600 Level Courses
- ENGL 664: Advanced Topics in Women and Literature
- Topic: Victorian Women’s Writing: This course explores how Victorian women writers interrogated Victorian constructions of femininity, addressed female agency, voice, and subjectivity, and investigated intersectionality, by dramatizing the interplay of multiple identities produced by class, ethnicity, gender, and dis/ability. We’ll examine Victorian literary feminism’s beginnings in the fiction of Charlotte Bronte, its mid-Victorian manifestations in George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dinah Muloch Craik, and Elizabeth Gaskell, and the emergence of the New Woman in late Victorian writing by George Egerton, and Amy Levy. We’ll read prose by Victorian feminists, and place these writings in conversation with contemporary feminism. (Combined with ENGL 464)
- ENGL 631: Contemporary Issues: Texts and Concepts
- Topic: Baltimore–Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: What does The Negro Motorist’s Green Book, a travel guide published during the Jim Crow era, have to do with the 2015 Baltimore uprising? Why do some in Baltimore have a life expectancy that is 14 years shorter than others in different areas of the city? How does spatial mobility affect the economic lives of those living in Baltimore? Questions like these will motivate this course. We will take a historical perspective that aims to unravel the complex intersections among rhetoric, race, and technology in the United States, so that we can better understand Baltimore today. Consequently, we will examine how race was constructed rhetorically and technologically from the abolition of slavery through the digital era with apps like Twitter and YouTube. (Combined with ENGL 493.02)
- ENGL 625: Material Culture and Production
- Topic: Theories of Creativity and Play: Albert Rouzie argues that “the deeply entrenched divisions between work and play, seriousness and frivolity, and order and chaos. . . ultimately impoverished our culture’s approach to literacy” (27). This course examines how these divisions came about and explores how recent attempts to anneal the work/play split (i.e., to take play seriously and recognize its connections to critical engagement), facilitate our abilities to make and negotiate meaning in a rapidly-changing world. The course will also focus on myths about, and approaches to, creativity. Throughout the semester we will be exploring ways that theories of play might inform and transform creative-critical practice. (Combined with ENGL 493.01)
- ENGL 610: Seminar in Genre Studies
- Topic: Versions of Pastoral 1500-1699: Versions of the pastoral genre permeate Renaissance literature. Originally a lyric form, pastoral developed to include prose romance, drama, and even epic. The genre provided a coded means to reflect on contemporary politics, culture, class, and mores. This course breaks the pastoral code, analyzing the artificiality of the genre–shepherds, rustics, idealized pastures, magical forests–in the context of literary and historical changes. The class concentrates on English authors such as Christopher Marlowe, Raleigh, Philip Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, Milton, and Andrew Marvell. Graduate students will explore the background in Theocritus, Virgil, Petrarch, Sannazaro, and Montemayor. (Combined with ENGL 410)
- ENGL 607: Language in Society
- In this course, students will study written texts and oral language exchanges in order to learn how language functions in various social settings. They will master skills and methods of sociolinguistic inquiry in the context of actual discourse communities. Students will produce research findings that contribute to current debates in sociolinguistics.
- ENGL 604: Advanced Topics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature
- Topic: Shakespearean Appropriation: This course will discuss adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare plays as they appear on film, stage, and printed page. To “appropriate” is to make something your own; that process tells us as much about the work of art being appropriated as it does about those responsible for it. We will engage that dynamic by examining a selection of Shakespeare’s plays in all their complexity and by thinking through the practices of adaptation and appropriation in recent decades. We will discuss issues of authorship and intertextuality, social contexts and cultural legacy. We will ask when Shakespeare stops being Shakespeare and becomes something new. (Combined with ENGL 413)
700 Level Courses
Master’s thesis research is conducted under the direction of a faculty member. Six credit hours are required for the Master’s degree with thesis.
In this independent study course, the Masters’ Portfolio is created under the directed of a graduate faculty member. Three credit hours are required for the Masters’ degree with portfolio.
This course provides students with the opportunity to study independently any aspect of texts, technologies, and literature not covered by regular course offerings.
Please also check other graduate offerings in MLLI, GWST, AMST, and LLC for courses relevant to your interests.