Fall 2026 Undergraduate Course Descriptions

Course Title Instructor
  Group 1  
4060 Old English Evans
  The language and literature of England before the Norman Conquest, with reading of selected texts.  
4230W Medieval Literature Camp
  Slow Reading, Slow Writing: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” 
The tendency of the English professor is to cram as much Cool Stuff into the syllabus as they can. This class is deliberately doing the opposite: instead of giving you a broad survey of Cool Stuff from Middle English literature (roughly 1300-1500), we’re just reading one long poem (and some related poetry), deeply and thoroughly. This is not only the best way to understand these texts well; it also replicates medieval reading practices, as we’ll discuss in class. Our main text, the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is among the masterpieces of English literature of any period, and will repay the slow, careful attention we will give it. We’ll read some shorter pieces as well – both medieval and contemporary – to frame and deepen our appreciation of this poem. 
While engaging in some deliberate slow reading, we will also practice the basic skills of the English major: close reading, word studies, poetry explication, and thoughtful engagement with secondary criticism. We’ll then apply these skills in a formal researched English essay in which you’ll engage deeply and richly with both Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the criticism that scholars have written about it. 
If you’re considering graduate school in any field (not just English, and not just medieval literature), this class is for you. If you want to level up your English major skill set, this class is also for you. If you just like to read and write about knotty, complex, mind-blowing stories – even when they’re nearly 650 years old – this class is definitely for you. 
Book lists and updates will be posted to my faculty website at https://ctcamp.franklinresearch.uga.edu/fall-2026-courses		  
4240 Chaucer Mattison
  Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and minor poems.  
4300 Elizabethan Poetry Jacobson
  Queen Elizabeth I was a powerful ruler and patron of poetry and the arts. She inspired and encouraged a vast amount of imaginative writing, from lyrical love poetry to classical myths of metamorphosis to religious allegorical fantasy Romance. This course will examine a variety of forms and authors of Elizabethan poetry, paying special attention to the ways that techniques in writing, printing, book-making, and art affected writers of poetry during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. We will also explore a fair amount of Elizabethan history and iconography, in order to understand the metaphors of power maintained by the Queen and referenced in the works she patronized. Authors will include Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Isabella Whitney, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Queen Elizabeth I herself. This is a hands-on course working with actual rare books and digitized first editions. We will spend some class time in Special Collections looking at (and touching!) some very old and beautiful books in the Hargrett rare book and manuscript collection.  
4320 Shakespeare I Abbouchi
  A survey of literature written by Shakespeare throughout his career.  
4340 Renaissance Drama Jacobson
  Poisoned skulls, Incestuous marriages, wax corpses, cross-dressed lesbian lovers, Turkish pirates, topsy-turvy universes: the world of Renaissance Drama does not belong to Shakespeare alone. In many cases, plays by his contemporaries and successors Ben Jonson, John Lyly, Thomas Middleton, John Webster and John Ford had crazier plots, more biting satire, and certainly reached more heights of dramatic violence, humor, ridiculousness and all-out chaos on stage. We will read six plays from a collection of playwrights, supplementing our reading with some history of Renaissance stagecraft and materials of performance, filmed performances of plays, and our own interpretations. We’ll spend the most time on Revenge Tragedy, but also explore the genres of City Comedy and Court Comedy. Throughout, we’ll examine the big questions these plays raise about the social order, gender, religion, race, and the power of performance.  
     
  Group 2  
4530 Victorian Literature Steger
  "Never since the beginning of Time was there, that we hear or read of, so intensely self-conscious a Society. Our whole relations to the Universe and to our fellow-man have become an Inquiry, a Doubt."  ~ Thomas Carlisle from "Characteristics"
The tumultuous years of Victoria's reign in England are hard to pin down with one word, so here are two: expansion and self-scrutiny.  The empire expanded, women's roles expanded, technological innovations and industrialization expanded, and so did class divides.  All of this change ushered in doubt and introspection, which authors explored in the literature of the period.  In this course, we will thus explore the ways that Victorian writers expressed their shifting and often-contradictory ideas about British identity.  
We will read poetry, essays, and fiction from a variety of voices, including the Brontes, Oscar Wilde, Mary Seacole, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Bram Stoker, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Michael Field, and Robert Louis Stevenson.  Our topics will include: Britain as/and empire; class and gender; Victorian monsters; poetic identity; faith, doubt and death, and questioning identity. 		  
4660 20th c. British & Irish Poetry Wasley
  British and Irish poetry since the 1890s.  
4685 Postcolonial Literature Santesso
  Throughout the semester, we will study literature penned by writers from former colonies. Focusing specifically on Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, we will explore the cultural, historical, and political issues raised by these texts, and observe the way they participate in postcolonial resistance. We will investigate a range of issues, including post-imperial identity, global migration, refugee crisis, race and gender, and national belonging in the aftermath of colonialism.   
  Group 3  
4723 Melville Marrs
 

This course explores the life and works of Herman Melville (1819-1891). Although he is often remembered only as the author of Moby-Dick (1851), Melville had a long and varied literary career that spanned nearly 45 years. From his first novel, Typee, to his final novella, Billy Budd, Melville produced a wide range of engaging and enriching works of verbal art, from lyrics and ballads to short stories, lectures, and prose-poem experiments. In this class, we will study Melville’s work from beginning to end, focusing on the development of his style, his intellectual influences, and his ideas about enduring philosophical concerns (e.g., human nature, good vs. evil, antiquity vs modernity, etc.). This course centers on Melville’s masterpiece, Moby-Dick, but situates it within the full arc of his career, examining how Melville’s writing and worldview evolved over time, and why Melville continues to matter today.

Required Texts: 

Herman Melville, Typee (Modern Library)

Melville, The Piazza Tales (Northwestern Newberry paperback edition)

Melville, Moby-Dick (Norton or Oxford)

Melville, The Confidence Man (Penguin)

Melville, Complete Poems (Library of America)

Melville, Billy Budd (Broadview)

  
4740 Southern Literature  
  The literature of the South from its roots through the modern renaissance. Writers may include Byrd, Cooke, Longstreet, Simms, Poe, Timrod, Lanier, Chopin, Twain, the Agrarians, Toomer, Roberts, Faulkner, Hurston, Welty, Porter, O'Connor, Wolfe, Percy, Crews, Berry, Kenan, Tyler, Dickey, Chappell, Alice Walker, and McCarthy.  
4790 Topics in American Literature McKnight
  A special topic not otherwise offered in the English curriculum. Topics and instructors vary from semester to semester.  
4791 American Autobiography McCaskill
  Exploration of the rich tradition of autobiographical narrative in America in a wide variety of settings and historical periods. The reading may focus on work written in any era, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, or center on particular thematic interests across the centuries.  
4860 Multicultural Literature Wei
  Topic: Refugee Narratives
In this course, we’ll examine how refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, and stateless subjects are represented and, in turn, how they represent themselves in fiction, poetry, performance, film, graphic novels, and digital games. We’ll focus on refugee subjects and narratives in the 20th and 21st centuries—e.g., Jewish, Palestinian, Vietnamese, Hmong, Central American, Black migrants—and contextualize their displacement and lifeworlds by turning to critical refugee studies, law, anthropology, news media, border studies, history, and more. We’ll see how their lives, epistemologies, and art can illuminate the interconnected, root causes of displacement, such as xenophobia, war, capitalism, climate, and colonialism.		  
     
  Group 4  
4640 Film as Literature Romero
  Special Topic: :  Global Indigenous Film and Media

This class will interrogate the ways that global Indigenous writers, filmmakers, and artists use film and digital media to articulate Indigenous stories, and to respond to and attempt to correct false cinematic stereotypes.  We will critically explore a variety of different media formats (films, documentaries, animation, multimedia art installations, etc.) from tribal peoples throughout the world, especially from North America, the Arctic, New Zealand, and Australia.  We will examine the diverse ways that contemporary Native, First Nations, and Aboriginal artists assert existing Indigenous presence and connections to tribal homelands, in the face of mainstream media traditions that historically render them absent.  Topics for discussion will include (among others) the relationship between cinema and tribal traditions, especially storytelling traditions;  visual sovereignty; spectatorship; cinema and language preservation; and the ethics of film production.		  
4800W Creative Writing: Introduction to Fiction Kashyap
  Writers enrolled in this class will learn the technical aspects of writing fiction and leave the class convinced that vast reading, regular writing, and rewriting are the secrets of good writing. As we discuss how to create believable characters that jump off the page, vivid settings that are deep, unique, memorable, narratives that keep the readers hooked, and dialogues that are realistic and punchy, we will read a wide variety of short stories written by some of the best canonical and contemporary writers in the world: Gabriel Garcia Marquez from Colombia, Nadine Gordimer from South Africa, Indira Goswami from India, Chinua Achebe from Nigeria, Alice Munro from Canada, Haruki Murakami from Japan. We will also read several American literary giants, such as Flanery O' Connor, Ernest Hemingway, Joyce Carol Oates, and Louise Erdrich, to study the technical and imaginative choices writers make to make a story riveting and invigorating. Alongside, we will read remarks on the craft of storytelling, aesthetics, the writing process, etc. Students will be guided with regular writing prompts and receive feedback on their work-in-progress drafts during the workshop from peers as well as the instructor.   
4801W

Creative Writing: Intermediate Poetry 

This class is cross-listed with ENGL 4803W.  See course description below.

 Zawacki
4803W Creative Writing: Advanced Poetry Zawacki
 

Riverrun

This advanced workshop will challenge students to write poetry about, alongside, in confluence with, and perhaps even on rivers. While our writing practice will focus on verse—from traditional to experimental, lyric to documentary, discrete to serial, formal to free—our reading selections will draw from several genres and media. Beyond a slew of famous river poems, beginning with Achilles’ battle with Scamander late in The Iliad, poetry will include Jim Harrison’s The Theory and Practice of Rivers and Alice Oswald’s book-length poems A Sleepwalk on the Severn and Dart. Fiction might comprise Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River and Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, as well as Lisa Robertson’s forthcoming Riverwork. We will consider non-fiction by Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), William Least Heat-Moon (River-Horse), Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge), and John McPhee (Encounters with the Archdruid), in addition to Thoreau’s famous weeklong trip on the Concord and Merrimack. We’ll sample a few films—Herzog’s Fizcarraldo, say, and Polanski’s Chinatown, in addition to the stunning Watermark—and will engage with a few works of visual art, foremost Jen Bervin’s River installation and Curran Hatleberg’s photobook River’s Dream. The class will likely hold some sessions at the Georgia Museum of Art, the Odum School of Ecology, and the Hargrett rare book and manuscript library. We will welcome a couple visitors, namely, a poet and a community member who works along the local waterways. Finally, and with our fingers crossed: the class might feature a (voluntary) canoe trek down the Oconee.

  
4810 Literary Magazine Editing Maa/Bonnaffons
  Students will engage in all aspects of editing and producing a literary magazine or scholarly journal while learning about literary and academic culture through theoretical, aesthetic, critical, and practical components.  
4815 History & Future of the Book Sargan
  What is a book? And what are its affordances as a technology? This course will map the history of writing technologies from their earliest forms—on stone, clay, and wax—to the most recent developments. In doing so, it will suggest that technological change created points of rupture that offered space for new writing communities to form. As might be expected, the course will provide hands on opportunities for material engagement: we will spend time in the Special Collections Library and in the Book Lab as we learn to identify, make, and use different book objects. This course is an elective for the Undergraduate Certificate in Publishing.  
4820 Literary Theory Martini Paula
  Representative texts from Aristotle to Derrida and beyond, exemplifying a range of contemporary critical approaches and providing a historical context for current theoretical debates.  
4825 Topics in Literary Theory Woodhouse
  Game History: Archives, Narratives, Voices 
The history of games and gaming culture is often treated as trivia. However, the stories we tell about where games come from and what they have meant reveal just as much about our culture and values as they do about the games themselves. In this class, we will learn how to critically read histories to understand how a historian’s sources, beliefs, and storytelling strategies shape what we think we know about the history of video games. Along the way, we’ll learn about the history of tabletop gaming, genre-defining titles like Doom and Quake, and the internet movement Gamergate. As our final project, we will practice the crafts of archival research and nonfiction storytelling by weaving our own historical narratives about our favorite games and gaming cultures. Students will have the opportunity to write a longform piece of video game history or present their findings through a multimedia project.		  
4864 History & Theory of the Novel Menke
  The theory, history, and development of the novel as a literary form.  
4876 Fantasy Literature Bray
  Fantasy Literature is a deep critical dive into the fantasy genre, during which students will engage in the process of completing a proposal, bibliography, and conference-length paper. Students are encouraged to submit their proposals (with time to revise based on instructor feedback) to the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts which takes place in March each year and has its proposal submission deadline in late October. This semester, we will focus on mythopoeism, or myth-making, in contemporary fantasy, reading works including Circe by Madeline Miller and The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo.  
4899 Topics in Science Fiction McKnight
  A special topic in science fiction not otherwise offered in the English curriculum. Topics and instructors vary from semester to semester.  
4912S Writing Center Theory & Practice Hallman Martini
  A survey of important topics in writing center theory, with regular seminar-style discussion of how these theories work in our writing center tutoring practice.  
     
  3000-level courses  
3007 Spy Fiction Parkes
 
Reading spy novelists from Buchan to Herron, this class will trace the development of a distinctively modern fictional genre in its literary, cultural, and political historical contexts from late Victorian imperialism through the Cold War to the present.  The course focuses primarily on British writers and the ways in which they represent espionage in Britain and Europe.
 
As well as studying a number of primary texts, we will read in the history of spy fiction and espionage.  We will think about what spying and fiction have to do with each other.  And we will consider how spy fiction emerges from various popular genres during and after the modernist period in literature and the arts.  Other topics of discussion will include espionage and empire; the world wars and the Cold War; ideological conflict and nation-states; nationality and identity in the modern surveillance state; gender, sexuality, and the family; spies in literature and popular cinema and television.  
 
 
Novels to be studied will probably include the following:
Eric Ambler, Epitaph for a Spy 
John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps 
Len Deighton, The Ipcress File 
Ian Fleming, Casino Royale
Mick Herron, Slow Horses 
George Orwell, 1984 
John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold 
Helen MacInnes, Above Suspicion 

 

  
3300 Women in Literature Romero
  Special Topic:  Women Writers of Color

This class explores contemporary African American, American Indian, Latina, and Asian American women’s writing. We will analyze literary aesthetics and forms, and learn to think critically about the relationships between literature and cultures. Throughout the course we’ll discuss how women writers of color experiment with language, narrative voice, structure, temporality, and genre to better represent their experiences.   		  
3335 Literature and Law Santesso
  This course aims to connect legal theory and concepts (personhood, ownership, justice, human rights, immigration) to literary texts and ideas. How does literature embody law, both as a principle of literary construction and as an examination of justice? By analyzing works of literature (novels, memoirs, short stories, essays) alongside legal texts and thought, the course will investigate the mutual influence between literature and law. We will pay particular attention to questions such as gender, race, and religion in their relation to law and its depictions on an international platform. By the end of the semester, students will be familiar with key scholarship concerning the intersection of law and the humanities and will be able to skillfully analyze legal themes in literature, film, and other media.  
3340 Literature and Crime Camp
  Southern Gothic, Southern Noir 
Southern writers gravitate toward gritty brutality, local wrongs, and the buried truths that continue to haunt us -- just the stuff that makes for good crime fiction. In this class, we'll read contemporary southern writers of crime fiction through the lens of southern gothic (asking, in part, if there is such a thing) and the hard-boiled noir genre. We'll ask how the common tropes of southern gothic play out in crime fiction; where those villainized by such tropes can find a voice in this genre; and how noir, typically written within an urban setting, translates to the largely rural south. We'll attend to issues of genre as well as of class, race, place, and regional identity; interrogate these novels' relationship to incarceration, the military and policing practices; and, of course, ask whodunnit. (Spoiler alert: in these novels, not the butler!) 
Expect to read widely across southern writers from William Faulkner to Ace Atkins, writers well known and just coming onto the scene. This is crime fiction, so also expect the content to be difficult at times. You'll be writing regularly about the crime fiction we will read; your final project will be a public-facing book review of a novel not on the syllabus, so also expect to learn how to write a good, spoiler-free book review. 
Book lists and updates will be posted to my faculty website at https://ctcamp.franklinresearch.uga.edu/fall-2026-courses		  
3410 Literature and Media Martini Paula
  Literature in English in relation to forms of media, past or present, to media environments, and to media change. Depending on the instructor, the course may concentrate on literature in the changing media ecology of the twenty-first century, or on historical interactions between literature and other media.  
3450 Literature and War Wei
  Topic: War and Memory in Asian American Literature 
This course explores how Asian American writers confront the memory of war. We'll focus on literary representations of the Philippine-American War, Japanese American internment, the Korean War, and Vietnam War by “postmemory” Asian American writers, that is, the generation after who write not through direct recollection but through imaginative investment and creation. What forms of representation do these writers invent to remember the war and uncover the silences and gaps in the historical record? What are the ethical and political limits of memorializing a war one did not directly live through? And what role does postmemory serve for collective identification, mourning, reckoning, and reconstruction around these wars? To address these questions, we’ll explore poetry, novels, short stories, film, and graphic novels by Asian American artists writing in the aftermath of U.S. wars in the Pacific.		  
3530 Victorian Studies Reeves
  Victorian history is gruesome, silly, horrifying, awe-inspiring and preposterous by turns. Want to learn about the cholera outbreak that ripped through London and changed science? Argue over who was likely Jack the Ripper? Explore fashion trends such as ingesting tapeworms and raw meat face masks? Let’s not forget about baby farms, body-snatching, death photography, and how easy it was for (women) to end up in insane asylums. Let’s hit the high and low points of the Victorian era while reading some amazing literature.
Possible texts:
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
The Beetle by Richard March
The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells
Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Secret Commissions: An Anthology of Victorian Investigative Journalism edited by Stephen Donovan and Matthew Rubery
The Collected Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Women in White by Wilkie Collins
She by H. Rider Haggard
East Lynne by Ellen Wood		  
3540 Introduction to Publishing Shermyen
  Examination of the major processes that typically take place when publishing a book or periodical in the U.S. and some of the contexts that drive decision-making by editors, publishers, marketers, designers, and other professionals. We will explore the past, present, and future of the U.S. publishing industry.  
3570 Games and Culture Woodhouse
  An interdisciplinary survey of games through the lenses of literature, culture, and media. Topics and inquiries include games and media theory; history of games; issues of identity, race, gender, class, and ability in games; and worldbuilding concepts. Students have the opportunity to design games in capstone course projects.
 		  
3590W Technical and Professional Communication Howard
  Writing in the professional domains, with an emphasis on research methods, clear and accurate presentation of ideas and data, and computer-mediated communication.  
3800H Introduction to Creative Writing (Honors) Kashyap
  Good writing is the result of extensive reading that helps us learn the techniques of good prose and poetry effectively. In fact, most published writing, and popular, successful writing, is the result of successful and efficient application of storytelling techniques backed by vast reading. The more you read as a writer and practice regularly, the better you become. This class is your writing lab to grow and experience this. Focusing on poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, this class is specially designed for beginning writers who are serious about kick-starting their writing life or honing their existing skills. We will begin the semester with craft lessons on poetry, followed by a series of classes on the form and technique in fiction and creative nonfiction. The last four to five weeks of the semester will have two rounds of workshops: the short story workshop and the creative nonfiction workshop; students will receive feedback from the instructor separately on their poetry. Until mid-term, there will be regular writing prompts to initiate the writers into the habit of frequent writing. Readings will include poetry, short stories, novel excerpts, and essays. We will look at these texts as practitioners of the craft, as budding literary artists, to understand the technical and imaginative choices writers make to create impactful and enjoyable stories, essays, and poems. Students will bring a chunk of their writing to class for the workshops and receive feedback on it. Will submit a polished portfolio as the final exam.  
3800W Introduction to Creative Writing  
  Elements of writing poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction through selected readings and discussion of student writing.  
3850S Writing and Community Davis
  Study of how writing functions in the formation and maintenance of communities and the role of written communication in addressing community needs and concerns.  
4001 Careers for English Majors Lasek-White
  Careers for English Majors is a class that can be taken at any point during an English student’s academic career. In this course, you will: begin to build a professional network; take advantage of professionalization resources available to you on campus; utilize the tactics in Designing Your Life: How To Build A Well-Lived, Joyful Life in order to identify potentially-fulfilling careers; and gain the skills necessary to research positions and apply for them using rhetorically-targeted documents.

The course is taught by Professor Lasek-White, faculty in English and the Internship and Career Coordinator for Humanities Students. Prior to getting an MFA in Creative Writing, Professor Lasek-White worked in web journalism and public relations for various companies in Detroit.