100 Level Courses
- ENGL 190: The World of Language I
- ENGL 110: Composition for ESL Students
- ENGL 100: Composition
- SPCH 100: Public Communication
200 Level Courses
- ENGL 291: Introduction to Writing Creative Essays
- ENGL 281: Intermediate Exposition
- ENGL 273: Introduction to Creative Writing–Poetry
- ENGL 271: Introduction to Creative Writing–Fiction
- ENGL 243: Currents in American Literature
- Topic: Passing in American Literature: In 1959, John Howard Griffin began taking methoxsalen and spending hours beneath an ultraviolet lamp to darken his skin and explore the Black experience in the American South¿an experience he cataloged in Black Like Me. Similar narratives tracing the tradition of passing are common in American literary history, from Schuyler’s Black No More to Johnson’s Incognegro, Row’s Your Face in Mine, and Larsen’s Passing. This course will explore issues of minstrelsy, racial passing, skin bleaching, racial reassignment surgery, and indeterminacy in American literature and film in order to engage its discussions of race, culture, and identity across time.
- Topic: Confession and Protest Poetry: This course focuses on radically contemporary poetry (since 2015) that is concerned with how the personal and the political spheres overlap. The poetry that we will read tackles intimate details of its speakers’ lives while also critiquing systems of everyday racism and sexism, U.S. involvement in wars in the Middle East, increasing wealth accumulation for the rich, systematic genocidal oppression of native peoples, and current immigration policy. Authors may include: Layli Long Soldier, Solmaz Sharif, Claudia Rankine, Anne Boyer, Ada Limón, Nicole Sealey, and Ocean Vuong.
- ENGL 241: Currents in British Literature
- ENGL 226: Grammar and Usage of Standard English
- ENGL 210: Introduction to Literature
- SPCH 210: Interpersonal Communication
300 Level Courses
- ENGL 399: Introduction to Honors Project
- ENGL 398: Journalism Internship
- ENGL 393: Technical Communication
- ENGL 392: Tutorial in Writing
- ENGL 391: Advanced Exposition and Argumentation
- ENGL 385: New Media and Digital Literacies
- ENGL 383: Science Writing
- ENGL 382: Feature Writing
- ENGL 379: Principles and Practices in Technical Communication
- ENGL 369: Race and Ethnicity in U.S. Literature
- ENGL 351: Studies in Shakespeare
- Topic: Shakespeare Beyond Comedy: This course will focus on Shakespeare’s works poised between tragedy and comedy. We will begin by attending to the disquieting “Problem Plays.” These defy classification as comedy, containing serious, dark, and often cynical themes. Their resolutions are troubling; their crises unresolved. We will also examine Shakespeare’s late plays, or romances. Shakespearean romances are tragi-comedies that require acceptance of a last-minute swerve into the territory of a happy ending. They draw attention to their own improbability. We will grapple with these unusual, rich and complex dramas, consider their political and cultural significance, as well as issues of staging and theatre history.
- ENGL 332: Contemporary American Literature
- ENGL 324: Theories of Communication and Technology
- ENGL 321: Internship in Tutoring Writing
- ENGL 317: Literature and the Sciences
- Topic: Diagnosing Gender: This course will focus on the history of Western scientific and medical interactions with gender-nonconforming people. We will read first person accounts authored by trans and intersexed persons from the 19th through the 21st century, including Ralph Werther (Autobiography of an Androgyne), Aleshia Brevard (The Woman I Was Not Born to Be), Max Wolf Valerio (The Testosterone Files), Julia Serano (Whipping Girl) and Janet Mock (Redefining Realness). We will also examine the work of pioneering 19th and 20th sexologists whose studies contributed to contemporary understandings of sex, gender and sexual orientation.
- ENGL 315: Studies in World Literature
- Topic: Feast and Fast in Pre-modern Literature: This course will analyze the significance of feast and fast in Europe and Britain, 1000-1650. We will consider famine and food scarcity, economic class and diet, superstitions regarding foods, mythic foods like the Holy Grail, constructions of the body, “holy anorexia,” banquets and their social protocols, food waste, the spice trade, and the histories of bread and ale. We will read Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Rabelais; statutes on the work of fishmongers, victuallers, and alewives; writings on diet, fasting, and gluttony; and premodern cookbooks. We will ask how premodern persons constructed culinary and gastronomical worlds, whether in homes, taverns, or palaces.
- ENGL 308: American Literature: The Civil War to 1945
- Topic: Revolution in Form: This course studies how American literature responds to four major changes of the era: Reconstruction and post-Civil War racism; the rise of industrial capitalism; changing notions of gender or “first wave” feminism; and the impacts of the World Wars. Our special focus will be on how experimentation in form–including modernist fragmentation and avant-gardism, for example, responds to each of these categories, describing, unraveling, shaping, and critiquing them. Possible readings and authors include: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Kate Chopin, Sui Sin Far, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, selections from Fire!!, Gwendolyn Brooks, T.S. Eliot, and Robert Hayden.
- ENGL 307: American Literature: From New World Contact to the Civil War
- ENGL 302: Literary Methodologies and Research
- ENGL 301: Analysis of Literary Language
- ENGL 300: Texts and Contexts
400 Level Courses
- ENGL 499: Senior Honors Project
- ENGL 495: Internship
- ENGL 493: Seminar in Communication and Technology
- Topic: Rhetoric of Health and Medicine: While most people recognize the science of medicine, its social, cultural, and persuasive dimensions also play central roles in defining health and treating illness. This course examines symbolic practices related to health and medicine, with a focus on rhetorical strategies employed by physicians, health professionals, patients, and advocates. Class readings will cover scholarship in various disciplines as well as popular writing from newspapers, websites, blogs, and social media. Discussions and assignments will emphasize connecting theories of rhetoric and communication with current health debates, including how discourses of medicine intersect with issues of race, disability, gender identity, sexuality, and socioeconomic status.
- ENGL 486: Seminar in Teaching Composition–Theory and Practice
- ENGL 471: Advanced Creative Writing–Fiction
- ENGL 448: Seminar in Literature and Culture
- Topic: World War I: Poetry and Prose: World War I, known as the Great War, lasted from 1914-1918. Nearly 10 million soldiers and 8 million civilians died across Europe. The war eviscerated a generation of young men. Many of these men, along with some women, wrote striking verse, novels, and memoirs about their experiences. In this course, we will analyze their powerfully articulate reactions to trench warfare, poison gas attacks, food shortages, medical relief, the Conscription Act, and conscientious objection. Students will read such English, German, and French authors as Sassoon, Owen, Graves, Apollinaire, Rosenberg, Kipling, Brittain, Jünger, and Brooke.
- ENGL 416: Advanced Topics in Literature and Other Arts
- ENGL 413: Advanced Topics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature
- Topic: Pilgrimage and Material Culture: This course explores how pilgrimage narratives reflect very material modes of knowing in late medieval culture, through relics, bones, badges, paraphernalia, and the relic trade. We will study pilgrim traffic to the historical Tabard Inn in brothel-populated Southwark (London), and the pilgrimage “contract,” to understand commercial aspects of pilgrimage. How did medieval persons navigate material signs to make meaning of their world? Do objects have agency? Texts include Mandeville’s Travels; Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man; Dante’s Divine Comedy; Bill Brown’s Other Things; the Pilgrim’s “Guide to Santiago de Compostela”; and medieval anti-pilgrimage writings.
- ENGL 405: Seminar in Literary History
- Topic: American Periodical: Many of the early United States’ most influential women writers first published their work in American newspapers and magazines. These writers–whom Nathaniel Hawthorne notoriously labeled “a damned mob of scribbling women”–were crafting serial novels, advocating abolition and enfranchisement, discussing fashion and child-rearing, agitating for laborers’ rights, and provoking political debate in the space of the periodical. This course will consider how periodical writers harnessed this print medium’s distinctive potential to challenge conceptions of womanhood and experiment with literary form. Authors may include Judith Sargent Murray, Margaret Fuller, Pauline Hopkins, Louisa May Alcott, Ida B. Wells, and Zitkala-Ša.
- ENGL 400: Special Projects in English