ENGL 5040a / CPLT 5140a / GMAN 5140a, What the University Was  Paul North

After this course, you might not know exactly where the university is going, but you should be able to say what it was once supposed to be, in its “modern” inception in Germany and in latter day materializations around the planet. The course is the interpretation of a particular dream. Who dreamed the dream of an institution that could be anywhere and contain everything important? How did its theorists think the unique nexus of power, economics, histories, and architecture that is, ideally at least, the university? How did they imagine it, given that it is a highly conflictual entity, riding the forefront of some transformations and at the same time codifying and regulating knowledges and social potentials? We read texts from the global archive called “critical university studies,” concentrating on articulations of the problems in theoretical texts. These include Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education, Nietzsche’s Anti-Education, Derrida’s Eyes of the University, Willy Thayer’s Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s Undercommons, and Roderick Ferguson’s The Reorder of Things.
M 3:30pm-6:30pm

ENGL 5761a / AFAM 5610a / AMST 6612a / FREN 7610a, Caribbean Literary and Cultural Studies  Marlene Daut

This course examines eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing (in translation, where applicable) by writers from the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone islands that make up the Caribbean. Haitian independence in 1804 ushered in a vibrant and diverse print culture that included poetry, plays, newspapers, and historical writing. From the pages of La Gazette Royale d’Hayti (1811–1820), to the poems of Jean-Baptiste Romane (1807–1858), to the historical writings of Louis-Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre (1776–1806), to the operas of Juste Chanlatte (1766–1828), there arose a distinct nineteenth-century literary culture in Haiti. Beginning with national literary developments in Haiti, this course expands to consider writing from Barbados, Cuba, Trinidad, Jamaica, Antigua, and Bermuda. These writings, both fictional and non-fictional, help us to think about whether and/or how a coherent early Caribbean literary tradition developed across geographical, linguistic, national, and imperial lines.
W 9:25am-11:15am

ENGL 5820b / AMST 6627b / FILM 6020b / RLST 6600b, Media and Religion  John Peters and Kathryn Lofton

Media and religion are devices of information and agencies of order. This course proceeds from the possible synonymy of its organizing terms, using as a form of weekly debate the relationship between media and religion. Readings think about how religion and media generate meanings about human doings and their relations with ecological and economic systems while also being constitutive parts of those systems. Students develop projects that allow them to explore a relationship between concept and subject in humanistic study.
M 3:30pm-5:20pm

ENGL 6137a / AFAM 8250a / AFST 9937a, African Urban Cultures: Mediations of the City  Stephanie Newell

This course approaches the study of African cities and urbanization through the medium of diverse texts, including fiction, nonfiction, popular culture, film, and the arts, as well as scholarly work on African cities. Through these cultural “texts,” attention is given to everyday conceptualizations of the body and the environment, as well as to theoretical engagements with the African city. We study urban relationships as depicted in literature and popular media in relation to Africa's long history of intercultural encounters, including materials dating back to the 1880s and the 1930s. Previously ENGL 937.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

ENGL 6500a / LING 5000a / MDVL 5700a, Old English I  Emily Thornbury

The essentials of the language, some prose readings, and close study of several celebrated Old English poems.
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

ENGL 6502b / LING 5010b / MDVL 6051b, Beowulf and the Beowulf Complex  Emily Thornbury

A close reading of Beowulf in Old English, within the modern and medieval critical landscapes. Prerequisite: a strong working knowledge of Old English (typically ENGL 500, or the equivalent).
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

ENGL 6535a / CPLT 5550a / MDVL 6035a, Postcolonial Middle Ages  Marcel Elias

This course explores the intersections and points of friction between postcolonial studies and medieval studies. We discuss key debates in postcolonialism and medievalists’ contributions to those debates. We also consider postcolonial scholarship that has remained outside the purview of medieval studies. The overall aim is for students, in their written and oral contributions, to expand the parameters of medieval postcolonialism. Works by critics including Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Leela Gandhi, Lisa Lowe, Robert Young, and Priyamvada Gopal are read alongside medieval romances, crusade and jihād poetry, travel literature, and chronicles.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

ENGL 6576b / ITAL 6578b, Medieval Women Mystics: Piety and Disobedience  Jessica Brantley and Jane Tylus

How was female sanctity practiced in medieval Europe? How did mystical engagement, in particular, spark both piety and disobedience? How was mysticism explored in writing and the arts by women themselves—especially those women who would challenge the status quo by asserting their own direct connections to the divine? Finally, how do we “access” these medieval minds today, and to what extent do contemporary theoretical concerns about gender identity, subjectivity, and alterity enable us to grapple with the intensely personal dynamics of mystical experience? We introduce these questions—and many others—in connection to the lives and works of five medieval women, beginning with Clare of Assisi, who fled her parents’ wealthy home in the middle of the night to join her radical neighbor, Francis. We consider the writings of Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, and Julian of Norwich, all formative figures in the crisis-ridden fourteenth century who unsettled the boundaries between private and public, religious and “profane.” Finally, we read the Book of Margery Kempe as a fifteenth-century record of how the mystical experiences of female saints inspired one bourgeois woman’s negotiation between her piety and her community. Historical, cultural, and religious topics to be considered include: the influence of the emerging vernaculars on religious movements and texts; the reassessment of Biblical figures such as Mary, Mary Magdalene, Judith, and Ruth; the impact of marginal, possibly heretical groups such as the Beguines; and the rise of the mendicant orders and the resulting changes to monastic and convent life. If our funding applications are successful, we take a course trip to England and Italy during spring break.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

ENGL 6611a / EMST 5611a, Renaissance Material Performance  Nicole Sheriko

This course surveys the wide range of early modern English performance from commercial drama (Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe) to court masques and street theater. Across this range, the course considers the materiality of performance, focused especially on theatrical objects, bodies, and spaces. Special attention is paid to intertheatrical ways these elements are recycled within and between performances to center theatrical matter as a physical and conceptual resource. Topics may include props, costumes, cosmetics, boy actors, puppetry, prosthesis, theater architecture, texts, animals, environment, and sensory experience. Readings offer an introduction to the practical craft of early modern theatermaking and critical frameworks for interrogating early modern materiality.
M 3:30pm-5:20pm

ENGL 6721a / EMST 5210a / PLSC 6720a, Edmund Burke and the Age of Empire  David Bromwich

A partial survey of the political writings of Burke in the context of the theory of empire and of revolution. We emphasize his writings on India and France, which reveal a common theme: innovation—sudden change in a way of life—always depends on violence, whether its agents are internal or external to the society. We touch on a wider subject: the birth of modern ideology, from the demand for systematic excuses to justify empire and revolution.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

ENGL 6742b / WGSS 7769b, Fiction, Didacticism, and Political Critique: 1789–1818  Jill Campbell

A study of writings that seek a specific effect in their reader—whether didactic instruction and moral formation, or an instigation to take action toward political change—and their uneasy alliance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the literary genre of prose fiction. How do writings that seek to inform or reform the real person or the real world put fictional narratives to use? How is the genre of the novel shaped, explicitly or implicitly, by writing to a specific “end”? Texts include novels, tales for children, life-writing, poetry with a “cause,” polemical essays; possible authors include Olaudah Equiano, Edmund Burke, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Inchbald, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Anna Barbauld, and Mary Shelley.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

ENGL 6774b, Henry James and Novel Theory  Ruth Yeazell

A close reading of selected novels and tales by Henry James in light of critical and theoretical commentary from James's day to ours. Focus both on James's development as a novelist and on the history of novel criticism in the twentieth century.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

ENGL 6830a, The Genre System Post-1945  Staff

This seminar considers the complex interactions between literary history and cultural history in the period from 1945 to the present. In the mid-twentieth-century US the “paperback revolution” coincided with “the new social movements.” How did these emergent cultural processes articulate with one another? We study the negotiations between the classical and mass cultural genre systems, the format-specific affordances of the paperback original, the speciation of genre fictions and consolidation of minority and ethnic literatures as publishing categories, the provincialization of literary fiction as one among many fiction genres, and the reincorporation of genre elements into literary fiction since then. Readings include literary theory, sociology of literature, and novels by authors like William Burroughs, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Colson Whitehead, Carmen Maria Machado, and Torrey Peters.
Th 9:25am-11:15am

ENGL 6847a / AFAM 6227a, Black Environmental Thought  Jonathan Howard

What if the greatest threat to life on Earth is not humanity in general, but the specific practice of human being indexed by whiteness? Since the advent of the “modern world,” race has been a defining, though often obscured, fault line along which the human enterprise has unfolded. So what would a racial accounting of humanity’s environmental harm entail? Who else are we as a species beyond the norms and aspirations enshrined by whiteness? And who must we become before Nature phases us out? If there is a future for humanity on Earth, it will not come apart from a serious reckoning with these questions. Guided by these questions, this course interrogates how the West has mutually imagined the category of the human as an aspiring independence from and dominion over Nature, on the one hand, and white, on the other. But beyond uncovering the unspoken whiteness of “the human” and its environmental harm, this course further takes up the alternative visions of human being and nature expressed within black nature writing. By undertaking a broad survey of this literary tradition, we consider the unique environmental perspectives of those, who, once considered no more than livestock, were the nature over which their masters ruled and consequently could not so easily imagine their humanity apart from it. Perhaps for this very reason, we may ultimately come to locate in black nature writing the resources for imagining a sustainable human life in nature, rather than apart from it.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

ENGL 6860a / CPLT 8810a / WGSS 9960a, Literary Theory  Caleb Smith

What is literary theory today, and what is its history? The aim of the course is to introduce students to central concepts in theory and explore their relation to method. We examine the variety of approaches available within the field of literary studies, including older ones such as Russian formalism, Critical Race Theory, New Criticism, deconstruction, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, as well as newer ones like actor-network theory and digital humanities research. We explore the basic tenets and histories of these theories in a way that is both critical and open-minded, and discuss their comparative advantages and pitfalls. The focus is on recurrent paradigms, arguments, and topics, and on transhistorical relations among our various schools of literary-theoretical thought. Readings might include work by René Wellek, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, Bruno Latour, Judith Butler, Northrop Frye, Fred Moten, and many others.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

ENGL 6868a, Literature and Political Modernity  Joseph North

This course introduces students to a range of thinking about the relationship between literature and political modernity (meaning roughly, for this purpose, the period from the French Revolution to the present). Our guiding questions are: Where does the modern category of the “literary” come from, and what social purposes has it served What are the key features that characterize political modernity? How can we understand these literary developments and these political developments as part of a common process? We try especially to examine the relationship between the distinctively modern conception of literature as aesthetic writing and two of the key figures that have structured political modernity: the left-center-right spectrum and the concept of “the People.”
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

ENGL 9090b, The Teaching of English  Sunny Xiang and Felisa Baynes-Ross

An introduction to the teaching of literature and of writing with attention to the history of the profession and to current issues in higher education such as the corporatization of the university, the role of the state in higher education, and the precarity of the humanities at the present time. Weekly seminars address a series of issues about teaching: guiding classroom discussion; introducing students to various literary genres; addressing race, class, and gender in the teaching of literature; formulating aims and assignments; grading and commenting on written work; lecturing and serving as a teaching assistant; preparing syllabuses and lesson plans. Formerly ENGL 990.
Th 9:25am-11:15am

ENGL 9091b, Public Criticism Workshop  Juno Richards

A workshop in which graduate students develop their critical writing about literature and culture for nonspecialist audiences. We survey writing for diverse publics in a range of venues in order to explore the formal and intellectual possibilities of criticism today, as well as in the recent past. Students experiment in forms such as the book review, long-form essay, lyric essay, and profile. Questions discussed include how to convey specialized knowledge to a broad audience; how to establish and manage style, voice, and address; how to combine criticism and reporting or narrative; how magazine editors select and develop the writing they publish; how to edit writing for publication; how to pitch a piece. We host class visits from editors and writers. Applications, including a short writing sample and short personal statement describing the student’s interest in public writing, are reviewed in fall 2025 for participation in the spring 2026 workshop.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

ENGL 9092a, Advanced Pedagogy  Heather Klemann

Training for graduate students teaching introductory expository writing. Students plan a course of their own design on a topic of their own choosing, and they then put theories of writing instruction into practice by teaching a writing seminar. Prerequisite: open only to graduate students teaching ENGL 114.
HTBA

ENGL 9093a, Prospectus Workshop  Elleza Kelley

A workshop in which students develop, draft, revise, and present their dissertation prospectuses, open to all third-year Ph.D. students in English.
M 3:30pm-5:20pm

ENGL 9095a, Directed Reading  Staff

Designed to help fill gaps in students’ programs when there are corresponding gaps in the department’s offerings. By arrangement with faculty and with the approval of the DGS.
HTBA