission. If you would like to enroll in this course, but are not in the MFA Program, please contact Prof. Petrosino via e-mail (cmp2k@virginia.edu) with a message detailing your interest.

ENGL 8598 -- Form & Theory of Fiction: Vultures & Magpies

Jesse Ball
W 2:00-4:30

ENGL 8800 -- Introduction to Literary Research

Andrew Stauffer
We 9:30am - 12:00pm or Fr 9:30am - 12:00pm

ENGL 8900-1 -- Writing Pedagogy Seminar

James Livingood
Mo 12:30pm - 1:45pm

ENCW 7310 - MFA Poetry Workshop

M 02:00PM-04:30PM
Rita Dove

In this graduate-level workshop, designed for MFA poets in the first two years of the program, students will continue developing their own writing practices while exploring other compositional and critical techniques. We’ll devote most class sessions to reviewing peer-generated poetry, but we’ll also discuss published works by established writers and other aspects of the creative process. In addition, we will examine what it means to “manage” a writer’s life, with particular emphasis on writing routines as well as exploring ways to probe, massage and coax poems into revealing their secrets. Students should be prepared to participate energetically in group critique sessions in addition to polishing their own writing. All students will be required to complete one “wild card” assignment; both first and second-year MFA students will assemble a portfolio of poetry at semester's end.

ENCW 7610 - MFA Fiction Workshop

M 02:00PM-04:30PM
Jesse Ball

This advanced workshop is designed for first- and second-year graduate students in the Masters of Fine Arts in Fiction program.  Enrollment is by instructor permission only. 

ENGL 5060 - The Sonnet Revised & Revisited

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Clare Kinney

“A chamber of sudden change”; “a meeting place of image and voice”; “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 and the modernists to Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Kiki Petrosino, 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 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 5190 - The Bible

W 10:00AM-12:30PM
Stephen Cushman

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

ENGL 5500 - Milton & Whitman 

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Mark Edmundson

We’ll read with care and imagination what are perhaps the two greatest long poems in English, John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Both are works of palpable genius, but of very different kinds. Milton’s poem is committed to hierarchy, order and degree. In his cosmos, justified subordination and command are the highest ideals. (Though he is constantly challenging them.) His world at its best is firmly, yet flexibly ordered. He is a brilliant exemplar of true conservatism. Whitman is much different. “Unscrew the locks from the doors / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jams,” Walt chants. Whitman wants to dissolve all needless boundaries in the interest of perfect democratic equality. He wants to undo the barriers between old and young, rich and poor, women and men. And he does so, at least imaginatively, in “Song of Myself.” We’ll read the poems for what they are in themselves. But we’ll also consider them as brilliant exemplars of the progressive mind and its conservative counterpart. Students may be surprised as to where their allegiances lie. With any luck, we’ll all find ourselves, in the words of Wallace Stevens, “more truly and more strange.” A mid-term paper, a final essay, and some short writing assignments.

ENGL 5510 - Introduction to Old Norse

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
Stephen Hopkins

This course provides an introduction to the language and literature of medieval Iceland (also called Old Norse or Old Icelandic, roughly 800-1400 CE), and the goal is to arrive at a sound reading knowledge of the Old Norse language. Drawing upon Byock’s textbook, Viking Language, the first half of the semester focuses on internalizing the basics of Old Norse grammar and vocabulary. While acquiring these rudimentary linguistic skills, we will practice translating bits of prose and poetry (The Prose Edda, Egils Saga, et al.)  as supplied in the textbook. After midterms, we will translate The Tale of Thorsteinn Staff-Struck. The course will also include secondary readings to orient us towards Old Norse genres, contexts, and critical/theoretical approaches prevalent in the field today, with an emphasis on the history of the conversion and the importation of writing technologies (i.e., basic paleography). 

ENGL 5530 - The Literature of British Abolition c. 1750-1810

T 03:30PM-06:00PM
Michael Suarez

How did Great Britain come to abolish the slave trade in 1807 and what roles did literature play in enlightening readers to the barbarities of this human traffic? Reading works such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, and a variety of poems, both canonical and from relatively unknown voices, we will attempt to immerse ourselves in the literature of British abolition. Juxtaposing such writings with visual materials (viz., the slave ship Brooks), abolitionist political pamphlets, and letters in the C18 public press will give greater depth to our discussions. Finally, we will read Caryl Phillips’ novel Cambridge and reflect on how a literature of abolition might function in our own time.

This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement.

ENGL 5559 - TASTE: Textual, Accessible, Sustainable, Teachable, Experimental 

TR 9:30AM-10:45AM
Alison Booth

This seminar is open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students in any humanities area or major. No prior experience in digital studies or coding is expected; the tech-adverse need not fear. Our focus is textual studies of post-1800 literature in English. Students may design their coursework to fulfill the course requirement “from 1700 to 1900,” while some of our texts will be post-1900. TASTE fulfills an elective for the graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities (DH), but the course will be accessible or teachable to anyone who likes to read or edit closely and who is curious to experiment. Sustainable, like accessible, has several meanings: in the environment as well as in DH (will it last?). Some literature is sustained (canonical) because taste (then or now) tells us to reread it and help make it more accessible. Something that we cannot dispute (personal taste) is deeply political and changeable.

With a cue from our acronym, we will read selected sources about taste: as aesthetic concept; as class and gender code; as racial/ethnographic/international divide; as connection between the body and cultural history; as related to property/propriety of sexuality. Among our aims is to cultivate our taste for written descriptions of interior decoration, fashion, food and dining, as well as people, buildings, and landscapes. Readings will include Jane Austen’s Persuasion; Elizabeth Gaskell’s novella Cousin Phillis; selected poetry from different contexts (prospects; country houses; beloveds), including African American and from former British colonies; short stories (some classics like Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” Carver’s “Cathedral”); a unit on consumer culture including foodways. One short, one longer essay; frequent short assignments on texts; a class presentation; participation in a joint project on passages in the ~400 analyzed short biographies of women in Alison Booth’s Collective Biographies of Women as they reveal biographers’ evaluations of historic women related to taste.

Texts have not been ordered at the bookstore; part of our project will be identifying and working with library and online sources and comparing editions.

ENGL 5559 - Latinx Literature & the Americas

M 03:30PM-06:00PM
Carmen Lamas

In this course we will read works that situate the Latinx experience in its Americas context. Such genres as the memoir, speculative fiction, romance, YA, graphic novels, historical fiction and poetry will be read. Issues such as border crossing, immigration, and deportation will serve to approach and query Latinidad in/from its many historical, geographic, generic, aesthetic, and political manifestations. We will locate these works in the wider debates regarding literature, language, departmental/field placement, and the interdisciplinary nature of Latinx studies. No prior experience reading Latinx literature is necessary. Fourth-years welcome with permission. All readings, writings, and discussions are in English.

ENGL 5580 - Material Culture: Theories and Methods

R 05:00PM-07:30PM
Lisa Goff

“Material culture” is the stuff of everyday life: landscapes and street corners, skyscrapers and log cabins, umbrellas and dining room tables and Picassos and Fitbits. Every thing in our lives, those we choose and those that are thrust upon us, conveys meaning—many meanings, in fact, from the intentions of the creator to the reception (and sometimes the subversion) of the consumer. Interpreting objects, buildings, and places provides insight into the values and beliefs of societies and cultures past and present. In this course we will study theories of material culture, many of which now intersect with literary criticism, from a variety of scholarly disciplines including anthropology, historical archaeology, art history, geography, environmental humanities, American Studies, and literary studies. And we will apply those theories to texts and artifacts of all kinds, from novels and short stories to movies, photographs, historic sites, visual art and culture, fashion and clothing, landscapes, and more. We will read theorists familiar to students of literature, such as thing theorist Bill Brown, but also folklorist Henry Glassie; archaeologist James Deetz; anthropologist Elizabeth Chin, and political theorist Jane Bennett. The class will prepare you to interpret things in ways that illuminate texts, and to read texts in ways that reveal and cultivate the meanings of things.

ENGL 5580 - Intro to Textual Criticism & Scholarly Editing

F 09:30AM-12:00PM
David Vander Meulen

This course in textual criticism deals with some of the fundamental problems of literary study:

● If a work exists in multiple forms and with different wording, what constitutes "the text"?

● How are such judgments made and standards determined?

● How are verbal works as intellectual abstractions affected by the physical forms in which they are transmitted?

● If one is faced with the prospect of editing a work, how does one go about it?

● How does one choose an edition for use in the classroom?

● What difference does this all make?

The course will deal with such concerns and will include:

● A short survey of analytical bibliography and the solution of practical problems as they apply to literary texts.

● Study of the transmission of texts in different periods.

● Consideration of theories and techniques of editing literary and non-literary texts of different genres, and of both published and unpublished materials.

The course will build to the preparation of a scholarly edition by each student. The class on books as physical objects, ENGL 5810, provides helpful background but is not a prerequisite.

*This course satisfies the Graduate English requirement for the history of criticism or literary theory.*

ENGL 8005 - Intro to Environmental Humanities

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
Adrienne Ghaly

How do the arts and the humanities contribute to conversations about the environment and the fate of our planet? How are they responding to the environmental challenges of the Anthropocene, the geological age in which humans (some more than others) shape Earth systems? This course introduces the questions, methods, and arguments that organize work in the environmental humanities (EH). The seminar’s primary objective to is to advance graduate student capacities to use skills, knowledges, tools, and archives of the humanities to advance pluralist, integrated understandings of environmental issues. In support of that purpose, the seminar develops critical reflection on conceptual, theoretical and methodological questions in EH about disciplinarity, collaboration, innovation, and public engagement. The course materials draw from literary and cultural studies, philosophy, history, anthropology, and religion. This graduate seminar is open to MA and PhD students from any discipline, including the sciences and social sciences. 

This class is collaborative by design, with guest speakers from across UVA presenting over the course of the semester. It also fulfills one of the requirements for the graduate certificate in Environmental Humanities (info can be found here).  

ENGL 8262 - Edmund Spenser in Faery Land

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM
Elizabeth Fowler

The extreme art of the settler-colonial frontier—stringent, searching, terrifying, ambitious, violent, feminist, fantastic, surreal, comic—Spenser's poetry and prose, almost all written in Ireland, has provoked much of the best work by early modernists over the last three decades. We'll attempt immersive reading, make forays into the work of the in-progress Oxford Spenser edition, and grapple with problems poetic, editorial, theoretical, ecological, aesthetic, moral, historical, and jurisprudential. Spenser is soaked in Malory, Chaucer, Vergil, Homer, Aristotle—and English-language authors in all the ensuing centuries are soaked in him, Shakespeare to Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Yet where else can you get a dominant female knight, an elusive queen of faerie, queer sex scenes of many variations, a dragon who vomits books, joyous rivers in hats getting married, the invention of the words “self” and “emotion,” cannibals singing Petrarchan blazons, and a sex-positive, anatomically correct Mound of Venus? (BTW, Milton says Spenser is a better teacher than Aquinas, and was he ever wrong?) Our goals will be to collaborate on a working sense of Spenser’s poetry and its bibliography, to get good at immersion in lots of material while keeping what’s important to you above the waterline, to become articulate about poetry and able to move around within it while developing interesting trains of thought, and to hone all those skills both in seminar conversation and in your prose.

This course fulfills the pre-1700 requirement.

ENGL 8500 - Oceanic Connections: Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds

T 03:30PM-06:00PM
Debjani Ganguly

The course will explore the emergence of the ‘ocean’ as a powerful rubric in global and hemispheric literary studies. The fluidity of the ocean as against terrestrial borders gives new meaning to categories like empire, diaspora, postcolonial, slave, settler, and indentured labor.

Through novels, philosophical tracts, and theories of history, we will study the import of the transatlantic slave trade and its traumatic entanglement with global histories of modern maritime colonialism including those of Indian Ocean worlds. Specifically, we will trace connections across the Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds through the novels of Barry Unsworth, Fred D’Aguiar, and Amitav Ghosh, and the narrative non-fiction of Paul Gilroy. The course will include excerpts from the work of Edouard Glissant, the famous exponent of Caribbean Creolite, from an anthology of black narratives that emerged during the transatlantic slave trade, and from Ian Baucom’s philosophical history of the Zong massacre of 1781.

Primary Texts

Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

Fred D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts

Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies

Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic

Readings available on Canvas

Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic  

Vincent Caretta ed. Unchained Voices 

ENGL 8500 - Black Women's Rhetorics

T 02:00PM-04:30PM
Tamika Carey

This seminar explores Black women’s rhetorical practices as a critical tradition. Through an interdisciplinary lens grounded in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies scholarship and informed by work in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and literary criticism, we will work to identify the techne, the praxis, and the implications of Black women’s choice to use written, visual, and aural strategies to shape and reshape themselves and their worlds. By necessity, we will consider questions such as: how do Black women define and name conditions of their subjectivity and the constraints to their public participation and livelihood? What is the connection between Black feminist thought and Black women’s literacies? Which genres, arguments, and strategies do they rely upon to address personal or sociopolitical concerns? And what might Black feminist/womanist rhetorical criticism or pedagogy involve? Ideally, this work will enable us to outline how Black women’s rhetorics operate as interpretive, interventionist, and instructional resources. Our readings will involve a combination of primary texts and critical writings. The scholars and public intellectuals we are likely to engage include: Jacqueline Jones Royster, Marcyliena Morgan, Elaine Richardson, Gwendolyn Pough, Carmen Kynard, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Beverly Guy Sheftall, Audre Lorde, Brittney Cooper, and Moya Bailey. Assignments may include: a discussion leading and course presentation activity, short weekly writing assignments, a brief annotated bibliography, and a seminar-length essay.

ENGL 8540 - Race-Making and Romanticism

R 03:30PM-06:00PM
Taylor Schey

This course explores how British literature of the Romantic era (1780s – 1820s) registers and participates in processes of race-making that have shaped the modern world. Taking our cue from theoretical readings in Black studies, we’ll investigate how the racial order of chattel slavery was insidiously strengthened during the historical period in which its economic infrastructure began to be dismantled. While we’ll study some poems and novels that directly address the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery (e.g. abolitionist poetry; The Woman of Colour; Mansfield Park) and a couple that reflect the popularization of racial science (e.g. Frankenstein), we’ll be especially interested in interrogating how the development of seemingly unrelated political movements (e.g. white feminism; popular radicalism), literary conventions (e.g. the ballad revival; the aesthetics of the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque), and Romantic ideals (e.g. community, liberty, the power of poetry, the human) are connected to the broader consolidation of antiblackness and white-supremacist logics in the nineteenth century. This seminar satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement. It also introduces students to an influential tradition of theoretical work in Black studies.

Authors include Jane Austen, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hannah More, Mary Robinson, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Southey, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth; theorists include Rizvana Bradley, Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, bell hooks, Christina Sharpe, Hortense Spillers, Rei Terada, Alexander Weheliye, Frank Wilderson, and Sylvia Wynter.

ENGL 8560 - Poetry in a Global Age

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM
Jahan Ramazani

How does poetry articulate and respond to the globalizing processes that accelerate in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? In this seminar, we consider modern and contemporary poetry in English in relation to transnational, global, world literary, and postcolonial theory and history. Issues to be explored include the historical memory of colonization and enslavement, global challenges such as war and the climate crisis, and transformations of world-traveling poetic forms and strategies. We closely read the vibrant anglophone poetries of India, Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, Ireland, Black and Asian Britain, and diasporic and Indigenous America, which bring new worlds, new idioms, and new literary possibilities into English. Postcolonial writers enrich poetry in English by hybridizing local traditions with the poetic inheritances of the global North. Forged in response to an increasingly globalized world, the innovations of transnational modernist writers provide crucial tools that the poets of the global South repurpose. Featured writers include postcolonial poets such as Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Lorna Goodison, NourbeSe Philip, A. K. Ramanujan, Okot p’Bitek, Christopher Okigbo, and Daljit Nagra, and modernists like T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and Claude McKay.

ENGL 8560 - Caribbean Sci-Fi and Fantasy

M 05:00PM-07:30PM
Njelle Hamilton

Superheroes, space operas, time travel, futuristic tech — the stuff of dreams and the subject of countless popular literary and cultural works over the past century. Far too long featuring mainly white male heroes and US or European settings, sci-fi and fantasy (SF/F) have become increasingly diverse in recent years, even as reframed definitions open up archives of previously overlooked black and brown genre writing from across the globe. Still, the Caribbean is often ignored, or imagined either as a rustic beach or a technological backwater. In this seminar, however, you will encounter authors and auteurs (Indiana, Hopkinson, Ross, Diaz, et al) from the English-, Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean working at the cutting edge of SF/F, and discover novels and stories that center Caribbean settings, peoples, and culture, even as they expand the definition of genre. We’ll read these novels and stories alongside important Caribbean and SF theory and criticism (expect roughly 300-500pp/wk of reading) to generate critical discussion around the limits of mainstream terms and discourses in SFF and formulate region-specific language and frameworks.

In addition to exposing you to Caribbean literary studies, critical debates and methods, this course encourages you to deepen as well as experiment with modes of academic scholarship. In tandem with the ways these Caribbean SFF texts interrogate form and narrative—especially in response to colonization and the hegemony of Western epistemologies—I’ll challenge/inspire you to think about un-disciplining academic writing. What projects might you imagine that match the level of #joysparking that reading these novels bring you, and that demonstrate Caribbean study as praxis? For whom will you write? What platforms, technologies and formats do those readers/listeners/thinkers frequent? How can scholarly writing (or other formats of disseminating research) become an act of radical speculation in its own right?

ENGL 8596 - Form and Theory of Poetry: What is Lyric? 

W 02:00PM-04:30PM
Sumita Chakraborty

Lyric poem, lyric voice, lyric speaker, lyric reading: these and other similar terms share one strange, variously theorized, and often-contested word at their core. This course will explore a range of theories of the lyric from Aristotle and Horace to more contemporary figures like Gloria Anzaldúa, Édouard Glissant, and the scholars who make up the recent turn to “New Lyric Studies.” We will also explore how poetic schools that critique the lyric—such as conceptual poetry and language poetry—define and contest it. MA, MFA, and PhD students are all most welcome, as the assignments for this course will include both creative and critical options.

ENGL 8598 - Form and Theory of Fiction: The Short Story 

T 02:00PM-04:30PM
Kevin Moffett

A foray into the short story as a discrete form, its constraints and possibilities. We’ll consider how story writers distill time and compress language to generate volatility and produce resonant echoes in a confined space. We’ll discuss Poe’s single effect and other apparent truisms and entertain, examine, revise, and perhaps debunk them. We’ll read minimalists, maximalists, and mediumalists, the formulaic and the formally inventive. Texts will be chosen with the aim of showing the plasticity and playfulness of the form: possibly Chekhov, Angela Carter, Barthelme, Murakami, Edward P. Jones, Joy Williams. From week to week students will read and write briskly in a variety of modes, culminating in a story project in the second half of the semester.

ENGL 8900 - Writing Pedagogy Seminar

T 06:00PM-08:30PM
Heidi Nobles

ENGL 8900 - Writing Pedagogy Seminar

W 10:00AM-12:30PM
Steph Ceraso

ENGL 8900 - Writing Pedagogy Seminar

Jeb Livingood

ENGL 9580 - Queer Theory

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
Mrinalini Chakravorty

This graduate course is a survey of queer studies as a discipline. It situates the emergence of sexuality as an analytic of study for the humanities through a survey of influential foundational texts of the field. The course also engages the most important contemporary debates that is shaping our understanding of the history of sexuality.

ENGL 9995 - Dissertation Seminar

M 09:30AM-12:00PM
Bruce Holsinger