Spring 2026 Graduate Course Descriptions

ENGL 6210: Old English Literature

Prose and poetry of the Old English period, exclusive of Beowulf, with emphasis on poetry. Works will be read in Old English, with supplementary translations. Additional Requirements for Graduate Students: Graduate students will be responsible for a more extensive syllabus, for secondary reading, and for more ambitious, sophisticated writing. 

6710: American Writing, 1820–1865

This class examines the major literary works of the mid-nineteenth century United States. We will focus on five writers who lived through this era and wrote very perceptively about it: Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. We will read these authors’ most significant works and consider a range of questions, such as: How are these writers connected to their cultural and intellectual contexts? How do their distinctive styles and perspectives evolve over time? And why do so many of these texts—such as Moby-Dick and Dickinson's poems--continue to resonate in the 21st century? To answer such questions, we will read their work slowly and carefully. We will also dive in to recent scholarship (as well as some older scholarship) in nineteenth-century U.S. literary studies, considering an array of interpretive approaches and methodologies, from new materialism to biographical criticism.

Required texts:

• Emily Dickinson, Collected Poems
• Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom
• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
• Henry David Thoreau, Walden 

ENGL 6830: “Aesthetics and its (Dis)contents”

A survey of aesthetic theory and criticism, with an emphasis on how art, beauty, and the sublime (among other aesthetic categories such as ugliness, taste, hipness, and gimmickry) have been theorized vis-à-vis emancipatory politics in the capitalist world system.  Readings will include selections by Kant, Pierre Bourdieu, Herbert Marcuse, Susan Sontag, Jacques Rancière, Sianne Ngai, and Ariella Azoulay; as well as a selection of cinema, posters, photography, murals, and manifestos from case studies ranging from the Black Panthers and Cuban Revolution to the Sandinista Revolution and the Zapatistas. 

ENGL 6864: History and Theory of the Novel

This class will examine theories of the novel, its development, and its significance, from Lukács and Bakhtin to the present. Although our critical readings in classic theory will center on Michael McKeon’s Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (2000), one of our goals will be to consider novels and novel theory for the twenty-first century. Our encounters with genre theory and literary history will be rounded out by reading a set of novels from the eighteenth century to the present. (Note that this will be a graduate class, not an undergraduate class with added graduate seats.) 

ENGL 6900W: Academic Writing

Students will learn about and practice writing in different academic genres. The course will culminate with students producing a substantial literary research project, like a thesis chapter or essay submitted for publication.

ENGL 6999: Practicum in Professionalization

Professionalization strategies for graduate students in English studies.

ENGL 6770/8720: Topics in African American Lit / Seminar in African American Lit

Focuses on masterpieces of African American Literature, from the nineteenth-century to now. We will study enduring works by such writers as Harriet Jacobs, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Honore Fannone Jeffers that reflect key moments in the evolution of African American literature and transatlantic influences and interplays.  I'm assigning primary texts and secondary criticism to discuss which are also mainstays in the undergraduate classroom and widely available as either inexpensive paperbacks or online texts or both, as I know many of you expect to teach for all or a portion of your careers.  The final reading list is still in development, so I welcome suggestions from those of you planning to enroll in the course.

ENGL 8500: Seminar in British Romantic Literature

This course will consider the place of the Caribbean in the study of British Romantic Literature. The Romantic period (1780-1830) saw the expansion and solidification of the British Empire, movements for antislavery and abolition, and the Haitian and French Revolutions. We will examine how the literature of this period was shaped by Britain’s investment in slavery and by its relation to its Caribbean colonies. We will read Romantic poetry (by Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Opie, Rushton, Byron, and more), fiction (likely Mansfield Park and the Woman of Colour; possibly Emmanuel Appadocca, or Blighted Life: A Tale of the Boucaneers), and prose accounts of conditions in the Caribbean, written by both enslaved people and by plantation owners. We will consider literary and historical responses to the Haitian Revolution, both from the time and more recent texts, like C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins. And we will engage with exciting recent scholarship on Romantic literature and the Caribbean.

In addition to a close look at Britain’s relation to the Caribbean during the Romantic period, this course will also consider the afterlives of Romanticism in the Caribbean. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, and continuing long into the twentieth, Caribbean students were educated in British literature, especially Romantic poetry. Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” is one of the most famous examples of the frustrations of colonial education. We will read the British poetry that was used most often in imperial education (by Hemans, Byron, and Wordsworth) and we will work directly with the schoolbooks and anthologies that were sent from Britain to its colonies. This course will consider what role Romantic literature played in the imperial project. We will also read twentieth-century poems by Caribbean poets, responding to the Romantic poetry of their educations. 

ENGL 8800: Seminar in Creative Writing

Advanced instruction in the craft of writing. Details forthcoming.

ENGL8850: Seminar in Critical Theory

This graduate seminar takes as its subject "Transgender Fictions of the Archive". It will combine trans and queer critical theory and archival theory, with archival study, and modern literatures and creative approaches that centre on transgender archival work. This course is intended to provide students with a grounding in applying critical theory to research work. The overarching thesis of the course is that the “transgender archival novel” can be read alongside trans theories of the archive as a new entry way into archival research and study. Reading will include critical work by Susan Stryker, Jack Halberstam, Saidiya Hartman, and K.J. Rawson; novels by Jordy Rosenberg, Isaac Fellman, and shola von reinhold; alongside visits to archives and special collections. Students will work through the process of developing an archival project, presenting it to others, and writing it up for a wider audience. Together we will think through the ethics and boundaries of writing and researching minority populations. The course welcomes students in literature and creative writing.