Provisional University Bulletin (2026-2027)

• Minors
• Majors (BA)
• Master of Arts
• Doctor of Philosophy

Undergraduate Major in English

The department has three key goals in educating its students. First, students with a wide range of interests take our courses to learn about the various literary and cultural traditions that influence creative work in the English language. Second, we teach students to notice the striking and revealing features not only of literary works, but also of the texts that surround us in our daily lives. Third, those who choose to become English majors or minors acquire expressive and analytic skills that serve them well in many contexts. Seniors may pursue an honors essay or two-semester honors thesis to culminate the major.

Undergraduate Major in Creative Writing

Creative writing workshops have been taught at Brandeis since 1951. In 1977 Creative Writing became one of the English tracks, and in 2003 a major in its own right. It is also a popular choice as a minor. The Creative Writing Program is structured to allow flexible participation in its activities depending upon a student’s level of interest and commitment. The major consists of a combination of writing workshops, literature courses, studio or performance art, and independent study, culminating in a body of creative work of high caliber and a grasp of historical and contemporary literary currents. The major offers two honors tracks: a senior honors project and a senior honors thesis. Under the project option, the student works with a creative writing faculty mentor over one semester in the senior year to produce a short body of work. Under the thesis option, the student works with a creative writing faculty mentor over two semesters in the student’s senior year to produce a book-length collection of poetry or between 100 and 150 pages of fiction.

Graduate Program in English

The graduate program in English is designed to offer training in the interpretation and evaluation of literary texts in their historical and cultural contexts.

Undergraduate Major in English

The Department of English is committed to the study of literature, broadly construed, as well as the cultures and history surrounding its creation and reception. We study poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, film, popular culture, and digital media and place them in historical and geographical context for interpretation.

After completing the full range of courses required for the major, we expect our graduating majors to be able to demonstrate:

Core Skills

We expect our graduating majors to be able to demonstrate:

1. Close reading of literary and nonliterary texts with attention to their formal features.
2. Ability to contextualize texts and arguments within, (a) relevant literary histories and movements, (b) relevant world cultures, and/or (c) the social and political situations in which they were written or read.
3. Expertise in writing—including clear, convincing arguments, appropriate voice, and stylistic range.

Knowledge

Study of literary texts and criticism across different racial, ethnic, cultural, geographical, historical, generic traditions in the English-speaking world.

Social Justice

The study of English helps students participate as informed, articulate, and active citizens in a multilingual and multicultural society.

Writing Intensive

Learning goals for the English major include the expectation that students will develop as one of three core skills “Expertise in writing—including clear, convincing arguments, appropriate voice, and stylistic range.” The Writing Intensive requirement will support this goal by ensuring that students receive discipline-specific writing instruction and develop facility with the genres of writing necessary for literary and cultural analysis.

Oral Communication

Learning goals for the English major state our expectation that students will develop skills in “close reading of literary and nonliterary texts with attention to their formal features” as well as the ability to “contextualize texts and arguments within, (a) relevant literary histories and movements, (b) relevant world cultures, and/or (c) the social and political situations in which they were written or read.” Such close readings and contextualizations are regularly practiced in classroom discussion of assigned texts.  The oral communication requirement will ensure that students can demonstrate their own skills as well as receiving information conveyed by the instructor.

Digital Literacy

The learning goals for the English major describe our mission as studying “poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, film, popular culture, and digital media and place them in historical and geographical context for interpretation.” The Digital Literacy requirement will secure the place of digital media objects in our curriculum and require students to link their study of such objects to other forms of expression. By providing ways of examining and communicating about poetry, etc. in digital media, the requirement will also advance student knowledge of generic traditions and encourage their participation “as informed, articulate, and active citizens in a multilingual and multicultural society”—two additional goals of the major.

Undergraduate Major in Creative Writing

The primary goal for Creative Writing majors is developing a body of high caliber creative work—in fiction, poetry, or writing for the screen. In this pursuit, students will also gain a better grasp of the subtleties of language; develop an understanding of precision, logic, and attention to detail in writing; gain basic understanding of the publishing landscape; become more effective in editorial skills and oral communication; and become adept at close reading.

Students who major in Creative Writing take a combination of writing workshops, literature courses covering different periods and genres, and at least one studio or performing art class. Students who have been accepted for honors work independently with professors. This course of study builds a foundation for a lifetime of engagement with literature.

Upon graduation, students are prepared to continue their work as writers in the world as well as in graduate programs in literature and creative writing. Recent majors have gone on to publish work with national literary publications and presses and have used their degrees to secure positions in journalism, public relations, publishing, advertising, writing for television, online startups, and many other fields in which excellence in writing is required.

We expect our graduating majors to be able to demonstrate:

Core Skills

1. Create original works of literature.
2. Work through the stages of revision.
3. Develop the ability to give constructive feedback to other writers in written editorial comments and workshop discussion.
4. Become proficient in close reading skills.

Knowledge

1. Comprehensive understanding of the basic elements of the genres that are the primary focus of the student's studies. For example, scene writing, story arc, and conflict in fiction; the poetic line, rhythm, and diction for poets; fact, imagination, and structure for creative nonfiction; dialogue and scene in screenwriting; nuances of words and syntax for all genres.
2. An understanding of the student's literary influences and aesthetic values as a writer.

Social Justice

1. An awareness of how a student's own work is in conversation with larger, global literary traditions or movements/conversations.

Writing Intensive

1. Write a minimum of 25 pages of fiction, 12 poems, or 30 pages of screenplay. 
2. Develop the ability to thoughtfully and thoroughly revise work based on feedback from instructor and peers.

Oral Communication

1. Provide clear, concise, and detailed oral feedback to peers on creative work discussed in the workshop.
2. Incorporate feedback about effectiveness of oral communication from instructor in or outside of class and from peers.
3. Make an oral presentation of either a student’s own creative work or an analysis of published work in the relevant genre.

Digital Literacy

1. Create work in the relevant genre in a digital form.
2. Develop the ability to incorporate feedback from instructor on the above requirement.
3. Gain familiarity with digital tools related to the genre.

Graduate Program in English

Master of Arts in English

Core Skills

Students will be able to:

1. assess and use diverse scholarly methods for researching literary production, circulation, reception, and meaning.
2. formulate significant research problems in literary history and theory.
3. use archives, special collections, primary documents, and other resources for researching cultural and social histories related to literary history.
4. communicate complex ideas about literature and other arts to different publics, including students, humanities scholars, and general audiences.

Knowledge

Students will develop:

1. expertise in specific fields in literary and cultural studies.
2. detailed knowledge about disciplinary methods and practices, including the history of the discipline and interdisciplinary innovations.
3. familiarity with academic and scholarly institutions and organizations related to humanities work.

Social Justice

Students will contribute:

1. to conversations about the role of literature and other arts in mobilizing ethical responses to oppression, articulating the stakes of social conflict, commemorating resistance to domination, and imagining justice.
2. diverse perspectives on the role of literature and other arts across many communities and traditions.
3. insights into pedagogical practices based on diversity, equity, inclusion, and empowerment.

Joint Degree of Master of Arts in English & Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Core Skills

Students will be able to:

1. assess and use diverse scholarly methods for researching literary production, circulation, reception, and meaning.
2. formulate significant research problems in literary history and theory.
3. use archives, special collections, primary documents, and other resources for researching cultural and social histories related to literary history.
4. communicate complex ideas about literature and other arts to different publics, including students, humanities scholars, and general audiences.

Knowledge

Students will develop:

1. expertise in specific fields in literary and cultural studies, particularly as these are engaged with theories of gender and struggles for women’s equality.
2. detailed knowledge about disciplinary methods and practices, including the history of the discipline and interdisciplinary innovations.
3. familiarity with academic and scholarly institutions and organizations related to humanities work.

Social Justice

Students will contribute:

1. to conversations about the role of literature and other arts in mobilizing ethical responses to oppression, articulating the stakes of social conflict, commemorating resistance to domination, and imagining justice.
2. diverse perspectives on the role of literature and other arts across many communities and traditions.
3. insights into pedagogical practices based on diversity, equity, inclusion, and empowerment.

Doctor of Philosophy in English

Core Skills

Students will be able to:

1. assess and use diverse scholarly methods for researching literary production, circulation, reception, and meaning.
2. formulate significant research problems in literary history, theory, and pedagogy.
3. use archives, special collections, primary documents, and other resources for researching cultural and social histories related to literary history.
4. communicate complex ideas about literature and other arts to different publics, including students, humanities scholars, and general audiences.
5. develop student-centered and inclusive pedagogical techniques, original curricula, and collaborative practices within teaching communities.
6. pursue publication and related strategies for circulating ideas and knowledge.

Knowledge

Students will develop:

1. expertise in specific fields in literary and cultural studies.
2. detailed knowledge about disciplinary methods and practices, including the history of the discipline and interdisciplinary innovations.
3. familiarity with academic and scholarly institutions and organizations related to humanities work.

Social Justice

Students will contribute:

1. to conversations about the role of literature and other arts in mobilizing ethical responses to oppression, articulating the stakes of social conflict, commemorating resistance to domination, and imagining justice.
2. diverse perspectives on the role of literature and other arts across many communities and traditions.
3. insights into pedagogical practices based on diversity, equity, inclusion, and empowerment.

English

There are no prerequisites for declaring the major, and students may declare at any time; the first step is an appointment with the undergraduate advising head (UAH), who will assign a suitable adviser based on a student’s interests. Prospective majors are encouraged to take two or three courses in the department in their first and second years. Courses with numbers below 100 are especially suitable for beginning students.

Creative Writing

Students interested in the Creative Writing Program may find more information below.

Candidates for admission should review application requirements listed on the GSAS website.

For additional information, see the GSAS Admissions section of the bulletin.

MA and Joint MA Programs

Candidates for admission should have a strong background in English or a related field.

PhD Program

Candidates for admission should have a strong background in English or a related field. Students may enter the doctoral program with an MA degree or earn an MA in English en route to the doctoral degree.

Ulka Anjaria
South Asian literatures and film. Postcolonial literature and theory. Narrative theory. The global novel. Interdisciplinary approaches. Literary theory.

Elizabeth Bradfield, Co-Director of Creative Writing
Poetry. Literary publishing.

John Burt
American literature. Romanticism. Composition. Philosophy of education. Literature
of the American South. Poetry.

Brandon Callender
19th and 20th century American Literature. African American literature. Film and media studies. Gender and sexuality studies.

Emilie Diouf
Anglophone and Francophone African literature. Caribbean literature. Critical Theory. Film/Media. Gender and Sexuality studies. Postcolonial literature and theory.

William Flesch, Undergraduate Advising Head
Shakespeare. History of poetry. Narrative theory. Literature and science. Film.

Caren Irr
Theory. Film and media studies. Contemporaneity. The novel.

Dorothy Kim
Medieval Literature. Drama. Digital Humanities.

Stephen McCauley, Co-Director of Creative Writing
Fiction.

Paul Morrison
Modernism. Literary criticism and theory. Film studies. Cultural studies.

John Plotz
Victorian literature. The novel. Politics and aesthetics.

Laura Quinney
Romanticism. Literature and philosophy. Eighteenth-century literature.

David Sherman, Chair
Global modernism. Elegy and the politics of commemoration. Public sphere theory. Comedy. Literature in the criminal justice system. Literature and philosophy.

Faith Smith
African and Afro-American literature. Caribbean literature.

Howie Tam
Asian American literature and film. Vietnam War literature and film. Critical refugee studies. Queer of color criticism. Vietnamese studies. Critical race studies of the U.S. and France.

Ramie Targoff
Renaissance literature. Shakespeare. Religion and literature. Italian literature. Women's writing.

Jerome Tharaud, Director of Graduate Studies
Early American literature and culture. Print culture and media. American religious history. Art history and visual culture. Theories of space and place. The American West.

Affiliated Faculty

(contributing to the curriculum, advising and administration of the department or program)

Robin Feuer Miller
German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature

Courses are listed by category after the descriptions of the majors and minors. Courses only fulfill the requirement under which they are listed. For other restrictions, please see the section, Special Notes Relating to Undergraduates.

Minor in English

Five courses are required, including the following:

1. At least four courses counted toward the minor must be ENG-designated or cross-listed and taught by an English Department faculty member. Only one creative writing workshop may count toward the minor. (All five courses can be taken within the English department.)
2. The approval of one cross-listed, study abroad, or transfer course towards the minor requirements is subject to the approval of the department's undergraduate advising head.
3. Students are encouraged to speak with the UAH or their faculty advisor about clustering or distributing courses counted toward the minor.
4. Advanced Placement credit does not count toward the minor. 
5. A student wishing to double-minor in English and Creative Writing may double-count two courses, leading to a total number of 8 courses required for the two minors combined.

Minor in Creative Writing

Five semester courses are required, including the following:

1. Three creative writing workshops (English courses ending in 9) which can focus on any genre. See course category breakdown for list of creative writing workshops. Such courses facilitate writing under direction in a creative and critical community and are offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.
2. Two English electives.
3. The approval of one cross-listed, study abroad, or transfer course towards the minor requirements is subject to the approval of the department's undergraduate advising head.
4. Advanced Placement credit does not count toward the minor.
5. A student wishing to double-minor in English and Creative Writing may double-count two courses, leading to a total number of 8 courses required for the two minors combined.

Courses are listed by category after the descriptions of the majors and minors. Courses only fulfill the requirement under which they are listed. For other restrictions, please see the section, Special Notes Relating to Undergraduates.

English Major

Ten semester courses are required, including the following:

1. Two semester courses dealing primarily with literature in English written before 1800. By definition, media/film courses cannot fulfill the pre-1800 literature distribution requirements. See the listing of courses below. 
2. Two semester courses dealing primarily with literature in English written after 1800. By definition, meda/film courses cannot fulfill the post-1800 literature distribution requirements. See the listing of courses below.
3. One course from each of the following three categories:
   1. Literary Theory
   2. Media/Film
   3. Multicultural World Anglophone

Multicultural courses are those that focus on literature, film, or new media works by ethnic or racial minorities within the US or Great Britain; World Anglophone courses focus on literature, film, or new media works in English outside the United States and England (e.g., Indian, African, or Caribbean literature). See the listing of courses below.

4. Three elective courses. These may include any course offered or cross-listed in the department with the following exceptions: no more than one creative writing workshop may be counted as an elective. A maximum of three courses taken outside the department may be counted toward the major. This restriction includes cross-listed courses taken at Brandeis and courses taken while on study abroad; it does not apply to transfer credits (see “Special Notes Relating to Undergraduates”). Cross-listed courses taught by English Department faculty are considered within the department and are not included in this restriction.
5. There is no double counting between course categories listed in items A through D (i.e., The Novel in India cannot count for both the World Anglophone and post-1800 requirements). By definition, media/film courses cannot fulfill the pre-1800 and post-1800 literature distribution requirements. Courses that fulfill categories F, Foundational Literacies, and G, 100-level courses, can be double counted for course categories listed in items A through D.
6. Foundational Literacies: As part of completing the English major, students must:
   • Fulfill the writing intensive requirement by successfully completing any WI-designated course approved for the major.
   • Fulfill the oral communication requirement by successfully completing any OC-designated course approved for the major.
   • Fulfill the digital literacy requirement by successfully completing any DL-designated course approved for the major.

No single course may satisfy all three foundational literacies.

7. At least two of the courses that students take must be 100-level courses not ending in 9. We suggest these courses be taken in the junior and/or senior years. Cross-listed courses taken at Brandeis (unless taught by English faculty) and courses taken while on study abroad cannot fulfill this requirement without permission from the UAH.

Honors Track

Although a student does not need a 3.50 GPA within the major to begin an honors paper, a GPA of 3.50 or higher in courses counting toward the major at the time of graduation along with completion of a senior honors essay or thesis is needed to be considered for honors. The senior honors essay (one-semester ENG 99a or 99b) counts as an eleventh course. For the senior honors thesis (ENG 99d for two semesters), one semester may count as an elective while the other semester counts as an eleventh course.

Guidelines for paper lengths are as follows. Please note, these are only guidelines. The scope of the project will be determined in consultation with the director.

• Senior Essay—25 pages
• Senior Thesis—60 to 65 pages

The undergraduate advising head (UAH) can assist the student in finding an appropriate director. In consultation with the director, the student should draft a proposal (two pages): outline the topic, methods, sources, texts the student plans to examine, questions to be asked and likely conclusions. The director will approve and sign the proposal. In the case of the thesis, the approved proposal should reach the UAH by the end of registration of the first thesis-writing semester. The UAH, in consultation with the faculty director, will assign a second reader by the beginning of the second thesis-writing semester.

Departmental honors are awarded on the basis of excellence in all courses applied to the major, as well as all courses taken in the department, including the senior essay or thesis, as determined by the department faculty. Students in the Creative Writing major who complete ENG 96a and 96b will be considered to have completed a senior honors thesis and those majors who complete ENG 96a only will be considered to have completed a senior honors project.

For more information please visit the Department of English website.

A student majoring in English may double-major or minor in Creative Writing.

Creative Writing Major

This major may be declared upon the completion of three creative writing workshops (English courses ending in 9) and a course focused on close reading. Ten semester courses are required, including the following:

1. One close reading course: ENG 10b (Poetry: A Basic Course), ENG 11a (Close Reading: Theory and Practice), or ENG 11b (Fiction: A Basic Course), which should be taken as early as possible.
2. Four creative writing workshops (English courses ending in 9). See course category breakdown for list of creative writing workshops. No more than one workshop can be taken in any semester in the same genre. Two such courses may be taken in different genres. All workshops are by instructor's signature, require a manuscript submission, and are offered on a credit/no credit basis. Having a declared major in Creative Writing does not guarantee admission to the workshops.
3. One course dealing primarily with literature in English written before 1800. For specific information about whether a particular course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement, please see listing of courses below.
4. One multicultural or World Anglophone course. Multicultural courses are those that focus on literature, film, or new media by ethnic or racial minorities within the United States or Great Britain; World Anglophone courses focus on literature, film, or new media in English outside the United States and England (e.g., Indian, African, or Caribbean literature). Other courses may also be suitable; students with questions should consult a Co-Director of Creative Writing. See the listing of courses below.
5. Two elective courses, at least one of which must be offered by faculty in the English department. A maximum of three courses taken outside the department may be counted toward the major. This restriction includes cross-listed courses taken at Brandeis and courses taken while on study abroad; it does not apply to transfer credits (see “Special Notes Relating to Undergraduates”). Cross-listed courses taught by English Department faculty are considered within the department and are not included in this restriction.
6. An elective course in studio or performing art. Please be in touch with your advisor and complete a substitution request to have the course approved.
7. There is no double counting between course categories listed in items A through F (i.e., Chaucer’s “Global and Refugee Canterbury Tales”cannot count for both the pre-1800 and World Anglophone requirements). Courses that fulfill category H, Foundational Literacies, can be double counted for course categories listed in items A through E.
8. Foundational Literacies: As part of completing the Creative Writing major, students must:
   
   • Fulfill the writing intensive requirement by successfully completing any WI-designated course approved for the major.
   • Fulfill the oral communication requirement by successfully completing any OC-designated course approved for the major.

   • Fulfill the digital literacy requirement by successfully completing any DL-designated course approved for the major.

   No single course may satisfy all three foundational literacies.

Senior Creative Writing Honors Project Option

One semester of ENG 96a, as an eleventh course required for the major.

A student interested in this option should consult with a Co-Director of Creative Writing within the first month of the semester prior to the proposed study to discuss application guidelines and an adviser for the project, usually a senior faculty member the student has worked with before.

Normally, all four workshop requirements will have been completed prior to the start of the project.

The project will culminate in a creative body of work of high standard smaller in scope than the book-length thesis. A 25-page chapbook of poetry, for example, or 50 pages of fiction.

Recommendation for departmental honors will be made by the Creative Writing faculty to the English department based on the excellence of the student's record in the major, and the creative work as exemplified in the honors project.

Poetry or Fiction Thesis Option

Eleven semester courses are required, including the satisfactory completion of two semesters of the Creative Writing Senior Honors courses (ENG 96a and ENG 96b). One semester, ENG 96a, will count as the eleventh course, while the second semester, ENG 96b, may count as a creative writing workshop.

For the Creative Writing Thesis, the student will produce, under the direction of a faculty mentor, a distinguished body of writing (usually a book of poems 50-70 pages, or a collection of stories or a novel of 100-150 pages). The poetry or fiction thesis option also requires an essay discussing the student's literary influences. The essay will be due at the end of the senior year, along with the thesis.

Admission to the poetry or fiction thesis option in Creative Writing is by application only during the first semester of the junior year. An applicant needs to have completed two creative writing workshops before applying. The deadline for admission is usually in November. The deadline for midyear students will be in April.

Recommendations for honors in the Creative Writing major will be made to the English department by the Creative Writing faculty, based on the student's work as exemplified by the senior thesis.

A student majoring in Creative Writing may double-major in English or minor in English.

English/Creative Writing Double Major

This major may be declared upon the completion of three creative writing workshops (courses ending in 9) and a course focused on close reading. Fourteen semester courses are required; fifteen if pursuing honors in literature or the poetry or fiction thesis option, including the following:

1. One close reading course: ENG 10b (Poetry: A Basic Course), ENG 11a (Close Reading: Theory and Practice), or ENG 11b (Fiction: A Basic Course), which should be taken as early as possible.
2. Two semester courses dealing primarily with literature in English written before 1800. By definition, media/film courses cannot fulfill the pre-1800 literature distribution requirements. See the listing of courses below. 
3. Two semester courses dealing primarily with literature in English written after 1800. By definition, media/film courses cannot fulfill the post-1800 literature distribution requirements. See the listing of courses below.
4. One course from each of the following three categories:
   1. Literary Theory
   2. Media/Film
   3. Multicultural World Anglophone

Multicultural courses are those that focus on literature, film, or new media works by ethnic or racial minorities within the US or Great Britain; World Anglophone courses focus on literature, film, or new media works in English outside the United States and England (e.g., Indian, African, or Caribbean literature). See the listing of courses below.

5. One elective course, which may be any course offered or cross-listed in the department with the following exception: this requirement cannot be fulfilled by a creative writing workshop. A maximum of three courses taken outside the department may be counted toward the double major. This restriction includes cross-listed courses taken at Brandeis and courses taken while on study abroad; it does not apply to transfer credits (see “Special Notes Relating to Undergraduates”). Cross-listed courses taught by English Department faculty are considered within the department and are not included in this restriction.
6. A minimum of four creative writing workshops (English courses ending in 9). See course category breakdown for list of creative writing workshops.

For those students pursuing the poetry or fiction thesis option, please refer to that section of the bulletin for information about the number of workshops to be taken.

7. An elective course in a studio or performing art.
8. There is no double counting between course categories listed in items A through G (i.e., The Novel in India cannot count for both the World Anglophone and post-1800 requirements, etc.). By definition, media/film courses cannot fulfill the pre-1800 and post-1800 literature distribution requirements. Courses that fulfill category I, Foundational Literacies, can be double counted for course
   categories listed in items A through F. Courses that fulfill category J, 100-level courses, can be double counted for course categories listed in items A through E.
9. Foundational Literacies: As part of completing the English/Creative Writing double major, students must:
   • Fulfill the writing intensive requirement by successfully completing any WI-designated course approved for the major.
   • Fulfill the oral communication requirement by successfully completing any OC-designated course approved for the major.

   • Fulfill the digital literacy requirement by successfully completing any DL-designated course approved for the major.

   No single course may satisfy all three foundational literacies.

10. At least two courses must be 100-level courses not ending in 9. We suggest these courses be taken in the junior and/or senior years. Cross-listed courses taken at Brandeis (unless taught by English faculty) and courses taken while on study abroad cannot fulfill this requirement without permission from the UAH.

English Major/Creative Writing Minor

Thirteen semester courses are required, including the following:

1. All the requirements listed under the English major.
2. Three creative writing workshops (English courses ending in 9). See course category breakdown for list of creative writing workshops.

Creative Writing Major/English Minor

Thirteen courses are required, including the following:

1. All the requirements listed under the Creative Writing major.
2. Three elective courses (in addition to the two listed in item E. of the Creative Writing major). These may include any course offered or cross-listed in the department with the following exception: no more than one creative writing workshop may be counted as an elective. A maximum of three courses taken outside the department may be counted toward the major/minor. This restriction includes cross-listed courses taken at Brandeis and courses taken while on study abroad; it does not apply to transfer credits (see “Special Notes Relating to Undergraduates”). Cross-listed courses taught by English Department faculty are considered within the department and are not included in this restriction.
3. Students are encouraged to speak with the UAH or their faculty advisor about clustering or distributing courses counted toward the minor.

ENG 89a (English and Creative Writing Internship) and ENG 92b (Internship and Analysis) can only fulfill an elective requirement for the English and Creative Writing majors. These courses are considered outside the department. Please see note below about the limit of outside courses a student may take to fulfill major requirements.

No course with a final grade below C- can count toward fulfilling the major or minor requirements in English and Creative Writing.

Advanced Placement credit and courses taken on the pass/fail option do not count toward the English and Creative Writing majors and minors.

A student who transfers to Brandeis can petition to transfer up to three courses from previous postsecondary work toward any of the aforementioned tracks. This does not reduce the number of courses that may be taken outside the department while at Brandeis (i.e., study abroad courses, cross-listed courses not taught by a member of the department, and courses petitioned for substitution toward the degree). The Undergraduate Advising Head will consider exceptions to this policy on a case-by-case basis.

This department participates in the European Cultural Studies major and, in general, its courses are open to ECS majors.

COMP and UWS courses do not count toward the major or minor requirements in English and Creative Writing.

More detailed descriptions of the courses offered each semester will be available on the English department website.

To earn the Master of Arts in English (as distinct from the Master's in passing), students must complete the following requirements.

Course Requirement

32 course credits (equivalent to eight 4-credit courses) in the Department of English

1. At least 12 credits must be 200-level seminars.
2. One course must be ENG 301a (Master's Directed Research). (For more information about ENG 301a, see below.) 
3. ENG 200a (Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies) is optional but recommended. 
4. Master's students are expected to take all required course credits within the Department of English. A student must petition in writing to the department chair and director of graduate studies to be exempted from this rule. Up to two sections of ENG 298a, Independent Study, can be counted towards required coursework. (ENG 301a cannot be counted towards the 200-level requirement.) 
5. ENG 350a (Proseminar) and GSAS 360c (Article Publication Workshop) are optional but recommended credit/no-credit courses (2 credits each per semester) that count towards the 32 course credit requirement. Creative Writing Workshops do not count towards the degree.

Residence Requirement

Students may enroll on a full or part-time basis. There is a one-year minimum in-person residence requirement for full-time students. Most full-time students will take an additional one or two semesters beyond the first year to complete the degree as Extended Master's students. Part-time students have a residency requirement that is the equivalent to the full-time version of the program (i.e., once students have completed the equivalent of one full-time year). For more information, see the GSAS Bulletin section.

Master's Research Paper Requirement (ENG 301a)

This paper or project must be twenty-five to thirty-five pages long. Papers written for course work, papers presented at conferences, and papers written specifically for the MA degree are all acceptable. Projects, which must receive preliminary approval from the department, might include but are not limited to: comprehensively researched creative nonfiction, a critical edition, a digital archive, or other public-facing work. Projects should have a substantial analytical component and be comparable in length or effort required to the research paper. Each paper or project will be evaluated by two faculty members. The second reader need not be from the English department. The paper or project must satisfy the reader's standard for excellence in MA degree-level work.

Students admitted to the doctoral program are eligible to apply for an MA degree in passing upon completion of the following requirements. (For information about the stand-alone MA in English, see above. For information about the joint degree of Master of Arts in English & Women's and Gender Studies, see below).

Course Requirement

1. 32 course credits (equivalent to eight 4-credit courses), 12 credits of which must be 200-level seminars.
2. A capstone project (this may be fulfilled by one of the eight required courses, or by other departmental work deemed suitable by the DGS, such as an independent study or directed research comparable to the MA paper).
3. ENG 200a (Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies) is optional but recommended.
4. Creative Writing Workshops do not count towards the degree.

Residence Requirement

The minimum in-person residence requirement is one year.

Program of Study

1. WGS 205a, the foundational course in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
2. One course in feminist research methodologies (WGS 208b or an alternative course by petition).
3. 20 course credits in the English department selected from 100-level courses and graduate seminars (200-level courses). At least 12 credits must be at the 200 level. Four of these 20 credits must be listed as an elective with the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. ENG 200a (Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies) is optional but recommended. Up to two sections of ENG 298a, Independent Study, can be counted towards required coursework.
4. One Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course in a department other than the English department.
5. Joint MA paper or project requirement: Completion of a Master's research paper of professional quality and length (normally twenty-five to forty pages) on a topic related to the joint degree. Papers written for course work, papers presented at conferences, and papers written specifically for the MA degree are all acceptable. Projects, which must receive preliminary approval from the department, might include but are not limited to: comprehensively researched creative nonfiction, a critical edition, a digital archive, or other public-facing work. Projects should have a substantial analytical component and be comparable in length or effort required to the research paper.

6. Each paper or project will be read by two faculty members, at least one of whom is a member of the English department, and at least one of whom is a member of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies core or affiliate faculty. In consultation with the primary advisor, a student may register for WGS 299a,b, "Master’s Project." However, this course may not count toward the eight required courses.

7. Students may enroll on a full or part-time basis. There is a one-year minimum in-person residence requirement for full-time students. Most full-time students will take an additional one or two semesters beyond the first year to complete the degree as Extended Master's students. Part-time students have a residency requirement that is the equivalent to the full-time version of the program (i.e., once students have completed the equivalent of one full-time year). For more information, see the GSAS Bulletin section.

Note: ENG 350a (Proseminar) and GSAS 360c (Article Publication Workshop) are credit/no-credit courses that count towards the 20 credit English requirement. Creative Writing Workshops do not count towards the degree.

Students admitted to the doctoral program are eligible to earn the Joint MA degree in passing by completing the Requirements for the Joint Degree of Master of Arts in English & Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, listed above. Doctoral students who want to earn the Joint MA in passing should declare their intentions as soon as possible by meeting with the WGS Program Liaison who will appoint an advisor for each student. Please note non-English courses taken for the joint degree (WGS 205a, WGS 208b, or equivalent, and the WGS course in another department) will not count towards course credit for the PhD. Creative Writing Workshops do not count towards the degree.

Program of Study

A. Students are expected to complete a minimum of thirteen courses no later than the end of the third year. These include the following required courses:

1. ENG 350a - Proseminar
2. ENG 200a - Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies
3. ENG 275b - Pedagogy
4. GSAS 255b - Writing in the Humanities. Note that Pedagogy and Writing in the Humanities will be offered on an alternating basis every other year, so students should plan ahead.

B. Students can–and are encouraged to–count up to one transferable skills course from outside the department toward the thirteen required courses. Examples of transferable skills courses can be found on the website.

C. A student who comes to Brandeis with an MA degree in English may apply to the director of graduate studies (DGS), at the end of the first year of study, to transfer up to four graduate-level courses from the institution granting the MA. For more information about transfer credit, please see the policy in the GSAS section of the Bulletin. Of the nine additional courses required for the PhD degree, at least eight are normally taken within the English department.

D. The program reserves the right to require additional courses to assure thorough mastery of the area of study.

E. A student who wishes to be exempted from these rules must petition in writing to the department chair and DGS.

First Year

• Students enroll in six courses (three each semester) as well as ENG 350a each semester.
• Students are required to enroll in ENG 200a (Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies) in the fall semester.
• Students are required to enroll in the Department Proseminar (ENG 350a), a yearlong credit/no credit seminar.
• Students select their other five courses from departmental offerings at the 100- and 200-level, although at least three of these courses must be 200-level seminars. One of these five courses may be a transferable skills course from outside the department.
• In addition to satisfying these core requirements, students design a program of study in light of the strengths and weaknesses of their previous preparation and in accord with their own interests. First-year students are encouraged to meet with their faculty advisers to discuss curricular offerings, departmental expectations, and the nature of the academic career.

Second Year

• Students who come to Brandeis with a BA degree normally take two courses each semester.
• Students who come to Brandeis with a MA degree complete their course work.

Third Year

• Students complete their course work.
• Students are required to enroll in the Field Exam Colloquium (ENG 375c), a yearlong pass/fail seminar that is in addition to the thirteen course requirement.
• Students must have completed the Pedagogy and Writing in the Humanities courses by the end of the third year.
• Students are encouraged to take or audit additional courses during their third year and beyond.
• The Field Exam must be taken no later than May 15 of the third year.

Notes Pertaining to Courses

• Creative Writing Workshops do not count towards the PhD degree.
• GSAS 360c (Article Publication Workshop) is optional and does not count towards required courses for the PhD degree.
• Up to two sections of ENG 298a, Independent Study, can be counted towards required coursework.

• Students may apply to the director of graduate studies for permission to take courses offered
  • In other departments at Brandeis.
  • Through the Graduate Consortium. See the GSAS website for a complete list of schools. Permission from the Registrar’s Office is required. A grade of B- or better is required to receive transfer credit. Through The Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS), but not taught by department faculty members. Any course taught at GCWS by a faculty member in the department, and approved by the department, shall be deemed the equivalent of a 200-level course within the English department for the purposes of meeting degree requirements.

Additional Information

All students are encouraged to attend departmental events, such as guest lectures and conferences, and participate in professional development workshops.

In the fall of their second year, students usually present a paper to an audience of graduate students and faculty at the Second-Year Symposium.

Teaching Requirements and Preparation

Teaching is a core requirement of the PhD program in English and is integral to the professional development of all graduate students. Training in teaching takes place through assistantships in the department and the Pedagogy course.

Teaching assignments vary according to the pedagogical needs of the individual student, the curricular needs of the department, and enrollments. Please see the GSAS section on Teaching Requirements and the program handbook for more details.

Residence Requirement

The minimum in-person residence requirement is three years.

Language Requirement

The language requirement reflects the department’s belief that it is important for scholars in the humanities not to be monolingual. The requirement asks students to advance their knowledge of at least one language other than English as part of their graduate studies unless they have already made the study of languages a significant part of their education in the past. Students may fulfill this requirement in the following ways:

• By demonstrating a reading proficiency of a language and passing the English department examination.
• By undertaking further study of a language and earning an A- or better in a fourth-semester language course—such as a 100-level Brandeis language course—or a course designed to provide an equivalent reading knowledge of a language.
• By beginning to study a language (either because they have not seriously studied a language other than English before or because they have a reason to take up a new language), earning a grade of A- or better in a second-semester course in the language —such as a 20-level Brandeis language course. Ideally, the language should be related to their field of study.

Please note language classes do not count toward the required number of classes for the PhD.

Students must have completed the language requirement no later than the end of the third year in order to take the field exam.

Field Examination

The field portfolio and exam demonstrate expertise in a significant scholarly field and equip students for future contributions to the humanities. All students are required to take a year-long, credit/no-credit colloquium (ENG 375c) in their third year which will prepare them for the field exam. This colloquium is in addition to the 13-course requirement. No later than May 15 of the third year, students must turn in a portfolio and pass an oral examination. The portfolio must contain

• a list of 50-70 texts, representing thorough field knowledge
• a brief (500 words) introduction to the list
• an original essay of approximately 20 pages that articulates the student’s intellectual agenda in this field, formulated in consultation with the advisor. The essay can be a synthesis of a significant scholarly debate; a description of historical developments in the field and its methods; an analysis of pedagogical or curricular issues in the field; an interpretation of the field’s significance in a specific context; a description of emerging questions and methods in the field; a description of potential contributions to the field as a teacher, scholar, editor, translator, digital creator, program administrator; or some combination of these and other topics.
• two original syllabi relevant to the field
• optional: inclusion of one other item of approximately 5 pages or equivalent, which represents a contribution not represented by the field essay, for instance a website, proposal for an anthology, translation, book review, or equivalent

The portfolio must be turned in to the examining committee at least one week before the exam. 

This examination is taken no later than the fifteenth of May during the third year and must be passed by the unanimous vote of the committee members. At the discretion of the examiners, students taking the field exam may be asked to retake one portion of their exam and/or revise one or more items in the portfolio. If a student is asked to retake a portion of the exam or revise the portfolio, the time frame for the second examination will be set by the examiners in consultation with the student.

Doctoral Project / Dissertation Prospectus Conference

Students should meet with their prospectus committees after successful completion of the field exam to discuss the prospectus. The prospectus is intended to be an initial exploration of the doctoral project and is typically around 20 pages. No later than October 1 of the fourth year, students must hold a prospectus conference, which both first and second readers will attend. The prospectus must be signed by both readers. The prospectus should explain and justify the project’s topics, audiences, genres, media, and platforms and give evidence of the student’s preparation to complete this project.

Dissertation / Doctoral Project

The dissertation or doctoral project is the culmination of a student's studies and should make a substantive and original, primarily written, contribution to a designated field. Doctoral projects might consist of a book-length manuscript of scholarship, or a portfolio comprised of one or more of the following: a suite of linked essays, comprehensively researched creative nonfiction, a critical edition, a digital archive, or additional options of equivalent proportion. The portfolio should have a substantial analytical component. Its conception should be coherent, its organization should be compelling, and its design should indicate the desired impact on intended audiences. Where relevant, the project should satisfy prevailing professional ethical standards. The genre, medium, and platform of the doctoral project should be appropriate to its goals. The doctoral project will be evaluated by a dissertation committee comprised of two department members and an external evaluator with relevant expertise. The student will defend the doctoral project at a final oral examination. 

Annual Academic Performance Review and Progress to the Degree

Every student, whether or not currently in residence, must register at the beginning of each term. All graduate students will be evaluated by the program each spring. At this evaluation the records of all graduate students will be carefully reviewed with reference to the timely completion of coursework and non-course degree requirements, the quality of the work and research in progress and the student’s overall academic performance in the program. 

Being an active student in any given year does not guarantee future enrollment in the program. Continued enrollment in the doctoral program in English is subject to the department’s annual May student review process where the progress of graduate students, particularly first- and second-year students, is discussed by the department faculty. 

Because a career in the academy requires success as a scholar and teacher, service on administrative committees, and collegial participation in the life of the academy, suitable academic progress is judged principally by three criteria: grades, citizenship, and timely completion of work.

• Grades: Students are expected to maintain an A- average.
• Citizenship: Students are expected to participate regularly in department activities, including the departmental proseminar and scheduled talks and events.
• Timely Completion: Students may normally take no more than one incomplete in any semester; in exceptional circumstances a second incomplete may be permitted by the DGS. All incompletes must be made up by the deadline set by the Office of the University Registrar each semester. Students who require incompletes must apply for them from the relevant instructor in advance; incompletes will not be automatically granted.

AAAS/ENG 80a Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

Explores novelists’ and poets’ fascination with photography; the fraught role of photography in the struggle against antiblackness; Black photographers in the studio; and theorists of photography and looking. In African, African-American, Caribbean and Black British archives, canons and communities, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 22b Asian American Literature
[ deis-us hum ]

With its focus on a major and enduring racial formation in the U.S., this course covers a wide range of literary expressions of Asian American subjectivities forged in various flashpoints of American history, from the early days of Chinese “coolie” labor in the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment of refugee migration. Along the way, we will learn about structures of violence that have manifested into exclusion laws, internment camps, devastating wars, and refugee displacements. Usually offered every fourth year.

AMST/ENG 6a The American Renaissance
[ hum ]

Explores the transformation of U.S. literary culture before the Civil War: transcendentalism, the romance, the slave narrative, domestic fiction, sensationalism, and their relation to the visual art and architecture of the period. Authors will include Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Poe, Ridge, and Crafts. Usually offered every second year.

AMST/ENG 16b Mark Twain’s World

Read major works by Mark Twain alongside several of his contemporaries as a lens through which to view key currents of American and global modernity, including race, colonialism, democracy, and secularization. Topics include the critical debate over the depiction of race and slavery in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the role of humor in social and political change. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 47a Frontier Visions: The West in American Literature and Culture
[ hum oc ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 47a in prior years.

Explores more than two centuries of literary and visual culture about the American West, including the frontier myth, Indian captivity narratives, frontier humor, dime novel and Hollywood westerns, the Native American Renaissance, and western regionalism. Authors include Black Hawk, Cather, Doig, Silko, Turner, and Twain. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 48a American Immigrant Narratives
[ deis-us hum wi ]

With its essential role in U.S. society and history, immigration figures prominently in the American literary canon. This course traverses varied immigrant tales of twentieth-century and contemporary United States, set in the frontier of westward expansion, the Golden West, and the Eastern Seaboard. Some classics of this vast cultural corpus will anchor our critical inquiries into subject and nation formation, citizenship, and marginalization under powerful political forces both at home and abroad. By probing the complex aesthetic modes and narrative strategies in these and other texts, we will investigate deeply felt impacts of ever-shifting American cultural politics shaping immigrant experiences. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 1a Introduction to Literary Studies
[ hum wi ]

May not be taken by students who completed FYS 16a without instructor permission.

This course is designed to introduce students to basic skills and concepts needed for the study of Anglophone literature and culture. These include skills in close reading; identification and differentiation of major literary styles and periods; knowledge of basic critical terms; definition of genres. Usually offered every semester.

ENG 10b Poetry: A Basic Course
[ hum ]

Designed as a first course for all persons interested in the subject. It is intended to be basic without being elementary. The subject matter will consist of poems of short and middle length in English from the earliest period to the present. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 11a Close Reading: Theory and Practice
[ hum oc ]

Examines the theory, practice, technique, and method of close literary reading, with scrupulous attention to a variety of literary texts to ask not only what but also how they mean, and what justifies our thinking that they mean these things. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 12a Decolonizing Tongues: Language in African Literature
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

A comparative exploration of the politics of language in postcolonial African Literature and its impact on literary production. It locates the language question in anglophone and francophone African Literature within the context political independence. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 15b Black Joy
[ deis-us hum ]

Explores the exuberant and sometimes strained relationship between black people
and joy. In addition to literature, we will encounter various performances and perspectives that approach joy from multitude of perspectives, including minstrelsy, meditation, nature writing, ancestral remembrance, and the erotics of eating well and feeling good. Usually offered every year.

ENG 16b The Romantic Anti-Hero
[ hum ]

Dark, brooding, distant, yet secretly emotional, hates everyone but hates themselves the most: You may be thinking of Batman, but the trope can be traced back to at least as early as the 19th century. From the Byronic heroes to Heathcliff to Holden Caulfield–the anti-hero has gone through so many transformations across the history of literature and media that the trope merits as much critical attention as its popularity. This course leads students through a variety of texts with narratives centered around an anti-hero character. We will examine how writers from different times reimagine and utilize the trope to put the respective era’s common values into perspective, on issues ranging from general morality to political ideologies, gender dynamics, and class conflicts. By focusing on the dramatized yet deeply humanistic flaws of the characters, students will consider literature’s role in reflecting and influencing the shift of society’s view on the complexities and ambiguities of human morality. Special one-time offering, spring 2026.

ENG 17b Climate Fictions
[ hum oc wi ]

Examines fictional narratives addressing climate change. Asks how authors from around the world imagine a future in which sea levels, animal populations, temperatures, access to food, and/or weather patterns are significantly different from those of the present. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 18a Irish Literature, from the Peasantry to the Pogues
[ hum ]

Explores Irish poetry, fiction, drama, and film in English. Begins with the tradition's roots among subjugated peasants and Anglo-Irish aristocracy and ends in the modern post-colonial state. Authors include Swift, Yeats, Wilde, Bowen, Joyce, O'Brien, and Heaney. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 19a Introduction to Creative Writing Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.

A workshop for beginning writers. Practice and discussion of short literary forms such as fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Other forms may also be explored. Usually offered every year.

ENG 19b The Autobiographical Imagination: Creative Nonfiction Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.

Combines the study of contemporary autobiographical prose and poetry--from primarily Asian and Pacific Islander writers in the United States--with intense writing practice arising from these texts. Examines--as writers--what it means to construct the story of one's life, and ways in which lies, metaphor, and imagination transform memory to reveal and conceal the self. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 20a Bollywood: Popular Film, Genre, and Society
[ djw hum nw ]

An introduction to popular Hindi cinema through a survey of the most important Bollywood films from the 1950s until today. Topics include melodrama, song and dance, love and sex, stardom, nationalism, religion, diasporic migration, and globalization. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 20b Literary Games
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Course includes a mandatory lab and yields 6 credits.

Addresses a long durée history of the games through the lens of transmedia. This then is the start pointing to examine how transmedia theory may help unpack issues in what I call 'literary games' from the medieval chess board, dice game, to digital multi-player video games now. Within a discussion of transmedia we will address the various theories about narrative and play that have animated discussions about games from the Middle Ages to contemporary media. This class will also center race, gender, sexuality, disability, class in thinking through the issues of transmedia and the gaming cultures that have most recently been in the political mainstream news in relation to far-right politics. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 22a South Asian Ways of Watching: Films and Graphic Narratives
[ djw hum ]

How do we watch South Asia and how does South Asia watch itself? This course pairs films with graphic narratives, moving from black-and-white cinema to color-saturated narratives. We’ll explore myth, Partition, caste and care, love and queer desire, displacement and diaspora, ecological crisis, and street-level protest. Expect lively discussion plus creative labs (zines, storyboards, photos/videos/mini-comics) to try visual storytelling yourself. Special one-time offering, spring 2026.

ENG 25b Abolitionist Imaginaries: Literary Visions Beyond Prison
[ hum ]

What does it mean to imagine a world without prisons? What role does literature play in this process? This course explores abolition as a theoretical concept and traces the genealogy of abolition from slavery to the carceral state. In addition to prison writing, we will read texts by early reformers/abolitionists and authors such as Bentham, Dickens, and Douglas and contemporary prison abolitionists like Davis, Fleetwood, and Gilmore. We will ask what role literature plays in the abolitionist vision and how it can shape and reflect our evolving ideas about justice, freedom, and the structure of society. The course will culminate in a community engaged project. Special one-time offering, spring 2024.

ENG 26a Novels on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Fiction as Psychological Inquiry
[ hum wi ]

Explores novels as a mode of psychological inquiry, particularly into trauma, addiction, delusion, and depression. Our reading will help us consider the cultural complexity of mental illness and social dimensions of private suffering. How does the genre of the novel afford special attention to the intricacies of distressed mental life? And how has this art form been important for imagining psychological healing? Readings include novels from the 19th century to the present from several regions of the world, in a long lineage of narrative fiction about human psychology. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 27b Classic Hollywood Cinema
[ hum ]

A critical examination of the history of mainstream U.S. cinema from the 1930s to the present. Focuses on major developments in film content and form, the rise and fall of the studio and star system, the changing nature of spectatorship, and the social context of film production and reception. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 28a Environmental Literature in an Age of Extinction
[ deis-us dl hum ]

Explores literature's role in shaping modern understandings of environmental change and damage, as well as the possibility of ecological restoration. Works include environmental classics by Thoreau, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson as well as contemporary genres including dystopia, the thriller, and climate fiction. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 30a Introduction to Graphic Novels
[ hum ]

Introduces students to the genre conventions and theoretical context necessary for the critical study of graphic novels. In particular, we examine single-author graphic novels that trouble the border between fiction and nonfiction--memoirs, graphic reportage, and speculative histories. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 30b American Film Auteurs of the 1970s
[ deis-us hum ]

Interrogates idea of cinematic style. Examines works by directors such as Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Fosse, Roman Polanski, and Martin Scorsese. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 31a What Is It Like To Be An Animal: Other Minds in Literature
[ hum ]

A study of literature that examines human-nonhuman relations and animal subjectivity. We will look at how thinkers have characterized essential differences between "human" and "animal," as well as modernist literary responses that reimagine the chasm between the "rational human" and "instinctual animal." Readings include Thoreau, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Woolf, Wittgenstein, Coetzee, Cora Diamond, and contemporary animal studies scholarship. Special one-time offering, fall 2023.

ENG 32a 21st-Century Global Fiction: A Basic Course
[ djw hum nw oc ]

Offers an introduction to 21st-century global fiction in English. What is fiction and how does it illuminate contemporary issues such as migration, terrorism, and climate change? Authors include Zadie Smith, Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, J.M. Coetzee and others. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 32b Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Medieval Dream Visions
[ hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 132b in prior years.

Before there was Romeo and Juliet, there was Troilus and Criseyde. Before Shakespeare’s cultural behemoth defined what it meant to be star-crossed lovers, the story of Troilus and Criseyde was the dominant and popular narrative of doomed love. So, what happened? Did Shakespeare’s treatment of it kill the story? Why has it dropped out of the canon? This class will evaluate Chaucer’s other major poem Troilus and Criseyde and contextualize it by examining its sources, philosophical underpinnings, and its impact on literary production in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 33a Shakespeare
[ hum ]

May be repeated once for credit.

A survey of Shakespeare as a dramatist. From nine to twelve plays will be read, representing all periods of Shakespeare's dramatic career. Usually offered every year.

ENG 33b Shakespeare Now
[ hum oc ]

This introductory Shakespeare course will be structured around the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and issues of central relevance to our world today. We will be reading a small number of plays, leaving time to work on contemporary adaptations and uses of each of the plays we study. Topics to be explored include (but are by no means limited to) misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism. Usually offered every year.

ENG 35a The Weird and the Experimental in Contemporary Literature
[ hum wi ]

What does it mean to be “weird”? What makes a text “experimental”? And what can experimental texts teach us about the ever-changing nature of society? This course explores innovation and experimentation in the narrative structure of contemporary novels and films from around the world within their cultural contexts. Special one-time offering, spring 2024.

ENG 40b The Birth of the Short Story: Gods, Ghosts, Lunatics
[ hum ]

How old is the short story? It may go back to the Stone Age, Aesop's fables, or medieval saints' lives, but some credit Edgar Allan Poe and the Scottish shepherd James Hogg. This class takes an in-depth look at three key centers of the genre: Edinburgh, New York, and Moscow. Authors include Melville, Hawthorne, Dickens, Gogol, and Chekov. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 41a Critical Digital Humanities Methods and Applications
[ deis-us dl hum ]

Introduces critical digital humanities methods and applications. Considers both theory and praxis, the issues of open and accessible scholarship and work, and the centrality of collaboration. We will investigate power relations, inclusivity, and the ethics of social justice. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 43b Medieval Play: Drama, LARP, and Video Games
[ djw hum oc ]

Works with a selection of medieval mystery plays, medieval-themed video games and participatory live-action role play to explore: play structures and design; alternative-world creation by way of immersion; the significance of gender, race, disability, and sexuality in performance. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 45b Romanticism: Gods, Nature, Loneliness, Dreams
[ hum ]

A study of Romantic poetry, from love lyrics to ballads about the supernatural to philosophical meditations on self and soul. Authors include: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats and Shelley. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 46a Native American Storytelling
[ hum ]

Explores Native American storytelling practices in anglophone literature from the early 1800s to the present day. Course material will highlight prominent figures within Native American literature throughout history and will cover a range of non-fiction and fiction texts, including biographies, novels, films, and podcasts. Special one-time offering, fall 2023.

ENG 46b American Gothic Romantic Fiction
[ hum wi ]

American Gothic and romantic fiction from Charles Brockden Brown to Cormac McCarthy. Texts by Brown, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, O'Connor, Warren, and McCarthy. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 50a Love Poetry from Sappho to Neruda
[ hum oc ]

This course explores the relationship between love and poetry. Starts with the ancient Greek poet Sappho and proceeds through the centuries, reading lyrics by Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, Petrarch, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Rossetti, and others. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 50b American Independent Film
[ hum ]

Explores non-studio filmmaking in the United States. Defines an indie aesthetic and alternative methods of financing, producing, and distributing films. Special attention given to adaptations of major film genres, such as noir thrillers, domestic comedy, and horror. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 52a Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
[ deis-us djw dl hum nw oc ]

Yields 6 credits.

Examines the functions of storytelling in the refugee crisis. Its main objective is to further students' understanding of the political dimensions of storytelling. The course explores how reworking of reality enable people to question State and social structures. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 52b Vampires: Dark Fictions of Blood
[ deis-us hum ]

Highlights the innovations that black artists and scholars have made within the vampire tradition. Our sources range from literature and comics to television and film. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 53a Reading Shakespeare When the Globe is on Fire
[ djw hum ]

Examines the complex relationships between William Shakespeare’s plays and the radical ecological transformations occurring in and beyond England throughout the period in which he wrote. At the same time, we will consider how exploring the dynamic interplay between Shakespeare’s words and his world might help us better understand both the canon and the climate we’ve inherited. By pairing contemporary ecocritical scholarship alongside close readings of Shakespearean texts, we will grapple with the enduring challenges and possibilities of environmental justice and interrogate the “role” of art on a burning planet. Special one-time offering, fall 2025.

ENG 60a Storytelling Performance
[ hum oc ]

This experiential course is a workshop for students to craft and perform stories for live audiences at Brandeis and elsewhere in the Boston area. Through a series of collaborative exercises and rehearsals, students will develop a repertoire of several kinds of stories, including autobiographies, fictions, folk tales, and local history. We will tell our individual and group stories, as a team, at youth programs, open mics, and other public spaces. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 60b Literature by Ear: Talking Books from the Gramophone to the Podcast Era
[ hum ]

Explores how genres change and how ideas about art change when oral/aural distribution either supplements or replaces the printed word. Traces the idea of the talking book, from its origins to the present—and by inviting students to perform their own experiments with creating new kinds of audiobook, or podcasts, or more radical forays into the world of the ear. Beginning with a historical look at the early forms of mechanical recording (Victorian poetry recording, radio drama, the rise of recorded books around WW2) it moves forward into contemporary forms like YouTube poetry channels and the explosion of audiobook production in “the age of Amazon.” Usually offered every third year.

ENG 61b Philosophical Approaches to Film Theory
[ hum ]

Studies a philosophical approach to film theory, examining both what philosophy has to say about film and what effects the existence and experience of film can have on philosophical thinking about reality, perception, judgment, and other minds. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 62a Documentary: Techniques and Controversies
[ hum ]

An introduction to documentary, covering major works of nonfiction prose and film. Focuses on the variety of documentary techniques in both media and controversies surrounding efforts to represent the real. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 62b Contemporary African Literature, Global Perspectives
[ djw dl hum nw oc ]

What is "African" in African literature when the majority of writers are somehow removed from the African societies they portray? How do expatriate writers represent African subjectivities and cultures at the intersection of Diaspora and globalization? Who reads the works produced by these writers? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 64a Queer Readings: Before the Binary
[ hum oc ]

Explores vectors of desire, intimacy, and relationality prior to 1800 that do not always neatly line up with post-Enlightenment taxonomies of gender, sexuality, race, and humanness. We will read works by Austen, Behn, Marlowe, Phillips, Rochester, Shakespeare, and others, asking: What possibilities of pleasure, intimacy, love, friendship, and kinship existed alongside male-female reproductive sex and marriage before 1800? What possibilities for non-binary gender identifications and presentations? Without firm taxonomic distinctions among classes of people, between human and nonhuman animals, or even between the human and the thing, how did early moderns understand what counted as fully human? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 66b Contemporary Global Dystopias
[ djw hum wi ]

Explores the sources, moods, and effects of dystopian fiction from around the world. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 67b Modern Poetry
[ hum ]

A course on the major poets of the twentieth century. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 68a Salvage Work: Reimagining in Caribbean Ruins
[ hum ]

How do we imagine alternative futures in a space of ruin? This course is imagined in relation to Angela Naimou’s term salvage work, which “requires the acceptance and incorporation of existing loss, ruin, and injury into the fragments that are nonetheless generative of something more than absence” (Naimou 11). It references a sort of recovery or possibility rooted in the imagination of what these remnants or ruins can be in the Caribbean archipelago and beyond.

“Salvage Work” offers one way in which the Caribbean engage with ruin, imagination, and worldbuilding through the works of Shani Mootoo, Maisy Card, Nala Hopkinson, Tessa Mars, and other writers, painters, and filmmakers who explore the archives, motherhood, kinship, queerness, intimacy, inheritance, and return. These twentieth/twenty-first-century texts return to various periods, like enslavement, indentureship, postcolonial independent movements, Windrush, and other moments in the past.

By considering how race, class, gender, and sexuality overlap and relate, this class will create a space to reflect on the relationships between identity and belonging, oppression and resistance, literature, place, and people across generations and geographies. Special one-time offering, spring 2025.

ENG 70a The Birth of the Movies: From Silent Film to Hollywood
[ hum ]

Explores the birth of moving pictures, from Edison and Lumiere's experiments to "Birth of a Nation" and "The Jazz Singer". Traces film's roots in the photographic experiments, visual spectacles and magical lanterns of late nineteenth-century France, England, and America, and its relationship to the era's literary experiments. Filmmakers include: Georges Melies, Abel Ganz, Sergei Eisentein, D W Griffiths, Charlie Chaplin. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 72b World Anglophone Literatures in an Age of Epidemics
[ djw hum ]

In the aftermath of microbial epidemics and pandemics like HIV, Ebola, and COVID 19, how does literature offer us ways to live with microbes? The word “epidemic” in this course includes epidemics caused by microbes, and social epidemics like racism, patriarchy, mental health crises, etc. By reading novels, poetry, and graphic narratives, and through in-class creative activities, we will explore how literature conjures health. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 73a Witchcraft and Magic in the Renaissance: From Scotland to Salem
[ hum oc ]

Focuses on the representation of witches, wizards, devils, and magicians in texts by Shakespeare, Marlow, and others. Historical accounts of witchcraft trials in England and Scotland are read and several films dramatizing these trials are viewed. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 75b The Victorian Novel: Secrets, Lies, and Monsters
[ hum ]

The rhetorical strategies, themes, and objectives of Victorian realism. Texts may include Eliot's Middlemarch, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Brontë's Villette, Gaskell's Mary Barton, Dickens' Bleak House, and Trollope's The Prime Minister. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 79a Screenwriting Workshop: Beginning Screenplay
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Fundamentals of screenwriting: structure, plot, conflict, character, and dialogue. Students read screenwriting theory, scripts, analyze files, and produce an outline and the first act of an original screenplay. Usually offered every year.

ENG 96a Creative Writing Senior Honors I

Required for creative writing majors fulfilling the project option. Required for creative writing majors fulfilling the first semester of the thesis option. Usually offered every year.

ENG 96b Creative Writing Senior Honors II

Required for creative writing majors fulfilling the second semester of the thesis option. Usually offered every year.

ENG 98a Independent Study

Usually offered every year.

ENG 98b Independent Study

Yields half-course credit. Usually offered every year.

ENG 99a The Senior Honors Essay

For seniors interested in qualifying for departmental honors when combined with a tenth course for the major. Usually offered every year.

ENG 99b The Senior Honors Essay

For seniors interested in qualifying for departmental honors when combined with a tenth course for the major. Usually offered every year.

ENG 99d The Senior Honors Thesis

For seniors interested in qualifying for departmental honors with a thesis. Usually offered every year.

ENG/WLIT 21a The Literature of Walking
[ hum oc ]

Explores genres of pedestrianism—rambles, strolls, promenades, treks, pilgrimages, marches. Students will take and design walks as well as read major works on the subject. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG/WLIT 70b Environmental Film, Environmental Justice
[ djw hum ]

Examines films that address nature, environmental crisis, and green activism. Asks how world cinema can best advance the goals of social and environmental justice. Includes films by major directors and festival award winners. Usually offered every third year.

AAAS/ENG 141b Critical Race Theory
[ hum ]

Traces an intellectual and political history of critical race theory that begins in law classrooms in the 1980s and continues in the 21st century activist strategies of Black Lives Matter movement. We proceed by reading defining theoretical texts alongside African American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 102a Science and Fiction of the Transpacific
[ djw hum ]

Taking as its start in the Cold War, when the fear of Communist ideology and scientific advances reached its feverish peak, and ending with today’s increasing amalgamation of machine and humanity, this course opens a field of cultural inquiry into more than half a century of Transpacific imaginations of technological progress and its shadow of social retrogression. We will think capaciously about issues of colonialism and extraction in the name of science in the Pacific, transnational racialized labor and its post-apocalyptic life, techno-orientalism and the fantasy of Asiatic cyborgs, artificial intelligence and its affective concerns, as well as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and what it has to teach us about the human condition. In the wake of the highly racialized Covid-19 pandemic and its thorny questions regarding the health of the body politic, this course will introduce students to some of the most prominent examples of science fiction by diasporic Asian writers who have been inspired by the vast and multitudinous Transpacific as a space not only of conquest and competition but also of promise and possibility. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 115a The Asian American Memoir
[ deis-us ]

The recent flourishing of the memoir genre in Asian American literature coincides with the increased visibility and participation of Asian Americans in U.S. culture and politics. This course examines how the memoir has found primacy as a literary genre for articulating Asian American political subjects over a century. We will query what it means to craft selfhood as a racial minority—complicated by class, gender and sexual identities—while navigating the gaps between private memories and national history. We will learn about flashpoints in the turbulent history of migration and wars between the U.S. and various Asian countries over the twentieth century through intimate accounts of lived experiences. We will study how various authors manage the intractable issue of unreliability in memory work while responding to the pressure of speaking for their communities. Above all, we will appreciate how, by articulating themselves, each author also theorizes America and their fraught relationship to it. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 142a Vietnam War Representations
[ djw hum ]

Fifty years after it ended, the war in Vietnam seems marked for collective forgetting. Yet the war fundamentally changed the histories of Vietnam and the U.S. through the Cold War to the present day. Taking a transnational approach, this course will examine various understandings of the war through major U.S., Vietnamese, and Vietnamese diasporic literary texts and films from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. All course materials are in English. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 116b American Culture Across the Disciplines
[ hum ]

Explores the latest research on American culture by Brandeis faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Each week a different faculty member will join us to discuss their latest book or article, the questions that animate their research, and the archives, methodologies, and theories they use to answer them. Usually offered every fourth year.

AMST/ENG 138a Race, Region, and Religion in the Twentieth-Century South
[ deis-us hum wi ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 38b in prior years.

Twentieth century fiction of the American South. Racial conflict, regional identity, religion, and modernization in fiction from both sides of the racial divide and from both sides of the gender line. Texts by Chestnutt, Faulkner, Warren, O'Connor, Gaines, McCarthy, and Ellison. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 146a Reading the American Revolution
[ dl hum ]

Explores the role of emerging literary forms and media in catalyzing, shaping, and remembering the American Revolution. Covers revolutionary pamphlets, oratory, the constitutional ratification debates, seduction novels, poetry, and plays. Includes authors Foster, Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, Publius, Tyler, and Wheatley. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 154b Spirit Worlds: Religion and Early American Literature
[ hum ]

Explores how the religious imagination shaped literary expression in colonial America and the early United States, and how early American religion is represented in contemporary culture. Authors may include Ann Bradstreet, Charles Brockden Brown, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Arthur Miller, and Nat Turner. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 167b Writing the Nation: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison
[ deis-us hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 57b in prior years.

An in-depth study of three major American authors of the twentieth century. Highlights the contributions of each author to the American literary canon and to its diversity. Explores how these novelists narrate cross-racial, cross-gendered, cross-regional, and cross-cultural contact and conflict in the United States. Usually offered every third year.

ECS/ENG 110a Thinking about Infinity
[ hum ]

Explores the attempts of the finite human mind to think about infinity. Readings in mathematics, history of science, philosophy, literature, and art, including Euclid, Plato, Cantor, Poincaré, Einstein, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Wordsworth, Shelley, Joyce, Beckett, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 101a Studies in Popular Culture
[ hum ]

A critical analysis of contemporary culture, including television, film, video, advertising, and popular literature. Combines applied criticism and theoretical readings. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 102a Ghosts of Race
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines ghost stories and films from across the African Diasporic. Our discussions will consider a range of phenomena, from ancestral visitations and paranormal ethnography to haunted plantation tours. We will do so in order to highlight a variety of pressing themes within Black film and literatures, including trauma, memory, and xenophobia. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 103b Medieval Women in Print
[ dl hum wi ]

We will be thinking about reading women, writing women, and the production of female bodies through images, sound, and script. We will be reading about teenage runaways, real and fictional queens, Muslim princesses, business women, warrior women, and transgender women. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 104a Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Poetry, from Dryden to Blake
[ hum ]

The major British poets of the Restoration and eighteenth century, from Dryden to Blake, with an emphasis on the expressive experiments in form and content which set the terms and showed the possibilities available to all subsequent English poetry. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 104b Psalms and Stories: Poetry of the Sacred, 1600-1900
[ hum ]

Studies a range of sacred poetry written in Britain and America during a long, contentious period in the history of Western Christianity, from the rise of radical Protestantism through the Enlightenment to the public airing of religious doubt in the 19th century. What were the subjects of contention, of anxiety, of misgiving? How did poets address them in poetic form? To address these questions, we will look at a number of uniquely powerful poems in English. Our goal will be to approach the poems with sympathy, appreciation and a discerning eye. No prior knowledge of Christian doctrine is required. Works include the Psalms from the King James Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and selected poems of Emily Dickinson. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 105a All the Frankensteins
[ hum ]

Study of Frankenstein and its legacy. The syllabus will cover novels, films, and graphic literature. Works to include Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Poor Things, and Frankenkiss, as well as Destroyer, “Blade Runner,” and “Blackenstein.” Usually offered every three years.

ENG 106a Representing Slavery
[ deis-us hum wi ]

Examines the culture and politics of slavery in the US. We will read some of the classic slave narratives, some diaries of enslavers, political speeches by abolitionists and defenders of slavery, letters and public papers of President Lincoln, and novels written by authors with a close engagement with slavery. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 107a Women Writing Desire: Caribbean Fiction and Film
[ hum ]

Literature and film of the last two decades drawn from across the Caribbean and its diasporas, and read in dialogue with popular culture, theory, and earlier generations of artists. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 108a Literature and Heresy
[ hum ]

A study of major texts of British literature through the lens of religious heresy. Does literature provide a refuge for heresy? Or is there something about literature that encourages heretical thinking? These questions are considered in light of dissident works by Milton, Blake, Shelley, James Hogg, and others. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 109a Poetry Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

A workshop for poets willing to explore and develop their craft through intense reading in current poetry, stylistic explorations of content, and imaginative stretching of forms. Usually offered every year.

ENG 109b Fiction Workshop: Short Fiction
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

This workshop will focus on short fiction--stories ten pages and under in length. We will use writing exercises, assigned readings, and essays on craft to discuss structure, character development, point of view, and other elements of fiction. While appropriate for all levels, this workshop might be of special interest to writers who want a secure foundation in the basics. Usually offered every year.

ENG 111b Postcolonial Theory
[ djw hum wi ]

Introduces students to key concepts in postcolonial theory. Traces the consequences of European colonialism for politics, culture and literature around the world, situates these within ongoing contemporary debates, and considers the usefulness of postcolonial theory for understanding the world today. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 112a The Fierce Urgency of Now: Some Poetry in English Since 1945
[ hum wi ]

An introduction to recent poetry in English, dealing with a wide range of poets, as well as striking and significant departures from the poetry of the past. Looks, where possible, at individual volumes by representative authors. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 113b Performing Climate Justice
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Considers justice in relation to our ordinary and collective actions as these recreate or transform our social and material realities as human drivers of the Anthropocene. How can the embodied creation and transmission of knowledge and skills, by creative workers and change agents, help us imagine and create new, translocal ways of being and acting together no longer driven by fossil fuels? What happens to notions of the human, human civilization, and human history if we adopt a non-anthropocentric and biocentric approach to climate justice and climate ethics? Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 114a Enthusiasm, Disappointment, Recovery: British Literature and the French Revolution
[ hum ]

British radicals, including in their number the greatest poets of the age, responded joyously to the Fall of the Bastille and the early political reforms of the French Revolution. Like many European intellectuals, they saw in these developments the promise of major social change which would vindicate the ambitious optimism of the Enlightenment. The collapse of the French Revolution into violence and terror struck a blow to their hopes, their morale and their world-view. British literature of the Romantic age reflects this initial enthusiasm, the subsequent disappointment, and the painful effort of recovery. We will read 18th-century manifestos defending human rights by Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft; works of ardent support for the Revolution by first-generation Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge; their later works grappling with the Revolution’s failure; and the reflections of the second-generation Romantics (Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley) as they struggle to find new grounds of political hope. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 116a Operation Shylock: Responding to Antisemitism in English and American Literature

Considers the theme of antisemitism in English and American literature: Does Judaism pose a challenge to non-Jewish literary culture? Is it an opportunity for asserting an allegedly enlightened nationalism? Does it help or hinder literary quality? How do Jewish writers treat this theme? What issues about intersectionality does the topic of antisemitism bring up, especially with respect to queer and Black literature? Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 117b Novels of William Faulkner
[ hum wi ]

A study of the major novels and stories of William Faulkner, the most influential American novelist of the twentieth century. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 119a Fiction Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

An advanced fiction workshop. Students are expected to compose and revise their fiction, complete typed critiques of each other's work weekly, and discuss readings based on examples of various techniques. Usually offered every year.

ENG 119b Poetry Workshop: Special Topics in Poetry
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

For those who wish to improve as poets while broadening their knowledge of poetry, through a wide spectrum of readings. Students' poems will be discussed in a "workshop" format with emphasis on revision. Remaining time will cover assigned readings and issues of craft. Usually offered every year.

ENG 120a Thirties Movies
[ dl hum ]

Explores how 1930s Hollywood invented modern movies and their techniques -- Romcom, horror, suspense, crime, melodrama, feature-length animation, musicals -- responding to and profoundly altering social, political, industrial, cultural, and economic history, from the Depression to the beginning of World War II. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 121a Sex and Culture
[ hum ]

An exploration of the virtually unlimited explanatory power attributed to sexuality in the modern world. "Texts" include examples from literature, film, television, pornography, sexology, and theory. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 121b Literature in the Age of Mass Incarceration
[ deis-us hum ]

Investigates prison writing and the broader impact of mass incarceration on literature in the U.S. We will consider carceral institutions as distinctive, complex sites of cultural production and explore how creative practices in prisons emerge and circulate as texts. We will approach this literature as a practice of survival in extremity and resistance to an intensively racialized, dehumanizing set of institutions. And we will examine how this writing imagines very different forms of justice. Throughout, this course will investigate the volatile intersections of sexuality, gender, and race in carceral subjectivity and resistance. This course is based on the instructor’s experiences teaching incarcerated students in the Boston area and will have options for service-learning and community engagement. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 122a Decolonizing the Gothic
[ deis-us hum ]

An advanced study of the Gothic mode with special attention on the recent "decolonial turn" in Gothic studies research. The Gothic, established historically in European literature in the late 18th-to-early 20th centuries, has served as a genre in which the supernatural, preternatural, or otherwise uncanny are deployed to explore psychological, social, and political reactions to modernity. Foundational to interpreting the Gothic have been the notions of (often repressed) cultural and psychosocial anxieties, terrors, traumas, and, more broadly, the macabre. In recent decades, however, (re)interpretations have centered around the Gothic mode’s ability to covertly represent critique of colonial and neocolonial relations of power. The most recent turn toward the decolonial has been possible because of the inclusion in major publishing houses the work of historically marginalized writers – including Black and Indigenous people of color (BIPOC). Engaging with primary sources in the traditional Gothic canon followed by recent deployments of the Gothic mode in contemporary multi-ethnic literature, the course asks: What does it mean to decolonize the Gothic? How does traditional Gothic literature represent the racial Other? How do authors today reclaim and refashion the Gothic mode toward liberatory representations? Are there other versions of contemporary Gothic that seek neither to decolonize nor perpetuate colonial power relations? Special one-time offering, fall 2026.

ENG 123a Violence and the Body in Early Modern Drama
[ dl hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 23a in prior years.

Explores early modern understandings of the body, with particular attention to gender, sexuality, race, and nation. Considers the role of violence in determining who counts as fully human, who can be reduced to a body, and whose bodies can be severed from citizenship, recognition, and value. Explores as well the claims of the body and voice to memorialization and belonging, and the evidence of actors' bodies on the stage. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 124a Renaissance Women’s Writing
[ hum ]

Explores the extraordinary writing done by women during the Renaissance, spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and including (among other works) theatrical plays, poems, diaries, religious treatises, Biblical translations, and proto-feminist diatribes. Although the primary focus will be on England, several French and Italian authors will be read in translation. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 126b Joyce's Ulysses
[ hum wi ]

An intensive, collaborative reading of James Joyce's Ulysses, with attention to its historical situation and cultural impact. Consideration of significant scholarly debates around the novel. How does this remarkable text work and what does it offer readers today? How is it still teaching us to read and think about the role of literature in modern societies? We will engage this novel with slow, close attention in an interdisciplinary context, in order to generate a combination of analytical and creative responses. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 127a The Novel in India
[ djw hum nw ]

Survey of the novel and short story of the Indian subcontinent, their formal experiments in context of nationalism and postcolonial history. Authors may include Tagore, Anand, Manto, Desani, Narayan, Desai, Devi, Rushdie, Roy, Mistry, and Chaudhuri. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 127b Migrating Bodies, Migrating Texts
[ djw hum nw ]

Beginning with the region's representation as a tabula rasa, examines the textual and visual constructions of the Caribbean as colony, homeland, backyard, paradise, and Babylon, and how the region's migrations have prompted ideas about evolution, hedonism, imperialism, nationalism, and diaspora. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 128a Race and US Cinema
[ deis-us hum ]

Explores the central role film plays in the construction and policing of racialized identities in the US. We will focus primarily, but not exclusively, on the Black/white binarism. The course is structured as a survey. US cinema originates in the white depiction of Blacks or in the white deployment of blackface, and racialized bodies continue to serve as a ubiquitous (if frequently unacknowledged) source of fascination and anxiety in contemporary cinema. We will begin with early 'whitewashing' films and D.W. Griffith's foundational epic, The Birth of a Nation, and conclude with new queer Black cinema and contemporary Black filmmakers. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 129a Creative Nonfiction Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Students will learn how to use a wide range of literary techniques to produce factual narratives drawn from their own perspectives and lives. Creative assignments and discussions will include the personal essay, the memoir essay and literary journalism. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 131b Decolonial Pedagogy
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Familiarizes students in the humanities, social sciences and public policy with an important strain of pedagogical theory, what Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire called 'education as the practice of freedom.' Topics will include diversity, equity and inclusion; embodied teaching and learning; authority, or the lack thereof; grading and assessment; and teaching reading and writing. Special one-time offering, fall 2020.

ENG 133a Advanced Shakespeare
[ hum wi ]

Recommended prerequisite: ENG 33a or equivalent.

An intensive analysis of a single play or a small number of Shakespeare's plays. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 136a Imagining Apocalypse
[ hum ]

Examines apocalypse as a literary genre and explores the modern apocalyptic imagination in diverse media including film, visual culture, and radio. Topics include slavery and race war, nuclear Armageddon, eco-apocalypse, evangelical rapture culture, and global pandemics. Authors include Octavia Butler, Stanley Kubrick, Ling Ma, Cormack McCarthy, Nat Turner, and H.G. Wells. Usually offered every year.

ENG 137b Women and War
[ djw dl hum nw ]

Examines how African women writers and filmmakers use testimony to bear witness to mass violence. How do these writers resist political and sociocultural silencing systems that reduce traumatic experience to silence, denial, and terror? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 139a Publishing Workshop: Literary Editing and Publishing
[ dl hum oc ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. This course fulfills a workshop requirement for the Creative Writing major and minor. 

Editing and publishing a literary journal -- either digital, print, or in more experimental forms -- can be an important component of a writer's creative life and sense of literary citizenship. This experiential learning course will engage students with theoretical and historical reading, as well as provide practical hands-on tools for literary publishing. Broadsided Press (www.broadsidedpress.org) will be used as a case study. A group publishing project will be part of the coursework, and this can be tied into journals already being published on campus. By the end of the semester, students will have a fuller sense of the work, mindset, difficulties, strategies, and values of a literary publisher. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 139b Screenwriting Workshop: Intermediate Screenwriting
[ hum oc wi ]

Prerequisites: ENG 79a. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

In this writing-intensive course, students build on screenwriting basics and delve more deeply into the creative process. Participants read and critique each other's work, study screenplays and view films, and submit original written material on a biweekly basis. At the conclusion of the course each student will have completed the first draft of a screenplay (100-120 pages). Usually offered every year.

ENG 141b Poetry and Myth
[ hum ]

Studies the way modern English-language poets have adapted traditional myth and legend, with attention to the anthropological and literary theory of myth. The poems treat, variously, Classical, Irish and Yoruba mythology, as well as Arthurian legend. Authors include: W.B. Yeats, Audre Lorde, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Wole Solyinka, and H.D.

ENG 142a Blackness and Horror
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Cannot be taken by students who previously took ENG 42a.

Examines the tense and transformative place that blackness has within the horror tradition, beginning with the late nineteenth century and moving into the present. In addition to documentaries and critical texts, we will analyze literature, films, and various aspects of material culture that explore the relationship between blackness and horror. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 142b Black Queer Literatures
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines various works by black queer critics and cultural producers, beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into the present. While we largely focus upon the attempt to create the shared sense of a world and a tradition in common, we also attend to important divisions brought about by various forms and feelings of difference (including race, gender, class, nation, age and ability). Usually offered every third year.

ENG 143a The History of Mediascapes and Critical Maker Culture
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Class has a required lab component and yields six semester-hour credits towards rate of work and graduation.

To consider how to decolonize book history and “maker culture,” the class examines colonial erasure, colonial knowledge production, race, gender, disability, neurodiversity, sexuality in making an alternative book history that includes khipu, girdle books, wampum, pamphlets, zines, and wearable media technology. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 143b Chaucer's "Global and Refugee Canterbury Tales"
[ deis-us djw dl hum ]

Focuses on situating Chaucer, and particularly the Canterbury Tales, as a global
work. We will examine black feminist writers, playwrights, and poets of the African diaspora who have revised, adapted, extrapolated, and voiced the Canterbury Tales in Jamaican patois, Nigerian pidgin, and the S. London dialects of Brixton. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 144a Medieval Travel Writing
[ djw dl hum ]

Examining medieval travel literature from the Old English period to the early accounts of sixteenth-century explorers in the New World, this class will consider how the area of medieval travel writing exposes how race is framed in relation to gender, disability, multifaith encounters, critical animal studies, and thick mapping. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 144b The Body as Text
[ hum wi ]

How are our bodies the material for our presentations of self and our interactions with others? Examines contemporary theories and histories of the body against literary, philosophical, political, and performance texts of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 145a Poetry and the Supernatural
[ hum ]

Studies modern poetry and poetic theory of the Gothic and supernatural. What is at stake, psychologically and aesthetically, in the representation of supernatural phenomena? Figures include goblins, vampires, witches, ghosts and the goddess of the underworld. Texts include poetry by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Louise Gluck and Rita Dov. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 147a Film Noir
[ hum ]

A study of classics of the genre (The Killers, The Maltese Falcon, Touch of Evil) as well as more recent variations (Chinatown, Bladerunner). Readings include source fiction (Hemingway, Hammett) and essays in criticism and theory. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 148b Me, Myself, and I: The Theme of Self-Conflict
[ hum ]

Study of the images of inner division in literary and philosophical texts, from ancient to modern. Readings include: Plato, Gnostics, Augustine, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Shelley, Yeats, Freud, and Lacan. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 149a Screenwriting Workshop: Writing the Streaming Series
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Introduces students to the craft of writing for a variety of television programming formats, including episodic, late-night, and public service announcements. Students will read and view examples and create their own works within each genre. Usually offered every year.

ENG 149b Writing the Horror and Suspense Film
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Combining lectures, workshops, and screenings, this course introduces the principles and craft of screenwriting, specifically in the horror genre. Students develop confidence and critical thinking while honing their storytelling skills.

Class lectures cover the fundamentals of creative screenwriting: characterization, story structure, pacing, plot, and dialogue. Student participation includes discussions of the reading and viewing assignments, writing exercises, and critiques of their classmates’ original material.

Student work is informed by exploring horror films and their enduring appeal, dating from the earliest incarnations of the silent era through contemporary examples from Hollywood, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the indie film world. This course requires students to complete a polished first act and a detailed eight-to-ten-page outline of their feature-length screenplay. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 150b Out of This World: Science Fiction's Cyborgs, Time Travellers, and Space Invaders
[ hum ]

Charts four principal ways that SF over the past two centuries has imagined alternatives to ordinary reality: cyborgs, time travellers, dystopias and space invaders. It tests scholarly ideas about "cognitive estrangement," technological innovation ("novum") and self-contained "secondary worlds" and culminates in independent research projects. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 151a Queer Studies
[ hum ]

Recommended preparation: An introductory course in gender/sexuality and/or a course in critical theory.

Historical, literary, and theoretical perspectives on the construction and performance of queer subjectivities. How do queer bodies and queer representations challenge heteronormativity? How might we imagine public spaces and queer citizenship? Usually offered every second year.

ENG 151b Performance Studies
[ dl hum ]

Explores paradigms for making performance inside and outside of institutionalized theater spaces, with an emphasis on the performance of everyday life. Students read theories of theater and performance against paradigmatic dramatic texts and documents of social performance. Combining theory with practice, students explore and make site-specific and online performances. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 152a Indian Love Stories
[ djw dl hum nw ]

Introduces students to writings on love, desire and sexuality from ancient India to the present. Topics include ancient eroticism, love in Urdu poetry, Gandhi's sexual asceticism, colonial regulation of sexuality, Bollywood, queer fiction and more. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 152b Arthurian Literature
[ dl hum ]

A survey of (mostly) medieval treatments of the legendary material associated with King Arthur and his court, in several genres: bardic poetry, history, romance, prose narrative. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 153a Enlightenment of the Flesh: Reading and Writing Sex in the Eighteenth Century
[ hum wi ]

Reading libertine and erotic writing alongside medical and philosophical treatises and commercially mainstream fiction, we will ask how practices of writing and reading sex contributed to the emergence and surveillance of a private self knowable through its bodily sex and sensations. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 156a The Modern Prometheus
[ hum ]

Studies the theme of Prometheanism. What is the fate of ambitious efforts to improve the lot of humankind? Texts include: poetry and prose by William Blake, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley, as well as representative works from later periods. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 157a Contemporary Poetry
[ hum ]

Study of 21st-century poets, primarily American. Focus on form, innovation, and diversity. Poets to include: Louise Glück, Jo Harjo, Terence Hayes, Elisa Gonzalez, Alice Notley, Jericho Brown, Tracy K. Williams, and Ocean Vuong.. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 159a Screenwriting Workshop: Variations on the Short Film
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Introduces writing and producing of short films for independent production. Topics will include introduction to screenwriting, script format, loglines, pitch pages, beat sheets and outlines, short form structure, and the planning involved in pre-production. Usually offered every year.

ENG 161a Literature and Counterculture
[ hum ]

Explores alternative, subversive publics created through literature and art. Readings into avant-garde movements and their legacies, with a focus on creative political engagements with public spheres. We'll consider writing, experimental theater, visual art, and musical performance at the cultural edges and outsides. This is creative expression that plays with textual circulation and political subversion. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 165b Victorian Poetry and Its Readers
[ hum ]

Studies how poetry was written and read during the last time poetry held a prominent role in England's public life. The course centers on Tennyson's career as poet laureate, but also gives full attention to Robert Browning's work. The course also surveys the work of E. B. Browning, the Pre-Raphaelites, and others, and concludes with the poetry of Hardy and of the early Yeats. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 166b The Promise of Poetry: Whitman, Dickinson, and Others
[ hum wi ]

Poetry of Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, and Melville, with representative poems of Whittier, Bryant, Longfellow, Poe, Sigourney, and Tuckerman. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 168b Plotting Inheritance
[ djw dl hum ]

Examines novels published in the last two decades set during slavery and indenture in the British Caribbean, alongside (and as) theorizations of accumulation, inheritance, and freedom. How does fiction account for and plot material, moral and emotional worth? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 169a Eco-Writing Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.

A creative writing workshop focused on writing essays and poems that engage with environmental and eco-justice concerns. Readings, writing assignments, and class discussions will be augmented by field trips. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 170a Nigerian Movies in the World
[ hum nw ]

Introduces students to Nigeria's film industry, one of the world's largest. It focuses on both the form and the content of Nollywood films. Examines how Nollywood films project local, national, and regional issues onto global screens. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 170b Contemporary Theatre and Performance: Between Rights and the Post-Human
[ hum oc ]

Students will explore two pressing questions: How do contemporary theatre artists work to rehumanize those denied humanity? During a global climate emergency, how can the theatre, which is traditionally defined by the co-presence of humans, relocate the human as only one of many lifeforms--not the center of everything but rather entwined with other organic, inorganic, and spiritual agencies? Usually offered every second year.

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ djw hum nw ]

Examines African Feminism(s) as a literary and activist movement that underlines the need for centering African women's experiences in the study of African cultures, societies, and histories. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 173a Spenser and Milton
[ hum ]

A course on poetic authority: the poetry of authority and the authority of poetry. Spenser and Milton will be treated individually, but the era they bound will be examined in terms of the tensions within and between their works. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 175b Getting Behind in Black Gay Men's Literatures
[ deis-us hum ]

Examines black queer men’s sexualities in the field of twentieth and twenty-first century American literatures. Our focus on “getting behind” draws together topics that we will explore throughout term. These include varying attitudes that black queer writers have toward cruising and intimacy; falling behind the times; and falling behind at work, or in life, because of certain sexual pursuits. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 176b Jane Austen and George Eliot: Novel Genius
[ hum wi ]

Explores the novels of England's most inventive and surprising worldbuilders, Jane Austen and George Eliot. Their experiments in depicting unexpected aspects of reality unsettled their era's ideas about gender and class and the hidden workings of inequality. How did their innovative ways of depicting subjectivity, the passage of time, and the relationship between the ideal and the actual shape Modernist fiction, as well as the narrative arts of our own day, from film to television and beyond? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 177a Hitchcock's Movies
[ hum ]

A study of thirteen films covering the whole trajectory of Hitchcock's career, as well as interviews and critical responses. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 180a The Modern American Short Story
[ hum ]

Close study of American short-fiction masterworks. Students read as writers write, discussing solutions to narrative obstacles, examining the consequences of alternate points of view. Studies words and syntax to understand and articulate how technical decisions have moral and emotional weight. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 180b Romantic Comedy / Matrimonial Tragedy
[ hum ]

A genre study of romantic comedy, from early to recent cinema. How does its narrative machinery work and what social functions does it serve? An exploration of comedic pleasure as strategy for fashioning gender identities, sexualities, marriages, and anti-marriages. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 183b Gods and Humans in the Renaissance
[ ca hum ]

Examines the relationship between gods and humans in literature and art from the Renaissance, exploring how classical gods and goddesses, as well as biblical figures of the divine, are represented by major European artists and authors. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 188b Capitalism and Nature
[ hum oc ]

Investigates the vision of nature offered in pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist narratives from around the world. Usually offered every third year.

ENG/WLIT 106a The Lyric Imagination from Romanticism to the Present
[ hum ]

That the poetic imagination could be not merely a source of pleasure, instruction, and inspiration, but a source of insight into the meaning of being, a way of connecting the outer world of nature and the inner world of the spirit, a source of ontological, ethical, and political truth, was a conviction entertained by many poets in English and German from the Romantic period to the present day. The course will consider these ideas in the poetry of Blake, Novalis, Eichendorff, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Goethe, Keats, Whitman, Rilke, Eliot and Celan. Special one-time offering, fall 2024.

ENG/WLIT 140b Children's Literature and Constructions of Childhood
[ hum ]

Explores whether children's literature has sought to civilize or to subvert, to moralize or to enchant, forming a bedrock for adult sensibility. Childhood reading reflects the unresolved complexity of the experience of childhood itself as well as larger cultural shifts around the globe in values and beliefs. Usually offered every third year.

ENG/WLIT 141b Literature and Time
[ hum ]

Explores the human experience of temporality and reflection upon it. Themes covered by this course include: memory, nostalgia, anxiety, ethics, eternity, and time travel. Usually offered every third year.

ENG/WLIT 149a Hell: The Poetry
[ hum ]

Studies the Classical underworld and its reworking in English verse. Topics include the descent to the underworld, the ambiguous Satan, the myths of Orpheus and Penelope, and the psychological Hells of the modernists. Usually offered every second year.

ENG/WLIT 191a Environmental Aesthetics
[ djw hum oc ]

Explores major schools of thought about nature, ecology, and art. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 200a Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies

Required of all first-year Ph.D. graduate students. Optional for MA students. Can be repeated for credit with permission from advisor (if applicable) and the Director of Graduate Studies.

A broad-based theory course that will include a unit on research methods. Usually offered every year.

ENG 201a Gender and Sexuality Studies

Investigates sex assignment, genders, and sexualities as categories of social knowledge and modes of social production. Reading recent critical discussions and crossing disciplinary boundaries, this course explores gender, desire, and pleasure in everyday and formal performance, literary and other written texts, and visual representations. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 202a The Global Novel

Prerequisite: Instructor permission required.

Interrogates the term “global novel” as a way to describe 20th- and 21st-century fiction with global scope and scale. Structured around a series of primary texts and theoretical readings, the course will look at how fiction responds to globally-scaled phenomena such as war, migration and climate change, and how events and practices such as colonialism, translation, the publishing market and book clubs structure our understanding of global fiction. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 208a Poetry and Poetics Continuing Seminar

Prerequisite: Instructor permission required.

A study of poetry and poetics, this course will meet once weekly and continue from fall into spring. It is a 4-credit course spread over two semesters, offering 2 credits per semester. Students will have the option of taking one or both semesters. It will have the character of a reading course, but students taking it for credit will have writing assignments. Auditors, both faculty and advanced graduate students, will be encouraged to attend. The plan is to involve as much of the community as possible. The syllabus will be shaped by students’ interests. It will include close study of particular poets and poems as well as attention to the broader approaches offered by poetics and literary theory. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 209a Novels and Narrative

Prerequisite: Instructor permission. Yields half-course credit.

A study of Novels and Narrative with a syllabus organized around both theory and primary texts. We meet biweekly and continue from fall into spring. It is a 4-credit course spread over two semesters, offering 2 credits per semester. Students have the option of taking one or both semesters. It will have the character of a reading course, but students taking it for credit will have writing assignments. Auditors, both faculty and advanced graduate students, will be encouraged to attend and present work in progress. The syllabus will be shaped by students’ interests. It will include close study of particular novelists and prose writers, and explore the broader approaches offered by various forms of cultural and narrative theory. Usually offered every three years.

ENG 211a Black Queer Literatures

Examines various works by black queer critics and cultural producers, beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into the present. While we largely focus upon varied attempts to create a shared sense of a world and a tradition in common, we will also attend to important divisions brought about by various intersections of identity, as well as divergent perspectives on desire, aesthetics, and organizing. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 212a The Transpacific: Theory and Literature

Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

This graduate seminar introduces students to the emergent and fast-evolving field of Transpacific studies through an interdisciplinary, theoretical, and literary lens. We study the ways the U.S. has asserted its presence across the Pacific Ocean through colonialism, occupation, militarism, and financial domination. We examine how various countries and territories in Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania have become contentious sites of political critique, anticolonial resistance, and global imagination. We also account for Latin America and its long but eclipsed history of exchanges with the Asia Pacific region. Other topics include Asian settler colonialism, the Black Pacific, and oceanic intimacies. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 215a Milton and the Shelleys

A graduate seminar on Milton, primarily Paradise Lost, and his reception in the work of Percy and Mary Shelley. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 220a Poetry and Philosophy

Studies the interrelations of poetry and philosophy, from Plato to the present day. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 221a Text, Translation, Ethics

Examines the impact of translation on the construction of cultural memory, identity, and historical narrative. Studies postmodern theories of translation alongside African and Caribbean writers to explore the ethics and politics of writing, reading, and interpreting across languages and cultures. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 223a Reading Love in the Renaissance

Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates with permission of the instructor.

Explores both the literature of love produced in England and Italy from Dante to Shakespeare, and the scientific, medical, and philosophical understandings of love during the European Renaissance. Topics will include love sickness and melancholia, disability and love, the origins of the male gaze, and the female beauty ideal (and its dismantling), in plays, poems, treatises, letters, and historical documents. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 240a Genre, Form, Mode: Realism and Its Others (Genre Trouble)

Realism, even at its 19th century apex in Great Britain, always had a vexed relationship with neighboring novelistic genres: “We have never been realist.” By way of present-day theoretical and critical debates on realism’s limits and affordances (Jameson, Ranciere, Gallagher, Moi, Woloch, et. al.), we explore, taxonomize, and theorize the contact zone where canonical realist fiction (Gaskell, Eliot) shapes and is shaped by sensation (Wilde), naturalism (Hardy), fantasy (Jefferies), horror, “scientific romance” (Wells), the “verse novel.” Culminates with realist-adjacent Modernism (Ford, Woolf). Usually offered every third year.

ENG 247a American Literary Geographies

Explores the spatial frameworks developed by scholars to study American Literature and culture in recent decades, from micro-geographies like the plantation and the region to transnational spaces such as hemisphere and the planet. Readings include foundational literary texts from the colonial period to the twentieth century. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 248b Social Justice and Digital Humanities: Methods and Applications

Issues around accessibility–race, gender, disability, sexuality, etc.–are central to the digital humanities. This class will center these issues as we examine different method areas: archives, mapping, digital ethics, multimodality, digital pedagogy/digital praxis, data, labor, games, data visualization, new media. We will ask what methodological theories and praxis are necessary for a digital humanities that centers social justice. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 250b Film Theory

Provides an introduction to classical and contemporary film theory. Topics will depend, whenever possible, on the interests of students in the seminar, but the general focus will be on the relation of film to modernity. We will pay particular attention to issues of race, class, and sexuality. Students will be required to read broadly in film criticism and theory, and to watch a variety of movies from Birth of a Nation to Barbie. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 251b Political Fictions

Examines the role of collectivity in political fiction. Focuses on post-1960s narratives--especially representations of collectivities, narratives written from a collective point of view (we-narratives), and results of collaborative authorship. Includes experiments with collaborative learning. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 253b Medieval Women and the Book

Examines gender theory, queer theory, and critical race theory as it intersects in medieval women's literary cultures. It considers works about gender and medicine, the environment, race, and the law. Students will consider reading women, writing women, and the production of female bodies through images, sound, and script. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 257b Modernism's Broken Worlds

Seminar on literary modernism as it imagines experiences of brokenness and reparation, involving questions of trauma, collective memory, secularization, and historical justice. Work by Woolf, Eliot, Joyce, Faulkner, Stein, Barnes, Beckett are studied, as well as theoretical writing by Benjamin, Adorno, Freud, and others. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 275b Pedagogy

Required of all PhD students. Optional for MA students.

A broad-based course that will examine various methods and approaches to pedagogy. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 298a Independent Study

May be repeated once for credit.

Specific sections for individual faculty members, as requested. Permission of the director of graduate studies required.

ENG 301a Master's Directed Research

This course entails the creation of a research paper under the direction of a faculty member. Usually offered every year.

ENG 340b Graduate Pedagogy Proseminar

Credit/No Credit seminar. Open to all PhD/MA students. Instructor permission required.

Semester-long course that focuses on university pedagogy and especially antiracist pedagogy. We will discuss various methods and approaches to pedagogy (antiracist, digital, student-centered, etc.) while working through the creation of a college-level English class syllabus. May be repeated for credit. Usually offered every year.

ENG 350a Proseminar

Yields half-course credit. Offered exclusively on a credit/no-credit basis. Required of all first-year PhD students. Optional for MA students.

Focuses on professional development, including teaching competency. Usually offered every year.

ENG 375c Field Exam Colloquium

Full year credit/no credit proseminar required of third-year PhD students. Yields two credits per semester. Does not count towards the twelve required courses for the degree.

Supports PhD students preparing for the field exam.

ENG 402d Dissertation Research

Specific sections for individual faculty members as requested.

GSAS 255b Writing in the Humanities

Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

A graduate seminar investigating the diverse genres, publics, and purposes of critical writing in the humanities, across academic and non-academic contexts, with an introduction to the relevant publishing landscapes. We will explore how writing informed by humanities scholarship can reach many audiences and make significant contributions to public life. Includes extensive reading of exemplary texts by humanities scholars across styles and genres. Also includes readings in public sphere and genre theory, in relation to ongoing attempts by humanities scholars to justify their work to non-academic sectors. Students will develop ideas for diverse projects, across genres, and explore several styles and voices in their own writing. Usually offered every second year.

GSAS 360c Article Publication Workshop

Full year course. Yields two credits per semester. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit. Students should check with their departments about whether or not the course will fulfill any degree requirements.

Open to PhD, including ABD, and MA students in all Humanities, Arts, and Humanistic Social Sciences graduate programs.

This proseminar/workshop will meet every other week and introduce graduate students to the larger philosophy, as well as the nuts and bolts, of academic publication. Each student should come to the class with an academic journal article project in mind and aim to send out the article to a journal by the end of the year (or earlier!). We will workshop the papers in class, and peer review will be an essential component of coursework. Discussions will be general as well as field-specific.

AMST/ENG 146a Reading the American Revolution
[ dl hum ]

Explores the role of emerging literary forms and media in catalyzing, shaping, and remembering the American Revolution. Covers revolutionary pamphlets, oratory, the constitutional ratification debates, seduction novels, poetry, and plays. Includes authors Foster, Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, Publius, Tyler, and Wheatley. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/JOUR 113a Long-form Journalism: Storytelling for Magazines and Podcasts
[ dl oc ss ]

What makes for a great story? This course will examine the hallmarks of successful narrative nonfiction, in both written and audio form. Students will analyze award-winning magazine stories as well as reporting-based podcasts that have injected new energy and financial success into the journalism world. They will learn story structure and techniques to capture and hold the audience's attention. And they will learn by doing, producing their own podcasts and written pieces. This course fulfills the Reporting requirement of the Journalism minor. Usually offered every year.

ECS 100a European Cultural Studies Proseminar: Modernism
[ dl hum oc ]

Explores the interrelationship of literature, music, painting, philosophy, and other arts in the era of high modernism. Works by Artaud, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Mann, Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Kandinsky, Schiele, Beckett, Brecht, Adorno, Sartre, Heidegger, and others. Usually offered every fall semester.

ENG 20b Literary Games
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Course includes a mandatory lab and yields 6 credits.

Addresses a long durée history of the games through the lens of transmedia. This then is the start pointing to examine how transmedia theory may help unpack issues in what I call 'literary games' from the medieval chess board, dice game, to digital multi-player video games now. Within a discussion of transmedia we will address the various theories about narrative and play that have animated discussions about games from the Middle Ages to contemporary media. This class will also center race, gender, sexuality, disability, class in thinking through the issues of transmedia and the gaming cultures that have most recently been in the political mainstream news in relation to far-right politics. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 28a Environmental Literature in an Age of Extinction
[ deis-us dl hum ]

Explores literature's role in shaping modern understandings of environmental change and damage, as well as the possibility of ecological restoration. Works include environmental classics by Thoreau, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson as well as contemporary genres including dystopia, the thriller, and climate fiction. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 41a Critical Digital Humanities Methods and Applications
[ deis-us dl hum ]

Introduces critical digital humanities methods and applications. Considers both theory and praxis, the issues of open and accessible scholarship and work, and the centrality of collaboration. We will investigate power relations, inclusivity, and the ethics of social justice. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 52a Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
[ deis-us djw dl hum nw oc ]

Yields 6 credits.

Examines the functions of storytelling in the refugee crisis. Its main objective is to further students' understanding of the political dimensions of storytelling. The course explores how reworking of reality enable people to question State and social structures. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 62b Contemporary African Literature, Global Perspectives
[ djw dl hum nw oc ]

What is "African" in African literature when the majority of writers are somehow removed from the African societies they portray? How do expatriate writers represent African subjectivities and cultures at the intersection of Diaspora and globalization? Who reads the works produced by these writers? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 79a Screenwriting Workshop: Beginning Screenplay
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Fundamentals of screenwriting: structure, plot, conflict, character, and dialogue. Students read screenwriting theory, scripts, analyze files, and produce an outline and the first act of an original screenplay. Usually offered every year.

ENG 103b Medieval Women in Print
[ dl hum wi ]

We will be thinking about reading women, writing women, and the production of female bodies through images, sound, and script. We will be reading about teenage runaways, real and fictional queens, Muslim princesses, business women, warrior women, and transgender women. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 113b Performing Climate Justice
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Considers justice in relation to our ordinary and collective actions as these recreate or transform our social and material realities as human drivers of the Anthropocene. How can the embodied creation and transmission of knowledge and skills, by creative workers and change agents, help us imagine and create new, translocal ways of being and acting together no longer driven by fossil fuels? What happens to notions of the human, human civilization, and human history if we adopt a non-anthropocentric and biocentric approach to climate justice and climate ethics? Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 119b Poetry Workshop: Special Topics in Poetry
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

For those who wish to improve as poets while broadening their knowledge of poetry, through a wide spectrum of readings. Students' poems will be discussed in a "workshop" format with emphasis on revision. Remaining time will cover assigned readings and issues of craft. Usually offered every year.

ENG 120a Thirties Movies
[ dl hum ]

Explores how 1930s Hollywood invented modern movies and their techniques -- Romcom, horror, suspense, crime, melodrama, feature-length animation, musicals -- responding to and profoundly altering social, political, industrial, cultural, and economic history, from the Depression to the beginning of World War II. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 123a Violence and the Body in Early Modern Drama
[ dl hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 23a in prior years.

Explores early modern understandings of the body, with particular attention to gender, sexuality, race, and nation. Considers the role of violence in determining who counts as fully human, who can be reduced to a body, and whose bodies can be severed from citizenship, recognition, and value. Explores as well the claims of the body and voice to memorialization and belonging, and the evidence of actors' bodies on the stage. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 137b Women and War
[ djw dl hum nw ]

Examines how African women writers and filmmakers use testimony to bear witness to mass violence. How do these writers resist political and sociocultural silencing systems that reduce traumatic experience to silence, denial, and terror? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 139a Publishing Workshop: Literary Editing and Publishing
[ dl hum oc ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. This course fulfills a workshop requirement for the Creative Writing major and minor. 

Editing and publishing a literary journal -- either digital, print, or in more experimental forms -- can be an important component of a writer's creative life and sense of literary citizenship. This experiential learning course will engage students with theoretical and historical reading, as well as provide practical hands-on tools for literary publishing. Broadsided Press (www.broadsidedpress.org) will be used as a case study. A group publishing project will be part of the coursework, and this can be tied into journals already being published on campus. By the end of the semester, students will have a fuller sense of the work, mindset, difficulties, strategies, and values of a literary publisher. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 143a The History of Mediascapes and Critical Maker Culture
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Class has a required lab component and yields six semester-hour credits towards rate of work and graduation.

To consider how to decolonize book history and “maker culture,” the class examines colonial erasure, colonial knowledge production, race, gender, disability, neurodiversity, sexuality in making an alternative book history that includes khipu, girdle books, wampum, pamphlets, zines, and wearable media technology. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 143b Chaucer's "Global and Refugee Canterbury Tales"
[ deis-us djw dl hum ]

Focuses on situating Chaucer, and particularly the Canterbury Tales, as a global
work. We will examine black feminist writers, playwrights, and poets of the African diaspora who have revised, adapted, extrapolated, and voiced the Canterbury Tales in Jamaican patois, Nigerian pidgin, and the S. London dialects of Brixton. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 144a Medieval Travel Writing
[ djw dl hum ]

Examining medieval travel literature from the Old English period to the early accounts of sixteenth-century explorers in the New World, this class will consider how the area of medieval travel writing exposes how race is framed in relation to gender, disability, multifaith encounters, critical animal studies, and thick mapping. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 149a Screenwriting Workshop: Writing the Streaming Series
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Introduces students to the craft of writing for a variety of television programming formats, including episodic, late-night, and public service announcements. Students will read and view examples and create their own works within each genre. Usually offered every year.

ENG 151b Performance Studies
[ dl hum ]

Explores paradigms for making performance inside and outside of institutionalized theater spaces, with an emphasis on the performance of everyday life. Students read theories of theater and performance against paradigmatic dramatic texts and documents of social performance. Combining theory with practice, students explore and make site-specific and online performances. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 152a Indian Love Stories
[ djw dl hum nw ]

Introduces students to writings on love, desire and sexuality from ancient India to the present. Topics include ancient eroticism, love in Urdu poetry, Gandhi's sexual asceticism, colonial regulation of sexuality, Bollywood, queer fiction and more. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 152b Arthurian Literature
[ dl hum ]

A survey of (mostly) medieval treatments of the legendary material associated with King Arthur and his court, in several genres: bardic poetry, history, romance, prose narrative. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 168b Plotting Inheritance
[ djw dl hum ]

Examines novels published in the last two decades set during slavery and indenture in the British Caribbean, alongside (and as) theorizations of accumulation, inheritance, and freedom. How does fiction account for and plot material, moral and emotional worth? Usually offered every third year.

HISP 85a Introduction to U.S. Latinx Literatures and Cultures
[ deis-us djw dl hum ]

Offered in English.

Introduces students to U.S. Latinx cultural productions and to the interdisciplinary questions that concern U.S. Latinx communities. Latinxs have played a vital role in the history, politics, and cultures of the United States. U.S. Latinx literary works, in particular, have established important socio-historical and aesthetic networks that highlight Latinx expression and lived experiences, engaging with issues including biculturalism, language, citizenship, systems of value, and intersectional identity. Though the Latinx literary tradition spans more than 400 years, this course will focus on 20th and 21st century texts that decolonize nationalist approaches to Latinidad(es) and therefore challenge existing Latinx literary "canons." Usually offered every year.

AAAS 124a After the Dance: Performing Sovereignty in the Caribbean
[ hum oc ss ]

Utilizing short fiction, essays, plays, poetry, and the visual arts, this class theorizes movement and/as freedom in the spectacular or mundane movements of the region, including annual Carnival and Hosay celebrations. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 47a Frontier Visions: The West in American Literature and Culture
[ hum oc ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 47a in prior years.

Explores more than two centuries of literary and visual culture about the American West, including the frontier myth, Indian captivity narratives, frontier humor, dime novel and Hollywood westerns, the Native American Renaissance, and western regionalism. Authors include Black Hawk, Cather, Doig, Silko, Turner, and Twain. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/JOUR 113a Long-form Journalism: Storytelling for Magazines and Podcasts
[ dl oc ss ]

What makes for a great story? This course will examine the hallmarks of successful narrative nonfiction, in both written and audio form. Students will analyze award-winning magazine stories as well as reporting-based podcasts that have injected new energy and financial success into the journalism world. They will learn story structure and techniques to capture and hold the audience's attention. And they will learn by doing, producing their own podcasts and written pieces. This course fulfills the Reporting requirement of the Journalism minor. Usually offered every year.

ECS 100a European Cultural Studies Proseminar: Modernism
[ dl hum oc ]

Explores the interrelationship of literature, music, painting, philosophy, and other arts in the era of high modernism. Works by Artaud, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Mann, Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Kandinsky, Schiele, Beckett, Brecht, Adorno, Sartre, Heidegger, and others. Usually offered every fall semester.

ENG 11a Close Reading: Theory and Practice
[ hum oc ]

Examines the theory, practice, technique, and method of close literary reading, with scrupulous attention to a variety of literary texts to ask not only what but also how they mean, and what justifies our thinking that they mean these things. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 17b Climate Fictions
[ hum oc wi ]

Examines fictional narratives addressing climate change. Asks how authors from around the world imagine a future in which sea levels, animal populations, temperatures, access to food, and/or weather patterns are significantly different from those of the present. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 20b Literary Games
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Course includes a mandatory lab and yields 6 credits.

Addresses a long durée history of the games through the lens of transmedia. This then is the start pointing to examine how transmedia theory may help unpack issues in what I call 'literary games' from the medieval chess board, dice game, to digital multi-player video games now. Within a discussion of transmedia we will address the various theories about narrative and play that have animated discussions about games from the Middle Ages to contemporary media. This class will also center race, gender, sexuality, disability, class in thinking through the issues of transmedia and the gaming cultures that have most recently been in the political mainstream news in relation to far-right politics. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 32a 21st-Century Global Fiction: A Basic Course
[ djw hum nw oc ]

Offers an introduction to 21st-century global fiction in English. What is fiction and how does it illuminate contemporary issues such as migration, terrorism, and climate change? Authors include Zadie Smith, Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, J.M. Coetzee and others. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 33b Shakespeare Now
[ hum oc ]

This introductory Shakespeare course will be structured around the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and issues of central relevance to our world today. We will be reading a small number of plays, leaving time to work on contemporary adaptations and uses of each of the plays we study. Topics to be explored include (but are by no means limited to) misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism. Usually offered every year.

ENG 43b Medieval Play: Drama, LARP, and Video Games
[ djw hum oc ]

Works with a selection of medieval mystery plays, medieval-themed video games and participatory live-action role play to explore: play structures and design; alternative-world creation by way of immersion; the significance of gender, race, disability, and sexuality in performance. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 50a Love Poetry from Sappho to Neruda
[ hum oc ]

This course explores the relationship between love and poetry. Starts with the ancient Greek poet Sappho and proceeds through the centuries, reading lyrics by Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, Petrarch, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Rossetti, and others. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 52a Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
[ deis-us djw dl hum nw oc ]

Yields 6 credits.

Examines the functions of storytelling in the refugee crisis. Its main objective is to further students' understanding of the political dimensions of storytelling. The course explores how reworking of reality enable people to question State and social structures. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 60a Storytelling Performance
[ hum oc ]

This experiential course is a workshop for students to craft and perform stories for live audiences at Brandeis and elsewhere in the Boston area. Through a series of collaborative exercises and rehearsals, students will develop a repertoire of several kinds of stories, including autobiographies, fictions, folk tales, and local history. We will tell our individual and group stories, as a team, at youth programs, open mics, and other public spaces. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 62b Contemporary African Literature, Global Perspectives
[ djw dl hum nw oc ]

What is "African" in African literature when the majority of writers are somehow removed from the African societies they portray? How do expatriate writers represent African subjectivities and cultures at the intersection of Diaspora and globalization? Who reads the works produced by these writers? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 64a Queer Readings: Before the Binary
[ hum oc ]

Explores vectors of desire, intimacy, and relationality prior to 1800 that do not always neatly line up with post-Enlightenment taxonomies of gender, sexuality, race, and humanness. We will read works by Austen, Behn, Marlowe, Phillips, Rochester, Shakespeare, and others, asking: What possibilities of pleasure, intimacy, love, friendship, and kinship existed alongside male-female reproductive sex and marriage before 1800? What possibilities for non-binary gender identifications and presentations? Without firm taxonomic distinctions among classes of people, between human and nonhuman animals, or even between the human and the thing, how did early moderns understand what counted as fully human? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 73a Witchcraft and Magic in the Renaissance: From Scotland to Salem
[ hum oc ]

Focuses on the representation of witches, wizards, devils, and magicians in texts by Shakespeare, Marlow, and others. Historical accounts of witchcraft trials in England and Scotland are read and several films dramatizing these trials are viewed. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 109a Poetry Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

A workshop for poets willing to explore and develop their craft through intense reading in current poetry, stylistic explorations of content, and imaginative stretching of forms. Usually offered every year.

ENG 109b Fiction Workshop: Short Fiction
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

This workshop will focus on short fiction--stories ten pages and under in length. We will use writing exercises, assigned readings, and essays on craft to discuss structure, character development, point of view, and other elements of fiction. While appropriate for all levels, this workshop might be of special interest to writers who want a secure foundation in the basics. Usually offered every year.

ENG 113b Performing Climate Justice
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Considers justice in relation to our ordinary and collective actions as these recreate or transform our social and material realities as human drivers of the Anthropocene. How can the embodied creation and transmission of knowledge and skills, by creative workers and change agents, help us imagine and create new, translocal ways of being and acting together no longer driven by fossil fuels? What happens to notions of the human, human civilization, and human history if we adopt a non-anthropocentric and biocentric approach to climate justice and climate ethics? Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 119a Fiction Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

An advanced fiction workshop. Students are expected to compose and revise their fiction, complete typed critiques of each other's work weekly, and discuss readings based on examples of various techniques. Usually offered every year.

ENG 139a Publishing Workshop: Literary Editing and Publishing
[ dl hum oc ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. This course fulfills a workshop requirement for the Creative Writing major and minor. 

Editing and publishing a literary journal -- either digital, print, or in more experimental forms -- can be an important component of a writer's creative life and sense of literary citizenship. This experiential learning course will engage students with theoretical and historical reading, as well as provide practical hands-on tools for literary publishing. Broadsided Press (www.broadsidedpress.org) will be used as a case study. A group publishing project will be part of the coursework, and this can be tied into journals already being published on campus. By the end of the semester, students will have a fuller sense of the work, mindset, difficulties, strategies, and values of a literary publisher. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 139b Screenwriting Workshop: Intermediate Screenwriting
[ hum oc wi ]

Prerequisites: ENG 79a. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

In this writing-intensive course, students build on screenwriting basics and delve more deeply into the creative process. Participants read and critique each other's work, study screenplays and view films, and submit original written material on a biweekly basis. At the conclusion of the course each student will have completed the first draft of a screenplay (100-120 pages). Usually offered every year.

ENG 143a The History of Mediascapes and Critical Maker Culture
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Class has a required lab component and yields six semester-hour credits towards rate of work and graduation.

To consider how to decolonize book history and “maker culture,” the class examines colonial erasure, colonial knowledge production, race, gender, disability, neurodiversity, sexuality in making an alternative book history that includes khipu, girdle books, wampum, pamphlets, zines, and wearable media technology. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 170b Contemporary Theatre and Performance: Between Rights and the Post-Human
[ hum oc ]

Students will explore two pressing questions: How do contemporary theatre artists work to rehumanize those denied humanity? During a global climate emergency, how can the theatre, which is traditionally defined by the co-presence of humans, relocate the human as only one of many lifeforms--not the center of everything but rather entwined with other organic, inorganic, and spiritual agencies? Usually offered every second year.

ENG 188b Capitalism and Nature
[ hum oc ]

Investigates the vision of nature offered in pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist narratives from around the world. Usually offered every third year.

ENG/WLIT 21a The Literature of Walking
[ hum oc ]

Explores genres of pedestrianism—rambles, strolls, promenades, treks, pilgrimages, marches. Students will take and design walks as well as read major works on the subject. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG/WLIT 191a Environmental Aesthetics
[ djw hum oc ]

Explores major schools of thought about nature, ecology, and art. Usually offered every third year.

HSSP 118b Viewing Medicine and Health Policy Through the Lens of Literature
[ oc ss ]

Literature–fiction, memoir, poetry, and drama–offers a powerful lens for studying key health policy issues. By harnessing the power of authors' imaginations, insights and compelling stories, students can gain deeper insight into topics including: patient centered care, ethics in research, access to healthcare, obesity and hunger, role of the pharmaceutical and tobacco, aging policy, disability, and clinicians' roles and training. Usually offered every second year.

WGS 135b Postcolonial Feminisms
[ hum oc ]

Examines feminist theories, literature, and film from formerly colonized, Anglophone countries in South Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa. It takes the shared path of decolonization and postcoloniality to discuss the development of feminist discourse and the diverse trajectories of gendered lives. Usually offered every third year.

AAAS 79b African American Literature of the Twentieth Century
[ hum ss wi ]

An introduction to the essential themes, aesthetic concerns, and textual strategies that characterize African American writing of this century. Examines those influences that have shaped the poetry, fiction, and prose nonfiction of representative writers. Usually offered every second year.

AAAS/ENG 80a Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

Explores novelists’ and poets’ fascination with photography; the fraught role of photography in the struggle against antiblackness; Black photographers in the studio; and theorists of photography and looking. In African, African-American, Caribbean and Black British archives, canons and communities, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 48a American Immigrant Narratives
[ deis-us hum wi ]

With its essential role in U.S. society and history, immigration figures prominently in the American literary canon. This course traverses varied immigrant tales of twentieth-century and contemporary United States, set in the frontier of westward expansion, the Golden West, and the Eastern Seaboard. Some classics of this vast cultural corpus will anchor our critical inquiries into subject and nation formation, citizenship, and marginalization under powerful political forces both at home and abroad. By probing the complex aesthetic modes and narrative strategies in these and other texts, we will investigate deeply felt impacts of ever-shifting American cultural politics shaping immigrant experiences. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 138a Race, Region, and Religion in the Twentieth-Century South
[ deis-us hum wi ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 38b in prior years.

Twentieth century fiction of the American South. Racial conflict, regional identity, religion, and modernization in fiction from both sides of the racial divide and from both sides of the gender line. Texts by Chestnutt, Faulkner, Warren, O'Connor, Gaines, McCarthy, and Ellison. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 1a Introduction to Literary Studies
[ hum wi ]

May not be taken by students who completed FYS 16a without instructor permission.

This course is designed to introduce students to basic skills and concepts needed for the study of Anglophone literature and culture. These include skills in close reading; identification and differentiation of major literary styles and periods; knowledge of basic critical terms; definition of genres. Usually offered every semester.

ENG 12a Decolonizing Tongues: Language in African Literature
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

A comparative exploration of the politics of language in postcolonial African Literature and its impact on literary production. It locates the language question in anglophone and francophone African Literature within the context political independence. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 17b Climate Fictions
[ hum oc wi ]

Examines fictional narratives addressing climate change. Asks how authors from around the world imagine a future in which sea levels, animal populations, temperatures, access to food, and/or weather patterns are significantly different from those of the present. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 19a Introduction to Creative Writing Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.

A workshop for beginning writers. Practice and discussion of short literary forms such as fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Other forms may also be explored. Usually offered every year.

ENG 19b The Autobiographical Imagination: Creative Nonfiction Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.

Combines the study of contemporary autobiographical prose and poetry--from primarily Asian and Pacific Islander writers in the United States--with intense writing practice arising from these texts. Examines--as writers--what it means to construct the story of one's life, and ways in which lies, metaphor, and imagination transform memory to reveal and conceal the self. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 26a Novels on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Fiction as Psychological Inquiry
[ hum wi ]

Explores novels as a mode of psychological inquiry, particularly into trauma, addiction, delusion, and depression. Our reading will help us consider the cultural complexity of mental illness and social dimensions of private suffering. How does the genre of the novel afford special attention to the intricacies of distressed mental life? And how has this art form been important for imagining psychological healing? Readings include novels from the 19th century to the present from several regions of the world, in a long lineage of narrative fiction about human psychology. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 35a The Weird and the Experimental in Contemporary Literature
[ hum wi ]

What does it mean to be “weird”? What makes a text “experimental”? And what can experimental texts teach us about the ever-changing nature of society? This course explores innovation and experimentation in the narrative structure of contemporary novels and films from around the world within their cultural contexts. Special one-time offering, spring 2024.

ENG 46b American Gothic Romantic Fiction
[ hum wi ]

American Gothic and romantic fiction from Charles Brockden Brown to Cormac McCarthy. Texts by Brown, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, O'Connor, Warren, and McCarthy. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 66b Contemporary Global Dystopias
[ djw hum wi ]

Explores the sources, moods, and effects of dystopian fiction from around the world. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 79a Screenwriting Workshop: Beginning Screenplay
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Fundamentals of screenwriting: structure, plot, conflict, character, and dialogue. Students read screenwriting theory, scripts, analyze files, and produce an outline and the first act of an original screenplay. Usually offered every year.

ENG 103b Medieval Women in Print
[ dl hum wi ]

We will be thinking about reading women, writing women, and the production of female bodies through images, sound, and script. We will be reading about teenage runaways, real and fictional queens, Muslim princesses, business women, warrior women, and transgender women. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 106a Representing Slavery
[ deis-us hum wi ]

Examines the culture and politics of slavery in the US. We will read some of the classic slave narratives, some diaries of enslavers, political speeches by abolitionists and defenders of slavery, letters and public papers of President Lincoln, and novels written by authors with a close engagement with slavery. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 109a Poetry Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

A workshop for poets willing to explore and develop their craft through intense reading in current poetry, stylistic explorations of content, and imaginative stretching of forms. Usually offered every year.

ENG 109b Fiction Workshop: Short Fiction
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

This workshop will focus on short fiction--stories ten pages and under in length. We will use writing exercises, assigned readings, and essays on craft to discuss structure, character development, point of view, and other elements of fiction. While appropriate for all levels, this workshop might be of special interest to writers who want a secure foundation in the basics. Usually offered every year.

ENG 111b Postcolonial Theory
[ djw hum wi ]

Introduces students to key concepts in postcolonial theory. Traces the consequences of European colonialism for politics, culture and literature around the world, situates these within ongoing contemporary debates, and considers the usefulness of postcolonial theory for understanding the world today. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 112a The Fierce Urgency of Now: Some Poetry in English Since 1945
[ hum wi ]

An introduction to recent poetry in English, dealing with a wide range of poets, as well as striking and significant departures from the poetry of the past. Looks, where possible, at individual volumes by representative authors. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 117b Novels of William Faulkner
[ hum wi ]

A study of the major novels and stories of William Faulkner, the most influential American novelist of the twentieth century. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 119a Fiction Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

An advanced fiction workshop. Students are expected to compose and revise their fiction, complete typed critiques of each other's work weekly, and discuss readings based on examples of various techniques. Usually offered every year.

ENG 119b Poetry Workshop: Special Topics in Poetry
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

For those who wish to improve as poets while broadening their knowledge of poetry, through a wide spectrum of readings. Students' poems will be discussed in a "workshop" format with emphasis on revision. Remaining time will cover assigned readings and issues of craft. Usually offered every year.

ENG 126b Joyce's Ulysses
[ hum wi ]

An intensive, collaborative reading of James Joyce's Ulysses, with attention to its historical situation and cultural impact. Consideration of significant scholarly debates around the novel. How does this remarkable text work and what does it offer readers today? How is it still teaching us to read and think about the role of literature in modern societies? We will engage this novel with slow, close attention in an interdisciplinary context, in order to generate a combination of analytical and creative responses. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 129a Creative Nonfiction Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Students will learn how to use a wide range of literary techniques to produce factual narratives drawn from their own perspectives and lives. Creative assignments and discussions will include the personal essay, the memoir essay and literary journalism. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 133a Advanced Shakespeare
[ hum wi ]

Recommended prerequisite: ENG 33a or equivalent.

An intensive analysis of a single play or a small number of Shakespeare's plays. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 139b Screenwriting Workshop: Intermediate Screenwriting
[ hum oc wi ]

Prerequisites: ENG 79a. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

In this writing-intensive course, students build on screenwriting basics and delve more deeply into the creative process. Participants read and critique each other's work, study screenplays and view films, and submit original written material on a biweekly basis. At the conclusion of the course each student will have completed the first draft of a screenplay (100-120 pages). Usually offered every year.

ENG 144b The Body as Text
[ hum wi ]

How are our bodies the material for our presentations of self and our interactions with others? Examines contemporary theories and histories of the body against literary, philosophical, political, and performance texts of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 149a Screenwriting Workshop: Writing the Streaming Series
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Introduces students to the craft of writing for a variety of television programming formats, including episodic, late-night, and public service announcements. Students will read and view examples and create their own works within each genre. Usually offered every year.

ENG 149b Writing the Horror and Suspense Film
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Combining lectures, workshops, and screenings, this course introduces the principles and craft of screenwriting, specifically in the horror genre. Students develop confidence and critical thinking while honing their storytelling skills.

Class lectures cover the fundamentals of creative screenwriting: characterization, story structure, pacing, plot, and dialogue. Student participation includes discussions of the reading and viewing assignments, writing exercises, and critiques of their classmates’ original material.

Student work is informed by exploring horror films and their enduring appeal, dating from the earliest incarnations of the silent era through contemporary examples from Hollywood, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the indie film world. This course requires students to complete a polished first act and a detailed eight-to-ten-page outline of their feature-length screenplay. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 153a Enlightenment of the Flesh: Reading and Writing Sex in the Eighteenth Century
[ hum wi ]

Reading libertine and erotic writing alongside medical and philosophical treatises and commercially mainstream fiction, we will ask how practices of writing and reading sex contributed to the emergence and surveillance of a private self knowable through its bodily sex and sensations. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 159a Screenwriting Workshop: Variations on the Short Film
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Introduces writing and producing of short films for independent production. Topics will include introduction to screenwriting, script format, loglines, pitch pages, beat sheets and outlines, short form structure, and the planning involved in pre-production. Usually offered every year.

ENG 166b The Promise of Poetry: Whitman, Dickinson, and Others
[ hum wi ]

Poetry of Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, and Melville, with representative poems of Whittier, Bryant, Longfellow, Poe, Sigourney, and Tuckerman. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 169a Eco-Writing Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.

A creative writing workshop focused on writing essays and poems that engage with environmental and eco-justice concerns. Readings, writing assignments, and class discussions will be augmented by field trips. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 176b Jane Austen and George Eliot: Novel Genius
[ hum wi ]

Explores the novels of England's most inventive and surprising worldbuilders, Jane Austen and George Eliot. Their experiments in depicting unexpected aspects of reality unsettled their era's ideas about gender and class and the hidden workings of inequality. How did their innovative ways of depicting subjectivity, the passage of time, and the relationship between the ideal and the actual shape Modernist fiction, as well as the narrative arts of our own day, from film to television and beyond? Usually offered every third year.

GECS 130b The Princess and the Golem: Fairy Tales
[ hum wi ]

Conducted in English.

Compares Walt Disney's films with German and other European fairy tales from the nineteenth and twentieth century, focusing on feminist and psychoanalytic readings. Usually offered every second year.

THA 142b Women Playwrights: Writing for the Stage by and about Women
[ ca deis-us wi ]

Introduces the world of women playwrights. This course will engage the texts through common themes explored by women playwrights: motherhood (and daughterhood), reproduction, sexuality, family relationships, etc. Students will participate in writing or performance exercises based on these themes. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 10b Poetry: A Basic Course
[ hum ]

Designed as a first course for all persons interested in the subject. It is intended to be basic without being elementary. The subject matter will consist of poems of short and middle length in English from the earliest period to the present. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 11a Close Reading: Theory and Practice
[ hum oc ]

Examines the theory, practice, technique, and method of close literary reading, with scrupulous attention to a variety of literary texts to ask not only what but also how they mean, and what justifies our thinking that they mean these things. Usually offered every third year.

AAAS/ENG 141b Critical Race Theory
[ hum ]

Traces an intellectual and political history of critical race theory that begins in law classrooms in the 1980s and continues in the 21st century activist strategies of Black Lives Matter movement. We proceed by reading defining theoretical texts alongside African American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. Usually offered every third year.

ECS/ENG 110a Thinking about Infinity
[ hum ]

Explores the attempts of the finite human mind to think about infinity. Readings in mathematics, history of science, philosophy, literature, and art, including Euclid, Plato, Cantor, Poincaré, Einstein, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Wordsworth, Shelley, Joyce, Beckett, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 11a Close Reading: Theory and Practice
[ hum oc ]

Examines the theory, practice, technique, and method of close literary reading, with scrupulous attention to a variety of literary texts to ask not only what but also how they mean, and what justifies our thinking that they mean these things. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 12a Decolonizing Tongues: Language in African Literature
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

A comparative exploration of the politics of language in postcolonial African Literature and its impact on literary production. It locates the language question in anglophone and francophone African Literature within the context political independence. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 20b Literary Games
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Course includes a mandatory lab and yields 6 credits.

Addresses a long durée history of the games through the lens of transmedia. This then is the start pointing to examine how transmedia theory may help unpack issues in what I call 'literary games' from the medieval chess board, dice game, to digital multi-player video games now. Within a discussion of transmedia we will address the various theories about narrative and play that have animated discussions about games from the Middle Ages to contemporary media. This class will also center race, gender, sexuality, disability, class in thinking through the issues of transmedia and the gaming cultures that have most recently been in the political mainstream news in relation to far-right politics. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 25b Abolitionist Imaginaries: Literary Visions Beyond Prison
[ hum ]

What does it mean to imagine a world without prisons? What role does literature play in this process? This course explores abolition as a theoretical concept and traces the genealogy of abolition from slavery to the carceral state. In addition to prison writing, we will read texts by early reformers/abolitionists and authors such as Bentham, Dickens, and Douglas and contemporary prison abolitionists like Davis, Fleetwood, and Gilmore. We will ask what role literature plays in the abolitionist vision and how it can shape and reflect our evolving ideas about justice, freedom, and the structure of society. The course will culminate in a community engaged project. Special one-time offering, spring 2024.

ENG 31a What Is It Like To Be An Animal: Other Minds in Literature
[ hum ]

A study of literature that examines human-nonhuman relations and animal subjectivity. We will look at how thinkers have characterized essential differences between "human" and "animal," as well as modernist literary responses that reimagine the chasm between the "rational human" and "instinctual animal." Readings include Thoreau, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Woolf, Wittgenstein, Coetzee, Cora Diamond, and contemporary animal studies scholarship. Special one-time offering, fall 2023.

ENG 53a Reading Shakespeare When the Globe is on Fire
[ djw hum ]

Examines the complex relationships between William Shakespeare’s plays and the radical ecological transformations occurring in and beyond England throughout the period in which he wrote. At the same time, we will consider how exploring the dynamic interplay between Shakespeare’s words and his world might help us better understand both the canon and the climate we’ve inherited. By pairing contemporary ecocritical scholarship alongside close readings of Shakespearean texts, we will grapple with the enduring challenges and possibilities of environmental justice and interrogate the “role” of art on a burning planet. Special one-time offering, fall 2025.

ENG 60b Literature by Ear: Talking Books from the Gramophone to the Podcast Era
[ hum ]

Explores how genres change and how ideas about art change when oral/aural distribution either supplements or replaces the printed word. Traces the idea of the talking book, from its origins to the present—and by inviting students to perform their own experiments with creating new kinds of audiobook, or podcasts, or more radical forays into the world of the ear. Beginning with a historical look at the early forms of mechanical recording (Victorian poetry recording, radio drama, the rise of recorded books around WW2) it moves forward into contemporary forms like YouTube poetry channels and the explosion of audiobook production in “the age of Amazon.” Usually offered every third year.

ENG 61b Philosophical Approaches to Film Theory
[ hum ]

Studies a philosophical approach to film theory, examining both what philosophy has to say about film and what effects the existence and experience of film can have on philosophical thinking about reality, perception, judgment, and other minds. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 68a Salvage Work: Reimagining in Caribbean Ruins
[ hum ]

How do we imagine alternative futures in a space of ruin? This course is imagined in relation to Angela Naimou’s term salvage work, which “requires the acceptance and incorporation of existing loss, ruin, and injury into the fragments that are nonetheless generative of something more than absence” (Naimou 11). It references a sort of recovery or possibility rooted in the imagination of what these remnants or ruins can be in the Caribbean archipelago and beyond.

“Salvage Work” offers one way in which the Caribbean engage with ruin, imagination, and worldbuilding through the works of Shani Mootoo, Maisy Card, Nala Hopkinson, Tessa Mars, and other writers, painters, and filmmakers who explore the archives, motherhood, kinship, queerness, intimacy, inheritance, and return. These twentieth/twenty-first-century texts return to various periods, like enslavement, indentureship, postcolonial independent movements, Windrush, and other moments in the past.

By considering how race, class, gender, and sexuality overlap and relate, this class will create a space to reflect on the relationships between identity and belonging, oppression and resistance, literature, place, and people across generations and geographies. Special one-time offering, spring 2025.

ENG 101a Studies in Popular Culture
[ hum ]

A critical analysis of contemporary culture, including television, film, video, advertising, and popular literature. Combines applied criticism and theoretical readings. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 111b Postcolonial Theory
[ djw hum wi ]

Introduces students to key concepts in postcolonial theory. Traces the consequences of European colonialism for politics, culture and literature around the world, situates these within ongoing contemporary debates, and considers the usefulness of postcolonial theory for understanding the world today. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 113b Performing Climate Justice
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Considers justice in relation to our ordinary and collective actions as these recreate or transform our social and material realities as human drivers of the Anthropocene. How can the embodied creation and transmission of knowledge and skills, by creative workers and change agents, help us imagine and create new, translocal ways of being and acting together no longer driven by fossil fuels? What happens to notions of the human, human civilization, and human history if we adopt a non-anthropocentric and biocentric approach to climate justice and climate ethics? Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 116a Operation Shylock: Responding to Antisemitism in English and American Literature

Considers the theme of antisemitism in English and American literature: Does Judaism pose a challenge to non-Jewish literary culture? Is it an opportunity for asserting an allegedly enlightened nationalism? Does it help or hinder literary quality? How do Jewish writers treat this theme? What issues about intersectionality does the topic of antisemitism bring up, especially with respect to queer and Black literature? Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 121a Sex and Culture
[ hum ]

An exploration of the virtually unlimited explanatory power attributed to sexuality in the modern world. "Texts" include examples from literature, film, television, pornography, sexology, and theory. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 121b Literature in the Age of Mass Incarceration
[ deis-us hum ]

Investigates prison writing and the broader impact of mass incarceration on literature in the U.S. We will consider carceral institutions as distinctive, complex sites of cultural production and explore how creative practices in prisons emerge and circulate as texts. We will approach this literature as a practice of survival in extremity and resistance to an intensively racialized, dehumanizing set of institutions. And we will examine how this writing imagines very different forms of justice. Throughout, this course will investigate the volatile intersections of sexuality, gender, and race in carceral subjectivity and resistance. This course is based on the instructor’s experiences teaching incarcerated students in the Boston area and will have options for service-learning and community engagement. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 131b Decolonial Pedagogy
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Familiarizes students in the humanities, social sciences and public policy with an important strain of pedagogical theory, what Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire called 'education as the practice of freedom.' Topics will include diversity, equity and inclusion; embodied teaching and learning; authority, or the lack thereof; grading and assessment; and teaching reading and writing. Special one-time offering, fall 2020.

ENG 141b Poetry and Myth
[ hum ]

Studies the way modern English-language poets have adapted traditional myth and legend, with attention to the anthropological and literary theory of myth. The poems treat, variously, Classical, Irish and Yoruba mythology, as well as Arthurian legend. Authors include: W.B. Yeats, Audre Lorde, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Wole Solyinka, and H.D.

ENG 151a Queer Studies
[ hum ]

Recommended preparation: An introductory course in gender/sexuality and/or a course in critical theory.

Historical, literary, and theoretical perspectives on the construction and performance of queer subjectivities. How do queer bodies and queer representations challenge heteronormativity? How might we imagine public spaces and queer citizenship? Usually offered every second year.

ENG 151b Performance Studies
[ dl hum ]

Explores paradigms for making performance inside and outside of institutionalized theater spaces, with an emphasis on the performance of everyday life. Students read theories of theater and performance against paradigmatic dramatic texts and documents of social performance. Combining theory with practice, students explore and make site-specific and online performances. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 161a Literature and Counterculture
[ hum ]

Explores alternative, subversive publics created through literature and art. Readings into avant-garde movements and their legacies, with a focus on creative political engagements with public spheres. We'll consider writing, experimental theater, visual art, and musical performance at the cultural edges and outsides. This is creative expression that plays with textual circulation and political subversion. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ djw hum nw ]

Examines African Feminism(s) as a literary and activist movement that underlines the need for centering African women's experiences in the study of African cultures, societies, and histories. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 188b Capitalism and Nature
[ hum oc ]

Investigates the vision of nature offered in pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist narratives from around the world. Usually offered every third year.

ENG/WLIT 21a The Literature of Walking
[ hum oc ]

Explores genres of pedestrianism—rambles, strolls, promenades, treks, pilgrimages, marches. Students will take and design walks as well as read major works on the subject. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG/WLIT 141b Literature and Time
[ hum ]

Explores the human experience of temporality and reflection upon it. Themes covered by this course include: memory, nostalgia, anxiety, ethics, eternity, and time travel. Usually offered every third year.

ENG/WLIT 191a Environmental Aesthetics
[ djw hum oc ]

Explores major schools of thought about nature, ecology, and art. Usually offered every third year.

PHIL 182a Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations
[ hum ]

An intensive study of Ludwig Wittgenstein's seminal work, Philosophical Investigations. This course should be of interest to philosophy and literature students who want to learn about this great philosopher's influential views on the nature of language and interpretation. Usually offered every second year.

WLIT 132b Poetry and Philosophy
[ hum ]

Plato called the relationship between poetry and philosophy an "ancient quarrel." But within the last century some thinkers have attempted to effect a rapprochement. After considering the Platonic argument and its legacy, this course will explore the marriage of poetry and philosophy in later times, looking particularly at the experiments of German romantic aesthetics and its legacy in 20th-century Continental literary philosophy. What is the nature of the "ancient quarrel" between poetry and philosophy? In what sense do they compete for the same space? Can poetry be a kind of philosophy, or vice versa? Can philosophy help us to understand the nature of poetry, and vice versa? Usually offered every third year.

AAAS 134b Novel and Film of the African Diaspora
[ djw hum nw ]

Writers and filmmakers, who are usually examined separately under national or regional canonical categories such as "(North) American," "Latin American," "African," "British," or "Caribbean," are brought together here to examine transnational identities and investments in "authentic," "African," or "black" identities. Usually offered every third year.

AAAS/ENG 80a Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

Explores novelists’ and poets’ fascination with photography; the fraught role of photography in the struggle against antiblackness; Black photographers in the studio; and theorists of photography and looking. In African, African-American, Caribbean and Black British archives, canons and communities, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 20a Bollywood: Popular Film, Genre, and Society
[ djw hum nw ]

An introduction to popular Hindi cinema through a survey of the most important Bollywood films from the 1950s until today. Topics include melodrama, song and dance, love and sex, stardom, nationalism, religion, diasporic migration, and globalization. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 22a South Asian Ways of Watching: Films and Graphic Narratives
[ djw hum ]

How do we watch South Asia and how does South Asia watch itself? This course pairs films with graphic narratives, moving from black-and-white cinema to color-saturated narratives. We’ll explore myth, Partition, caste and care, love and queer desire, displacement and diaspora, ecological crisis, and street-level protest. Expect lively discussion plus creative labs (zines, storyboards, photos/videos/mini-comics) to try visual storytelling yourself. Special one-time offering, spring 2026.

ENG 27b Classic Hollywood Cinema
[ hum ]

A critical examination of the history of mainstream U.S. cinema from the 1930s to the present. Focuses on major developments in film content and form, the rise and fall of the studio and star system, the changing nature of spectatorship, and the social context of film production and reception. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 30a Introduction to Graphic Novels
[ hum ]

Introduces students to the genre conventions and theoretical context necessary for the critical study of graphic novels. In particular, we examine single-author graphic novels that trouble the border between fiction and nonfiction--memoirs, graphic reportage, and speculative histories. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 30b American Film Auteurs of the 1970s
[ deis-us hum ]

Interrogates idea of cinematic style. Examines works by directors such as Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Fosse, Roman Polanski, and Martin Scorsese. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 41a Critical Digital Humanities Methods and Applications
[ deis-us dl hum ]

Introduces critical digital humanities methods and applications. Considers both theory and praxis, the issues of open and accessible scholarship and work, and the centrality of collaboration. We will investigate power relations, inclusivity, and the ethics of social justice. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 50b American Independent Film
[ hum ]

Explores non-studio filmmaking in the United States. Defines an indie aesthetic and alternative methods of financing, producing, and distributing films. Special attention given to adaptations of major film genres, such as noir thrillers, domestic comedy, and horror. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 52b Vampires: Dark Fictions of Blood
[ deis-us hum ]

Highlights the innovations that black artists and scholars have made within the vampire tradition. Our sources range from literature and comics to television and film. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 60b Literature by Ear: Talking Books from the Gramophone to the Podcast Era
[ hum ]

Explores how genres change and how ideas about art change when oral/aural distribution either supplements or replaces the printed word. Traces the idea of the talking book, from its origins to the present—and by inviting students to perform their own experiments with creating new kinds of audiobook, or podcasts, or more radical forays into the world of the ear. Beginning with a historical look at the early forms of mechanical recording (Victorian poetry recording, radio drama, the rise of recorded books around WW2) it moves forward into contemporary forms like YouTube poetry channels and the explosion of audiobook production in “the age of Amazon.” Usually offered every third year.

ENG 61b Philosophical Approaches to Film Theory
[ hum ]

Studies a philosophical approach to film theory, examining both what philosophy has to say about film and what effects the existence and experience of film can have on philosophical thinking about reality, perception, judgment, and other minds. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 62a Documentary: Techniques and Controversies
[ hum ]

An introduction to documentary, covering major works of nonfiction prose and film. Focuses on the variety of documentary techniques in both media and controversies surrounding efforts to represent the real. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 70a The Birth of the Movies: From Silent Film to Hollywood
[ hum ]

Explores the birth of moving pictures, from Edison and Lumiere's experiments to "Birth of a Nation" and "The Jazz Singer". Traces film's roots in the photographic experiments, visual spectacles and magical lanterns of late nineteenth-century France, England, and America, and its relationship to the era's literary experiments. Filmmakers include: Georges Melies, Abel Ganz, Sergei Eisentein, D W Griffiths, Charlie Chaplin. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 103b Medieval Women in Print
[ dl hum wi ]

We will be thinking about reading women, writing women, and the production of female bodies through images, sound, and script. We will be reading about teenage runaways, real and fictional queens, Muslim princesses, business women, warrior women, and transgender women. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 113b Performing Climate Justice
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Considers justice in relation to our ordinary and collective actions as these recreate or transform our social and material realities as human drivers of the Anthropocene. How can the embodied creation and transmission of knowledge and skills, by creative workers and change agents, help us imagine and create new, translocal ways of being and acting together no longer driven by fossil fuels? What happens to notions of the human, human civilization, and human history if we adopt a non-anthropocentric and biocentric approach to climate justice and climate ethics? Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 120a Thirties Movies
[ dl hum ]

Explores how 1930s Hollywood invented modern movies and their techniques -- Romcom, horror, suspense, crime, melodrama, feature-length animation, musicals -- responding to and profoundly altering social, political, industrial, cultural, and economic history, from the Depression to the beginning of World War II. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 128a Race and US Cinema
[ deis-us hum ]

Explores the central role film plays in the construction and policing of racialized identities in the US. We will focus primarily, but not exclusively, on the Black/white binarism. The course is structured as a survey. US cinema originates in the white depiction of Blacks or in the white deployment of blackface, and racialized bodies continue to serve as a ubiquitous (if frequently unacknowledged) source of fascination and anxiety in contemporary cinema. We will begin with early 'whitewashing' films and D.W. Griffith's foundational epic, The Birth of a Nation, and conclude with new queer Black cinema and contemporary Black filmmakers. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 143a The History of Mediascapes and Critical Maker Culture
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Class has a required lab component and yields six semester-hour credits towards rate of work and graduation.

To consider how to decolonize book history and “maker culture,” the class examines colonial erasure, colonial knowledge production, race, gender, disability, neurodiversity, sexuality in making an alternative book history that includes khipu, girdle books, wampum, pamphlets, zines, and wearable media technology. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 147a Film Noir
[ hum ]

A study of classics of the genre (The Killers, The Maltese Falcon, Touch of Evil) as well as more recent variations (Chinatown, Bladerunner). Readings include source fiction (Hemingway, Hammett) and essays in criticism and theory. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 151b Performance Studies
[ dl hum ]

Explores paradigms for making performance inside and outside of institutionalized theater spaces, with an emphasis on the performance of everyday life. Students read theories of theater and performance against paradigmatic dramatic texts and documents of social performance. Combining theory with practice, students explore and make site-specific and online performances. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 170a Nigerian Movies in the World
[ hum nw ]

Introduces students to Nigeria's film industry, one of the world's largest. It focuses on both the form and the content of Nollywood films. Examines how Nollywood films project local, national, and regional issues onto global screens. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 177a Hitchcock's Movies
[ hum ]

A study of thirteen films covering the whole trajectory of Hitchcock's career, as well as interviews and critical responses. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 180b Romantic Comedy / Matrimonial Tragedy
[ hum ]

A genre study of romantic comedy, from early to recent cinema. How does its narrative machinery work and what social functions does it serve? An exploration of comedic pleasure as strategy for fashioning gender identities, sexualities, marriages, and anti-marriages. Usually offered every third year.

ENG/WLIT 70b Environmental Film, Environmental Justice
[ djw hum ]

Examines films that address nature, environmental crisis, and green activism. Asks how world cinema can best advance the goals of social and environmental justice. Includes films by major directors and festival award winners. Usually offered every third year.

FILM 100a Introduction to the Moving Image
[ hum ]

An interdisciplinary course surveying the history of moving image media from 1895 to the present, from the earliest silent cinema to the age of streaming media. Open to all undergraduates as an elective, it is the introductory course for the major and minor in film, television and interactive media. Usually offered every year.

AAAS 79b African American Literature of the Twentieth Century
[ hum ss wi ]

An introduction to the essential themes, aesthetic concerns, and textual strategies that characterize African American writing of this century. Examines those influences that have shaped the poetry, fiction, and prose nonfiction of representative writers. Usually offered every second year.

AAAS 124a After the Dance: Performing Sovereignty in the Caribbean
[ hum oc ss ]

Utilizing short fiction, essays, plays, poetry, and the visual arts, this class theorizes movement and/as freedom in the spectacular or mundane movements of the region, including annual Carnival and Hosay celebrations. Usually offered every third year.

AAAS 134b Novel and Film of the African Diaspora
[ djw hum nw ]

Writers and filmmakers, who are usually examined separately under national or regional canonical categories such as "(North) American," "Latin American," "African," "British," or "Caribbean," are brought together here to examine transnational identities and investments in "authentic," "African," or "black" identities. Usually offered every third year.

AAAS/ENG 80a Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

Explores novelists’ and poets’ fascination with photography; the fraught role of photography in the struggle against antiblackness; Black photographers in the studio; and theorists of photography and looking. In African, African-American, Caribbean and Black British archives, canons and communities, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Usually offered every third year.

AAAS/ENG 141b Critical Race Theory
[ hum ]

Traces an intellectual and political history of critical race theory that begins in law classrooms in the 1980s and continues in the 21st century activist strategies of Black Lives Matter movement. We proceed by reading defining theoretical texts alongside African American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 22b Asian American Literature
[ deis-us hum ]

With its focus on a major and enduring racial formation in the U.S., this course covers a wide range of literary expressions of Asian American subjectivities forged in various flashpoints of American history, from the early days of Chinese “coolie” labor in the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment of refugee migration. Along the way, we will learn about structures of violence that have manifested into exclusion laws, internment camps, devastating wars, and refugee displacements. Usually offered every fourth year.

AAPI/ENG 102a Science and Fiction of the Transpacific
[ djw hum ]

Taking as its start in the Cold War, when the fear of Communist ideology and scientific advances reached its feverish peak, and ending with today’s increasing amalgamation of machine and humanity, this course opens a field of cultural inquiry into more than half a century of Transpacific imaginations of technological progress and its shadow of social retrogression. We will think capaciously about issues of colonialism and extraction in the name of science in the Pacific, transnational racialized labor and its post-apocalyptic life, techno-orientalism and the fantasy of Asiatic cyborgs, artificial intelligence and its affective concerns, as well as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and what it has to teach us about the human condition. In the wake of the highly racialized Covid-19 pandemic and its thorny questions regarding the health of the body politic, this course will introduce students to some of the most prominent examples of science fiction by diasporic Asian writers who have been inspired by the vast and multitudinous Transpacific as a space not only of conquest and competition but also of promise and possibility. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 115a The Asian American Memoir
[ deis-us ]

The recent flourishing of the memoir genre in Asian American literature coincides with the increased visibility and participation of Asian Americans in U.S. culture and politics. This course examines how the memoir has found primacy as a literary genre for articulating Asian American political subjects over a century. We will query what it means to craft selfhood as a racial minority—complicated by class, gender and sexual identities—while navigating the gaps between private memories and national history. We will learn about flashpoints in the turbulent history of migration and wars between the U.S. and various Asian countries over the twentieth century through intimate accounts of lived experiences. We will study how various authors manage the intractable issue of unreliability in memory work while responding to the pressure of speaking for their communities. Above all, we will appreciate how, by articulating themselves, each author also theorizes America and their fraught relationship to it. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 142a Vietnam War Representations
[ djw hum ]

Fifty years after it ended, the war in Vietnam seems marked for collective forgetting. Yet the war fundamentally changed the histories of Vietnam and the U.S. through the Cold War to the present day. Taking a transnational approach, this course will examine various understandings of the war through major U.S., Vietnamese, and Vietnamese diasporic literary texts and films from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. All course materials are in English. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 48a American Immigrant Narratives
[ deis-us hum wi ]

With its essential role in U.S. society and history, immigration figures prominently in the American literary canon. This course traverses varied immigrant tales of twentieth-century and contemporary United States, set in the frontier of westward expansion, the Golden West, and the Eastern Seaboard. Some classics of this vast cultural corpus will anchor our critical inquiries into subject and nation formation, citizenship, and marginalization under powerful political forces both at home and abroad. By probing the complex aesthetic modes and narrative strategies in these and other texts, we will investigate deeply felt impacts of ever-shifting American cultural politics shaping immigrant experiences. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 167b Writing the Nation: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison
[ deis-us hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 57b in prior years.

An in-depth study of three major American authors of the twentieth century. Highlights the contributions of each author to the American literary canon and to its diversity. Explores how these novelists narrate cross-racial, cross-gendered, cross-regional, and cross-cultural contact and conflict in the United States. Usually offered every third year.

EAS 120b Southeast Asian Literature in English
[ djw hum ]

Explores a range of Southeast Asian literary productions presented in English from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Materials include influential texts by Western observers (W. Somerset Maugham, Marguerite Duras) during the colonial period as well as major works by prominent postcolonial writers (Tash Aw, Eka Kurniawan, Mai Der Vang). We will consider the complex questions of colonialism, postcoloniality, twentieth-century wars, and regional identity formation under late capitalism through intersectional textual analysis. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 12a Decolonizing Tongues: Language in African Literature
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

A comparative exploration of the politics of language in postcolonial African Literature and its impact on literary production. It locates the language question in anglophone and francophone African Literature within the context political independence. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 15b Black Joy
[ deis-us hum ]

Explores the exuberant and sometimes strained relationship between black people
and joy. In addition to literature, we will encounter various performances and perspectives that approach joy from multitude of perspectives, including minstrelsy, meditation, nature writing, ancestral remembrance, and the erotics of eating well and feeling good. Usually offered every year.

ENG 17b Climate Fictions
[ hum oc wi ]

Examines fictional narratives addressing climate change. Asks how authors from around the world imagine a future in which sea levels, animal populations, temperatures, access to food, and/or weather patterns are significantly different from those of the present. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 20a Bollywood: Popular Film, Genre, and Society
[ djw hum nw ]

An introduction to popular Hindi cinema through a survey of the most important Bollywood films from the 1950s until today. Topics include melodrama, song and dance, love and sex, stardom, nationalism, religion, diasporic migration, and globalization. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 22a South Asian Ways of Watching: Films and Graphic Narratives
[ djw hum ]

How do we watch South Asia and how does South Asia watch itself? This course pairs films with graphic narratives, moving from black-and-white cinema to color-saturated narratives. We’ll explore myth, Partition, caste and care, love and queer desire, displacement and diaspora, ecological crisis, and street-level protest. Expect lively discussion plus creative labs (zines, storyboards, photos/videos/mini-comics) to try visual storytelling yourself. Special one-time offering, spring 2026.

ENG 32a 21st-Century Global Fiction: A Basic Course
[ djw hum nw oc ]

Offers an introduction to 21st-century global fiction in English. What is fiction and how does it illuminate contemporary issues such as migration, terrorism, and climate change? Authors include Zadie Smith, Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, J.M. Coetzee and others. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 35a The Weird and the Experimental in Contemporary Literature
[ hum wi ]

What does it mean to be “weird”? What makes a text “experimental”? And what can experimental texts teach us about the ever-changing nature of society? This course explores innovation and experimentation in the narrative structure of contemporary novels and films from around the world within their cultural contexts. Special one-time offering, spring 2024.

ENG 41a Critical Digital Humanities Methods and Applications
[ deis-us dl hum ]

Introduces critical digital humanities methods and applications. Considers both theory and praxis, the issues of open and accessible scholarship and work, and the centrality of collaboration. We will investigate power relations, inclusivity, and the ethics of social justice. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 46a Native American Storytelling
[ hum ]

Explores Native American storytelling practices in anglophone literature from the early 1800s to the present day. Course material will highlight prominent figures within Native American literature throughout history and will cover a range of non-fiction and fiction texts, including biographies, novels, films, and podcasts. Special one-time offering, fall 2023.

ENG 52a Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
[ deis-us djw dl hum nw oc ]

Yields 6 credits.

Examines the functions of storytelling in the refugee crisis. Its main objective is to further students' understanding of the political dimensions of storytelling. The course explores how reworking of reality enable people to question State and social structures. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 52b Vampires: Dark Fictions of Blood
[ deis-us hum ]

Highlights the innovations that black artists and scholars have made within the vampire tradition. Our sources range from literature and comics to television and film. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 62b Contemporary African Literature, Global Perspectives
[ djw dl hum nw oc ]

What is "African" in African literature when the majority of writers are somehow removed from the African societies they portray? How do expatriate writers represent African subjectivities and cultures at the intersection of Diaspora and globalization? Who reads the works produced by these writers? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 66b Contemporary Global Dystopias
[ djw hum wi ]

Explores the sources, moods, and effects of dystopian fiction from around the world. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 68a Salvage Work: Reimagining in Caribbean Ruins
[ hum ]

How do we imagine alternative futures in a space of ruin? This course is imagined in relation to Angela Naimou’s term salvage work, which “requires the acceptance and incorporation of existing loss, ruin, and injury into the fragments that are nonetheless generative of something more than absence” (Naimou 11). It references a sort of recovery or possibility rooted in the imagination of what these remnants or ruins can be in the Caribbean archipelago and beyond.

“Salvage Work” offers one way in which the Caribbean engage with ruin, imagination, and worldbuilding through the works of Shani Mootoo, Maisy Card, Nala Hopkinson, Tessa Mars, and other writers, painters, and filmmakers who explore the archives, motherhood, kinship, queerness, intimacy, inheritance, and return. These twentieth/twenty-first-century texts return to various periods, like enslavement, indentureship, postcolonial independent movements, Windrush, and other moments in the past.

By considering how race, class, gender, and sexuality overlap and relate, this class will create a space to reflect on the relationships between identity and belonging, oppression and resistance, literature, place, and people across generations and geographies. Special one-time offering, spring 2025.

ENG 72b World Anglophone Literatures in an Age of Epidemics
[ djw hum ]

In the aftermath of microbial epidemics and pandemics like HIV, Ebola, and COVID 19, how does literature offer us ways to live with microbes? The word “epidemic” in this course includes epidemics caused by microbes, and social epidemics like racism, patriarchy, mental health crises, etc. By reading novels, poetry, and graphic narratives, and through in-class creative activities, we will explore how literature conjures health. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 102a Ghosts of Race
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines ghost stories and films from across the African Diasporic. Our discussions will consider a range of phenomena, from ancestral visitations and paranormal ethnography to haunted plantation tours. We will do so in order to highlight a variety of pressing themes within Black film and literatures, including trauma, memory, and xenophobia. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 107a Women Writing Desire: Caribbean Fiction and Film
[ hum ]

Literature and film of the last two decades drawn from across the Caribbean and its diasporas, and read in dialogue with popular culture, theory, and earlier generations of artists. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 111b Postcolonial Theory
[ djw hum wi ]

Introduces students to key concepts in postcolonial theory. Traces the consequences of European colonialism for politics, culture and literature around the world, situates these within ongoing contemporary debates, and considers the usefulness of postcolonial theory for understanding the world today. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 113b Performing Climate Justice
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Considers justice in relation to our ordinary and collective actions as these recreate or transform our social and material realities as human drivers of the Anthropocene. How can the embodied creation and transmission of knowledge and skills, by creative workers and change agents, help us imagine and create new, translocal ways of being and acting together no longer driven by fossil fuels? What happens to notions of the human, human civilization, and human history if we adopt a non-anthropocentric and biocentric approach to climate justice and climate ethics? Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 122a Decolonizing the Gothic
[ deis-us hum ]

An advanced study of the Gothic mode with special attention on the recent "decolonial turn" in Gothic studies research. The Gothic, established historically in European literature in the late 18th-to-early 20th centuries, has served as a genre in which the supernatural, preternatural, or otherwise uncanny are deployed to explore psychological, social, and political reactions to modernity. Foundational to interpreting the Gothic have been the notions of (often repressed) cultural and psychosocial anxieties, terrors, traumas, and, more broadly, the macabre. In recent decades, however, (re)interpretations have centered around the Gothic mode’s ability to covertly represent critique of colonial and neocolonial relations of power. The most recent turn toward the decolonial has been possible because of the inclusion in major publishing houses the work of historically marginalized writers – including Black and Indigenous people of color (BIPOC). Engaging with primary sources in the traditional Gothic canon followed by recent deployments of the Gothic mode in contemporary multi-ethnic literature, the course asks: What does it mean to decolonize the Gothic? How does traditional Gothic literature represent the racial Other? How do authors today reclaim and refashion the Gothic mode toward liberatory representations? Are there other versions of contemporary Gothic that seek neither to decolonize nor perpetuate colonial power relations? Special one-time offering, fall 2026.

ENG 127a The Novel in India
[ djw hum nw ]

Survey of the novel and short story of the Indian subcontinent, their formal experiments in context of nationalism and postcolonial history. Authors may include Tagore, Anand, Manto, Desani, Narayan, Desai, Devi, Rushdie, Roy, Mistry, and Chaudhuri. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 127b Migrating Bodies, Migrating Texts
[ djw hum nw ]

Beginning with the region's representation as a tabula rasa, examines the textual and visual constructions of the Caribbean as colony, homeland, backyard, paradise, and Babylon, and how the region's migrations have prompted ideas about evolution, hedonism, imperialism, nationalism, and diaspora. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 131b Decolonial Pedagogy
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Familiarizes students in the humanities, social sciences and public policy with an important strain of pedagogical theory, what Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire called 'education as the practice of freedom.' Topics will include diversity, equity and inclusion; embodied teaching and learning; authority, or the lack thereof; grading and assessment; and teaching reading and writing. Special one-time offering, fall 2020.

ENG 137b Women and War
[ djw dl hum nw ]

Examines how African women writers and filmmakers use testimony to bear witness to mass violence. How do these writers resist political and sociocultural silencing systems that reduce traumatic experience to silence, denial, and terror? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 142a Blackness and Horror
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Cannot be taken by students who previously took ENG 42a.

Examines the tense and transformative place that blackness has within the horror tradition, beginning with the late nineteenth century and moving into the present. In addition to documentaries and critical texts, we will analyze literature, films, and various aspects of material culture that explore the relationship between blackness and horror. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 142b Black Queer Literatures
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines various works by black queer critics and cultural producers, beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into the present. While we largely focus upon the attempt to create the shared sense of a world and a tradition in common, we also attend to important divisions brought about by various forms and feelings of difference (including race, gender, class, nation, age and ability). Usually offered every third year.

ENG 143b Chaucer's "Global and Refugee Canterbury Tales"
[ deis-us djw dl hum ]

Focuses on situating Chaucer, and particularly the Canterbury Tales, as a global
work. We will examine black feminist writers, playwrights, and poets of the African diaspora who have revised, adapted, extrapolated, and voiced the Canterbury Tales in Jamaican patois, Nigerian pidgin, and the S. London dialects of Brixton. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 144a Medieval Travel Writing
[ djw dl hum ]

Examining medieval travel literature from the Old English period to the early accounts of sixteenth-century explorers in the New World, this class will consider how the area of medieval travel writing exposes how race is framed in relation to gender, disability, multifaith encounters, critical animal studies, and thick mapping. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 152a Indian Love Stories
[ djw dl hum nw ]

Introduces students to writings on love, desire and sexuality from ancient India to the present. Topics include ancient eroticism, love in Urdu poetry, Gandhi's sexual asceticism, colonial regulation of sexuality, Bollywood, queer fiction and more. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 168b Plotting Inheritance
[ djw dl hum ]

Examines novels published in the last two decades set during slavery and indenture in the British Caribbean, alongside (and as) theorizations of accumulation, inheritance, and freedom. How does fiction account for and plot material, moral and emotional worth? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 170a Nigerian Movies in the World
[ hum nw ]

Introduces students to Nigeria's film industry, one of the world's largest. It focuses on both the form and the content of Nollywood films. Examines how Nollywood films project local, national, and regional issues onto global screens. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ djw hum nw ]

Examines African Feminism(s) as a literary and activist movement that underlines the need for centering African women's experiences in the study of African cultures, societies, and histories. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 175b Getting Behind in Black Gay Men's Literatures
[ deis-us hum ]

Examines black queer men’s sexualities in the field of twentieth and twenty-first century American literatures. Our focus on “getting behind” draws together topics that we will explore throughout term. These include varying attitudes that black queer writers have toward cruising and intimacy; falling behind the times; and falling behind at work, or in life, because of certain sexual pursuits. Usually offered every third year.

ENG/WLIT 191a Environmental Aesthetics
[ djw hum oc ]

Explores major schools of thought about nature, ecology, and art. Usually offered every third year.

WLIT 117a Magical Realism and Modern Myth
[ hum ]

An exploration of magical realism, as well as the enduring importance of myth, in twentieth and twenty-first century fiction and film from Columbia, India, Nigeria, the United States, England, and elsewhere. Authors include Ben Okri, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie; films include Pan's Labyrinth and Beasts of the Southern Wild. Usually offered every second year.

AMST/ENG 146a Reading the American Revolution
[ dl hum ]

Explores the role of emerging literary forms and media in catalyzing, shaping, and remembering the American Revolution. Covers revolutionary pamphlets, oratory, the constitutional ratification debates, seduction novels, poetry, and plays. Includes authors Foster, Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, Publius, Tyler, and Wheatley. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 154b Spirit Worlds: Religion and Early American Literature
[ hum ]

Explores how the religious imagination shaped literary expression in colonial America and the early United States, and how early American religion is represented in contemporary culture. Authors may include Ann Bradstreet, Charles Brockden Brown, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Arthur Miller, and Nat Turner. Usually offered every third year.

ECS/ENG 110a Thinking about Infinity
[ hum ]

Explores the attempts of the finite human mind to think about infinity. Readings in mathematics, history of science, philosophy, literature, and art, including Euclid, Plato, Cantor, Poincaré, Einstein, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Wordsworth, Shelley, Joyce, Beckett, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 32b Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Medieval Dream Visions
[ hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 132b in prior years.

Before there was Romeo and Juliet, there was Troilus and Criseyde. Before Shakespeare’s cultural behemoth defined what it meant to be star-crossed lovers, the story of Troilus and Criseyde was the dominant and popular narrative of doomed love. So, what happened? Did Shakespeare’s treatment of it kill the story? Why has it dropped out of the canon? This class will evaluate Chaucer’s other major poem Troilus and Criseyde and contextualize it by examining its sources, philosophical underpinnings, and its impact on literary production in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 33a Shakespeare
[ hum ]

May be repeated once for credit.

A survey of Shakespeare as a dramatist. From nine to twelve plays will be read, representing all periods of Shakespeare's dramatic career. Usually offered every year.

ENG 33b Shakespeare Now
[ hum oc ]

This introductory Shakespeare course will be structured around the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and issues of central relevance to our world today. We will be reading a small number of plays, leaving time to work on contemporary adaptations and uses of each of the plays we study. Topics to be explored include (but are by no means limited to) misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism. Usually offered every year.

ENG 40b The Birth of the Short Story: Gods, Ghosts, Lunatics
[ hum ]

How old is the short story? It may go back to the Stone Age, Aesop's fables, or medieval saints' lives, but some credit Edgar Allan Poe and the Scottish shepherd James Hogg. This class takes an in-depth look at three key centers of the genre: Edinburgh, New York, and Moscow. Authors include Melville, Hawthorne, Dickens, Gogol, and Chekov. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 43b Medieval Play: Drama, LARP, and Video Games
[ djw hum oc ]

Works with a selection of medieval mystery plays, medieval-themed video games and participatory live-action role play to explore: play structures and design; alternative-world creation by way of immersion; the significance of gender, race, disability, and sexuality in performance. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 50a Love Poetry from Sappho to Neruda
[ hum oc ]

This course explores the relationship between love and poetry. Starts with the ancient Greek poet Sappho and proceeds through the centuries, reading lyrics by Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, Petrarch, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Rossetti, and others. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 53a Reading Shakespeare When the Globe is on Fire
[ djw hum ]

Examines the complex relationships between William Shakespeare’s plays and the radical ecological transformations occurring in and beyond England throughout the period in which he wrote. At the same time, we will consider how exploring the dynamic interplay between Shakespeare’s words and his world might help us better understand both the canon and the climate we’ve inherited. By pairing contemporary ecocritical scholarship alongside close readings of Shakespearean texts, we will grapple with the enduring challenges and possibilities of environmental justice and interrogate the “role” of art on a burning planet. Special one-time offering, fall 2025.

ENG 64a Queer Readings: Before the Binary
[ hum oc ]

Explores vectors of desire, intimacy, and relationality prior to 1800 that do not always neatly line up with post-Enlightenment taxonomies of gender, sexuality, race, and humanness. We will read works by Austen, Behn, Marlowe, Phillips, Rochester, Shakespeare, and others, asking: What possibilities of pleasure, intimacy, love, friendship, and kinship existed alongside male-female reproductive sex and marriage before 1800? What possibilities for non-binary gender identifications and presentations? Without firm taxonomic distinctions among classes of people, between human and nonhuman animals, or even between the human and the thing, how did early moderns understand what counted as fully human? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 73a Witchcraft and Magic in the Renaissance: From Scotland to Salem
[ hum oc ]

Focuses on the representation of witches, wizards, devils, and magicians in texts by Shakespeare, Marlow, and others. Historical accounts of witchcraft trials in England and Scotland are read and several films dramatizing these trials are viewed. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 103b Medieval Women in Print
[ dl hum wi ]

We will be thinking about reading women, writing women, and the production of female bodies through images, sound, and script. We will be reading about teenage runaways, real and fictional queens, Muslim princesses, business women, warrior women, and transgender women. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 104a Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Poetry, from Dryden to Blake
[ hum ]

The major British poets of the Restoration and eighteenth century, from Dryden to Blake, with an emphasis on the expressive experiments in form and content which set the terms and showed the possibilities available to all subsequent English poetry. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 104b Psalms and Stories: Poetry of the Sacred, 1600-1900
[ hum ]

Studies a range of sacred poetry written in Britain and America during a long, contentious period in the history of Western Christianity, from the rise of radical Protestantism through the Enlightenment to the public airing of religious doubt in the 19th century. What were the subjects of contention, of anxiety, of misgiving? How did poets address them in poetic form? To address these questions, we will look at a number of uniquely powerful poems in English. Our goal will be to approach the poems with sympathy, appreciation and a discerning eye. No prior knowledge of Christian doctrine is required. Works include the Psalms from the King James Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and selected poems of Emily Dickinson. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 108a Literature and Heresy
[ hum ]

A study of major texts of British literature through the lens of religious heresy. Does literature provide a refuge for heresy? Or is there something about literature that encourages heretical thinking? These questions are considered in light of dissident works by Milton, Blake, Shelley, James Hogg, and others. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 114a Enthusiasm, Disappointment, Recovery: British Literature and the French Revolution
[ hum ]

British radicals, including in their number the greatest poets of the age, responded joyously to the Fall of the Bastille and the early political reforms of the French Revolution. Like many European intellectuals, they saw in these developments the promise of major social change which would vindicate the ambitious optimism of the Enlightenment. The collapse of the French Revolution into violence and terror struck a blow to their hopes, their morale and their world-view. British literature of the Romantic age reflects this initial enthusiasm, the subsequent disappointment, and the painful effort of recovery. We will read 18th-century manifestos defending human rights by Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft; works of ardent support for the Revolution by first-generation Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge; their later works grappling with the Revolution’s failure; and the reflections of the second-generation Romantics (Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley) as they struggle to find new grounds of political hope. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 123a Violence and the Body in Early Modern Drama
[ dl hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 23a in prior years.

Explores early modern understandings of the body, with particular attention to gender, sexuality, race, and nation. Considers the role of violence in determining who counts as fully human, who can be reduced to a body, and whose bodies can be severed from citizenship, recognition, and value. Explores as well the claims of the body and voice to memorialization and belonging, and the evidence of actors' bodies on the stage. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 124a Renaissance Women’s Writing
[ hum ]

Explores the extraordinary writing done by women during the Renaissance, spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and including (among other works) theatrical plays, poems, diaries, religious treatises, Biblical translations, and proto-feminist diatribes. Although the primary focus will be on England, several French and Italian authors will be read in translation. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 133a Advanced Shakespeare
[ hum wi ]

Recommended prerequisite: ENG 33a or equivalent.

An intensive analysis of a single play or a small number of Shakespeare's plays. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 143a The History of Mediascapes and Critical Maker Culture
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]

Class has a required lab component and yields six semester-hour credits towards rate of work and graduation.

To consider how to decolonize book history and “maker culture,” the class examines colonial erasure, colonial knowledge production, race, gender, disability, neurodiversity, sexuality in making an alternative book history that includes khipu, girdle books, wampum, pamphlets, zines, and wearable media technology. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 143b Chaucer's "Global and Refugee Canterbury Tales"
[ deis-us djw dl hum ]

Focuses on situating Chaucer, and particularly the Canterbury Tales, as a global
work. We will examine black feminist writers, playwrights, and poets of the African diaspora who have revised, adapted, extrapolated, and voiced the Canterbury Tales in Jamaican patois, Nigerian pidgin, and the S. London dialects of Brixton. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 144a Medieval Travel Writing
[ djw dl hum ]

Examining medieval travel literature from the Old English period to the early accounts of sixteenth-century explorers in the New World, this class will consider how the area of medieval travel writing exposes how race is framed in relation to gender, disability, multifaith encounters, critical animal studies, and thick mapping. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 144b The Body as Text
[ hum wi ]

How are our bodies the material for our presentations of self and our interactions with others? Examines contemporary theories and histories of the body against literary, philosophical, political, and performance texts of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 148b Me, Myself, and I: The Theme of Self-Conflict
[ hum ]

Study of the images of inner division in literary and philosophical texts, from ancient to modern. Readings include: Plato, Gnostics, Augustine, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Shelley, Yeats, Freud, and Lacan. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 152b Arthurian Literature
[ dl hum ]

A survey of (mostly) medieval treatments of the legendary material associated with King Arthur and his court, in several genres: bardic poetry, history, romance, prose narrative. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 153a Enlightenment of the Flesh: Reading and Writing Sex in the Eighteenth Century
[ hum wi ]

Reading libertine and erotic writing alongside medical and philosophical treatises and commercially mainstream fiction, we will ask how practices of writing and reading sex contributed to the emergence and surveillance of a private self knowable through its bodily sex and sensations. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 173a Spenser and Milton
[ hum ]

A course on poetic authority: the poetry of authority and the authority of poetry. Spenser and Milton will be treated individually, but the era they bound will be examined in terms of the tensions within and between their works. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 183b Gods and Humans in the Renaissance
[ ca hum ]

Examines the relationship between gods and humans in literature and art from the Renaissance, exploring how classical gods and goddesses, as well as biblical figures of the divine, are represented by major European artists and authors. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG/WLIT 149a Hell: The Poetry
[ hum ]

Studies the Classical underworld and its reworking in English verse. Topics include the descent to the underworld, the ambiguous Satan, the myths of Orpheus and Penelope, and the psychological Hells of the modernists. Usually offered every second year.

AAAS 124a After the Dance: Performing Sovereignty in the Caribbean
[ hum oc ss ]

Utilizing short fiction, essays, plays, poetry, and the visual arts, this class theorizes movement and/as freedom in the spectacular or mundane movements of the region, including annual Carnival and Hosay celebrations. Usually offered every third year.

AAAS/ENG 80a Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

Explores novelists’ and poets’ fascination with photography; the fraught role of photography in the struggle against antiblackness; Black photographers in the studio; and theorists of photography and looking. In African, African-American, Caribbean and Black British archives, canons and communities, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 22b Asian American Literature
[ deis-us hum ]

With its focus on a major and enduring racial formation in the U.S., this course covers a wide range of literary expressions of Asian American subjectivities forged in various flashpoints of American history, from the early days of Chinese “coolie” labor in the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment of refugee migration. Along the way, we will learn about structures of violence that have manifested into exclusion laws, internment camps, devastating wars, and refugee displacements. Usually offered every fourth year.

AAPI/ENG 102a Science and Fiction of the Transpacific
[ djw hum ]

Taking as its start in the Cold War, when the fear of Communist ideology and scientific advances reached its feverish peak, and ending with today’s increasing amalgamation of machine and humanity, this course opens a field of cultural inquiry into more than half a century of Transpacific imaginations of technological progress and its shadow of social retrogression. We will think capaciously about issues of colonialism and extraction in the name of science in the Pacific, transnational racialized labor and its post-apocalyptic life, techno-orientalism and the fantasy of Asiatic cyborgs, artificial intelligence and its affective concerns, as well as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and what it has to teach us about the human condition. In the wake of the highly racialized Covid-19 pandemic and its thorny questions regarding the health of the body politic, this course will introduce students to some of the most prominent examples of science fiction by diasporic Asian writers who have been inspired by the vast and multitudinous Transpacific as a space not only of conquest and competition but also of promise and possibility. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 115a The Asian American Memoir
[ deis-us ]

The recent flourishing of the memoir genre in Asian American literature coincides with the increased visibility and participation of Asian Americans in U.S. culture and politics. This course examines how the memoir has found primacy as a literary genre for articulating Asian American political subjects over a century. We will query what it means to craft selfhood as a racial minority—complicated by class, gender and sexual identities—while navigating the gaps between private memories and national history. We will learn about flashpoints in the turbulent history of migration and wars between the U.S. and various Asian countries over the twentieth century through intimate accounts of lived experiences. We will study how various authors manage the intractable issue of unreliability in memory work while responding to the pressure of speaking for their communities. Above all, we will appreciate how, by articulating themselves, each author also theorizes America and their fraught relationship to it. Usually offered every third year.

AAPI/ENG 142a Vietnam War Representations
[ djw hum ]

Fifty years after it ended, the war in Vietnam seems marked for collective forgetting. Yet the war fundamentally changed the histories of Vietnam and the U.S. through the Cold War to the present day. Taking a transnational approach, this course will examine various understandings of the war through major U.S., Vietnamese, and Vietnamese diasporic literary texts and films from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. All course materials are in English. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 6a The American Renaissance
[ hum ]

Explores the transformation of U.S. literary culture before the Civil War: transcendentalism, the romance, the slave narrative, domestic fiction, sensationalism, and their relation to the visual art and architecture of the period. Authors will include Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Poe, Ridge, and Crafts. Usually offered every second year.

AMST/ENG 16b Mark Twain’s World

Read major works by Mark Twain alongside several of his contemporaries as a lens through which to view key currents of American and global modernity, including race, colonialism, democracy, and secularization. Topics include the critical debate over the depiction of race and slavery in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the role of humor in social and political change. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 47a Frontier Visions: The West in American Literature and Culture
[ hum oc ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 47a in prior years.

Explores more than two centuries of literary and visual culture about the American West, including the frontier myth, Indian captivity narratives, frontier humor, dime novel and Hollywood westerns, the Native American Renaissance, and western regionalism. Authors include Black Hawk, Cather, Doig, Silko, Turner, and Twain. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 48a American Immigrant Narratives
[ deis-us hum wi ]

With its essential role in U.S. society and history, immigration figures prominently in the American literary canon. This course traverses varied immigrant tales of twentieth-century and contemporary United States, set in the frontier of westward expansion, the Golden West, and the Eastern Seaboard. Some classics of this vast cultural corpus will anchor our critical inquiries into subject and nation formation, citizenship, and marginalization under powerful political forces both at home and abroad. By probing the complex aesthetic modes and narrative strategies in these and other texts, we will investigate deeply felt impacts of ever-shifting American cultural politics shaping immigrant experiences. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 116b American Culture Across the Disciplines
[ hum ]

Explores the latest research on American culture by Brandeis faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Each week a different faculty member will join us to discuss their latest book or article, the questions that animate their research, and the archives, methodologies, and theories they use to answer them. Usually offered every fourth year.

AMST/ENG 138a Race, Region, and Religion in the Twentieth-Century South
[ deis-us hum wi ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 38b in prior years.

Twentieth century fiction of the American South. Racial conflict, regional identity, religion, and modernization in fiction from both sides of the racial divide and from both sides of the gender line. Texts by Chestnutt, Faulkner, Warren, O'Connor, Gaines, McCarthy, and Ellison. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ENG 167b Writing the Nation: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison
[ deis-us hum ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 57b in prior years.

An in-depth study of three major American authors of the twentieth century. Highlights the contributions of each author to the American literary canon and to its diversity. Explores how these novelists narrate cross-racial, cross-gendered, cross-regional, and cross-cultural contact and conflict in the United States. Usually offered every third year.

EAS 120b Southeast Asian Literature in English
[ djw hum ]

Explores a range of Southeast Asian literary productions presented in English from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Materials include influential texts by Western observers (W. Somerset Maugham, Marguerite Duras) during the colonial period as well as major works by prominent postcolonial writers (Tash Aw, Eka Kurniawan, Mai Der Vang). We will consider the complex questions of colonialism, postcoloniality, twentieth-century wars, and regional identity formation under late capitalism through intersectional textual analysis. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 1a Introduction to Literary Studies
[ hum wi ]

May not be taken by students who completed FYS 16a without instructor permission.

This course is designed to introduce students to basic skills and concepts needed for the study of Anglophone literature and culture. These include skills in close reading; identification and differentiation of major literary styles and periods; knowledge of basic critical terms; definition of genres. Usually offered every semester.

ENG 12a Decolonizing Tongues: Language in African Literature
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

A comparative exploration of the politics of language in postcolonial African Literature and its impact on literary production. It locates the language question in anglophone and francophone African Literature within the context political independence. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 15b Black Joy
[ deis-us hum ]

Explores the exuberant and sometimes strained relationship between black people
and joy. In addition to literature, we will encounter various performances and perspectives that approach joy from multitude of perspectives, including minstrelsy, meditation, nature writing, ancestral remembrance, and the erotics of eating well and feeling good. Usually offered every year.

ENG 16b The Romantic Anti-Hero
[ hum ]

Dark, brooding, distant, yet secretly emotional, hates everyone but hates themselves the most: You may be thinking of Batman, but the trope can be traced back to at least as early as the 19th century. From the Byronic heroes to Heathcliff to Holden Caulfield–the anti-hero has gone through so many transformations across the history of literature and media that the trope merits as much critical attention as its popularity. This course leads students through a variety of texts with narratives centered around an anti-hero character. We will examine how writers from different times reimagine and utilize the trope to put the respective era’s common values into perspective, on issues ranging from general morality to political ideologies, gender dynamics, and class conflicts. By focusing on the dramatized yet deeply humanistic flaws of the characters, students will consider literature’s role in reflecting and influencing the shift of society’s view on the complexities and ambiguities of human morality. Special one-time offering, spring 2026.

ENG 17b Climate Fictions
[ hum oc wi ]

Examines fictional narratives addressing climate change. Asks how authors from around the world imagine a future in which sea levels, animal populations, temperatures, access to food, and/or weather patterns are significantly different from those of the present. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 18a Irish Literature, from the Peasantry to the Pogues
[ hum ]

Explores Irish poetry, fiction, drama, and film in English. Begins with the tradition's roots among subjugated peasants and Anglo-Irish aristocracy and ends in the modern post-colonial state. Authors include Swift, Yeats, Wilde, Bowen, Joyce, O'Brien, and Heaney. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 22a South Asian Ways of Watching: Films and Graphic Narratives
[ djw hum ]

How do we watch South Asia and how does South Asia watch itself? This course pairs films with graphic narratives, moving from black-and-white cinema to color-saturated narratives. We’ll explore myth, Partition, caste and care, love and queer desire, displacement and diaspora, ecological crisis, and street-level protest. Expect lively discussion plus creative labs (zines, storyboards, photos/videos/mini-comics) to try visual storytelling yourself. Special one-time offering, spring 2026.

ENG 25b Abolitionist Imaginaries: Literary Visions Beyond Prison
[ hum ]

What does it mean to imagine a world without prisons? What role does literature play in this process? This course explores abolition as a theoretical concept and traces the genealogy of abolition from slavery to the carceral state. In addition to prison writing, we will read texts by early reformers/abolitionists and authors such as Bentham, Dickens, and Douglas and contemporary prison abolitionists like Davis, Fleetwood, and Gilmore. We will ask what role literature plays in the abolitionist vision and how it can shape and reflect our evolving ideas about justice, freedom, and the structure of society. The course will culminate in a community engaged project. Special one-time offering, spring 2024.

ENG 26a Novels on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Fiction as Psychological Inquiry
[ hum wi ]

Explores novels as a mode of psychological inquiry, particularly into trauma, addiction, delusion, and depression. Our reading will help us consider the cultural complexity of mental illness and social dimensions of private suffering. How does the genre of the novel afford special attention to the intricacies of distressed mental life? And how has this art form been important for imagining psychological healing? Readings include novels from the 19th century to the present from several regions of the world, in a long lineage of narrative fiction about human psychology. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 28a Environmental Literature in an Age of Extinction
[ deis-us dl hum ]

Explores literature's role in shaping modern understandings of environmental change and damage, as well as the possibility of ecological restoration. Works include environmental classics by Thoreau, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson as well as contemporary genres including dystopia, the thriller, and climate fiction. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 30a Introduction to Graphic Novels
[ hum ]

Introduces students to the genre conventions and theoretical context necessary for the critical study of graphic novels. In particular, we examine single-author graphic novels that trouble the border between fiction and nonfiction--memoirs, graphic reportage, and speculative histories. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 31a What Is It Like To Be An Animal: Other Minds in Literature
[ hum ]

A study of literature that examines human-nonhuman relations and animal subjectivity. We will look at how thinkers have characterized essential differences between "human" and "animal," as well as modernist literary responses that reimagine the chasm between the "rational human" and "instinctual animal." Readings include Thoreau, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Woolf, Wittgenstein, Coetzee, Cora Diamond, and contemporary animal studies scholarship. Special one-time offering, fall 2023.

ENG 32a 21st-Century Global Fiction: A Basic Course
[ djw hum nw oc ]

Offers an introduction to 21st-century global fiction in English. What is fiction and how does it illuminate contemporary issues such as migration, terrorism, and climate change? Authors include Zadie Smith, Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, J.M. Coetzee and others. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 35a The Weird and the Experimental in Contemporary Literature
[ hum wi ]

What does it mean to be “weird”? What makes a text “experimental”? And what can experimental texts teach us about the ever-changing nature of society? This course explores innovation and experimentation in the narrative structure of contemporary novels and films from around the world within their cultural contexts. Special one-time offering, spring 2024.

ENG 45b Romanticism: Gods, Nature, Loneliness, Dreams
[ hum ]

A study of Romantic poetry, from love lyrics to ballads about the supernatural to philosophical meditations on self and soul. Authors include: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats and Shelley. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 46a Native American Storytelling
[ hum ]

Explores Native American storytelling practices in anglophone literature from the early 1800s to the present day. Course material will highlight prominent figures within Native American literature throughout history and will cover a range of non-fiction and fiction texts, including biographies, novels, films, and podcasts. Special one-time offering, fall 2023.

ENG 46b American Gothic Romantic Fiction
[ hum wi ]

American Gothic and romantic fiction from Charles Brockden Brown to Cormac McCarthy. Texts by Brown, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, O'Connor, Warren, and McCarthy. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 52a Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
[ deis-us djw dl hum nw oc ]

Yields 6 credits.

Examines the functions of storytelling in the refugee crisis. Its main objective is to further students' understanding of the political dimensions of storytelling. The course explores how reworking of reality enable people to question State and social structures. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 60a Storytelling Performance
[ hum oc ]

This experiential course is a workshop for students to craft and perform stories for live audiences at Brandeis and elsewhere in the Boston area. Through a series of collaborative exercises and rehearsals, students will develop a repertoire of several kinds of stories, including autobiographies, fictions, folk tales, and local history. We will tell our individual and group stories, as a team, at youth programs, open mics, and other public spaces. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 60b Literature by Ear: Talking Books from the Gramophone to the Podcast Era
[ hum ]

Explores how genres change and how ideas about art change when oral/aural distribution either supplements or replaces the printed word. Traces the idea of the talking book, from its origins to the present—and by inviting students to perform their own experiments with creating new kinds of audiobook, or podcasts, or more radical forays into the world of the ear. Beginning with a historical look at the early forms of mechanical recording (Victorian poetry recording, radio drama, the rise of recorded books around WW2) it moves forward into contemporary forms like YouTube poetry channels and the explosion of audiobook production in “the age of Amazon.” Usually offered every third year.

ENG 62b Contemporary African Literature, Global Perspectives
[ djw dl hum nw oc ]

What is "African" in African literature when the majority of writers are somehow removed from the African societies they portray? How do expatriate writers represent African subjectivities and cultures at the intersection of Diaspora and globalization? Who reads the works produced by these writers? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 66b Contemporary Global Dystopias
[ djw hum wi ]

Explores the sources, moods, and effects of dystopian fiction from around the world. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 67b Modern Poetry
[ hum ]

A course on the major poets of the twentieth century. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 75b The Victorian Novel: Secrets, Lies, and Monsters
[ hum ]

The rhetorical strategies, themes, and objectives of Victorian realism. Texts may include Eliot's Middlemarch, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Brontë's Villette, Gaskell's Mary Barton, Dickens' Bleak House, and Trollope's The Prime Minister. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 101a Studies in Popular Culture
[ hum ]

A critical analysis of contemporary culture, including television, film, video, advertising, and popular literature. Combines applied criticism and theoretical readings. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 102a Ghosts of Race
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines ghost stories and films from across the African Diasporic. Our discussions will consider a range of phenomena, from ancestral visitations and paranormal ethnography to haunted plantation tours. We will do so in order to highlight a variety of pressing themes within Black film and literatures, including trauma, memory, and xenophobia. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 105a All the Frankensteins
[ hum ]

Study of Frankenstein and its legacy. The syllabus will cover novels, films, and graphic literature. Works to include Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Poor Things, and Frankenkiss, as well as Destroyer, “Blade Runner,” and “Blackenstein.” Usually offered every three years.

ENG 106a Representing Slavery
[ deis-us hum wi ]

Examines the culture and politics of slavery in the US. We will read some of the classic slave narratives, some diaries of enslavers, political speeches by abolitionists and defenders of slavery, letters and public papers of President Lincoln, and novels written by authors with a close engagement with slavery. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 107a Women Writing Desire: Caribbean Fiction and Film
[ hum ]

Literature and film of the last two decades drawn from across the Caribbean and its diasporas, and read in dialogue with popular culture, theory, and earlier generations of artists. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 111b Postcolonial Theory
[ djw hum wi ]

Introduces students to key concepts in postcolonial theory. Traces the consequences of European colonialism for politics, culture and literature around the world, situates these within ongoing contemporary debates, and considers the usefulness of postcolonial theory for understanding the world today. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 112a The Fierce Urgency of Now: Some Poetry in English Since 1945
[ hum wi ]

An introduction to recent poetry in English, dealing with a wide range of poets, as well as striking and significant departures from the poetry of the past. Looks, where possible, at individual volumes by representative authors. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 116a Operation Shylock: Responding to Antisemitism in English and American Literature

Considers the theme of antisemitism in English and American literature: Does Judaism pose a challenge to non-Jewish literary culture? Is it an opportunity for asserting an allegedly enlightened nationalism? Does it help or hinder literary quality? How do Jewish writers treat this theme? What issues about intersectionality does the topic of antisemitism bring up, especially with respect to queer and Black literature? Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 117b Novels of William Faulkner
[ hum wi ]

A study of the major novels and stories of William Faulkner, the most influential American novelist of the twentieth century. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 122a Decolonizing the Gothic
[ deis-us hum ]

An advanced study of the Gothic mode with special attention on the recent "decolonial turn" in Gothic studies research. The Gothic, established historically in European literature in the late 18th-to-early 20th centuries, has served as a genre in which the supernatural, preternatural, or otherwise uncanny are deployed to explore psychological, social, and political reactions to modernity. Foundational to interpreting the Gothic have been the notions of (often repressed) cultural and psychosocial anxieties, terrors, traumas, and, more broadly, the macabre. In recent decades, however, (re)interpretations have centered around the Gothic mode’s ability to covertly represent critique of colonial and neocolonial relations of power. The most recent turn toward the decolonial has been possible because of the inclusion in major publishing houses the work of historically marginalized writers – including Black and Indigenous people of color (BIPOC). Engaging with primary sources in the traditional Gothic canon followed by recent deployments of the Gothic mode in contemporary multi-ethnic literature, the course asks: What does it mean to decolonize the Gothic? How does traditional Gothic literature represent the racial Other? How do authors today reclaim and refashion the Gothic mode toward liberatory representations? Are there other versions of contemporary Gothic that seek neither to decolonize nor perpetuate colonial power relations? Special one-time offering, fall 2026.

ENG 126b Joyce's Ulysses
[ hum wi ]

An intensive, collaborative reading of James Joyce's Ulysses, with attention to its historical situation and cultural impact. Consideration of significant scholarly debates around the novel. How does this remarkable text work and what does it offer readers today? How is it still teaching us to read and think about the role of literature in modern societies? We will engage this novel with slow, close attention in an interdisciplinary context, in order to generate a combination of analytical and creative responses. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 127a The Novel in India
[ djw hum nw ]

Survey of the novel and short story of the Indian subcontinent, their formal experiments in context of nationalism and postcolonial history. Authors may include Tagore, Anand, Manto, Desani, Narayan, Desai, Devi, Rushdie, Roy, Mistry, and Chaudhuri. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 127b Migrating Bodies, Migrating Texts
[ djw hum nw ]

Beginning with the region's representation as a tabula rasa, examines the textual and visual constructions of the Caribbean as colony, homeland, backyard, paradise, and Babylon, and how the region's migrations have prompted ideas about evolution, hedonism, imperialism, nationalism, and diaspora. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 136a Imagining Apocalypse
[ hum ]

Examines apocalypse as a literary genre and explores the modern apocalyptic imagination in diverse media including film, visual culture, and radio. Topics include slavery and race war, nuclear Armageddon, eco-apocalypse, evangelical rapture culture, and global pandemics. Authors include Octavia Butler, Stanley Kubrick, Ling Ma, Cormack McCarthy, Nat Turner, and H.G. Wells. Usually offered every year.

ENG 137b Women and War
[ djw dl hum nw ]

Examines how African women writers and filmmakers use testimony to bear witness to mass violence. How do these writers resist political and sociocultural silencing systems that reduce traumatic experience to silence, denial, and terror? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 141b Poetry and Myth
[ hum ]

Studies the way modern English-language poets have adapted traditional myth and legend, with attention to the anthropological and literary theory of myth. The poems treat, variously, Classical, Irish and Yoruba mythology, as well as Arthurian legend. Authors include: W.B. Yeats, Audre Lorde, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Wole Solyinka, and H.D.

ENG 142a Blackness and Horror
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Cannot be taken by students who previously took ENG 42a.

Examines the tense and transformative place that blackness has within the horror tradition, beginning with the late nineteenth century and moving into the present. In addition to documentaries and critical texts, we will analyze literature, films, and various aspects of material culture that explore the relationship between blackness and horror. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 142b Black Queer Literatures
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines various works by black queer critics and cultural producers, beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into the present. While we largely focus upon the attempt to create the shared sense of a world and a tradition in common, we also attend to important divisions brought about by various forms and feelings of difference (including race, gender, class, nation, age and ability). Usually offered every third year.

ENG 145a Poetry and the Supernatural
[ hum ]

Studies modern poetry and poetic theory of the Gothic and supernatural. What is at stake, psychologically and aesthetically, in the representation of supernatural phenomena? Figures include goblins, vampires, witches, ghosts and the goddess of the underworld. Texts include poetry by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Louise Gluck and Rita Dov. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 150b Out of This World: Science Fiction's Cyborgs, Time Travellers, and Space Invaders
[ hum ]

Charts four principal ways that SF over the past two centuries has imagined alternatives to ordinary reality: cyborgs, time travellers, dystopias and space invaders. It tests scholarly ideas about "cognitive estrangement," technological innovation ("novum") and self-contained "secondary worlds" and culminates in independent research projects. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 152a Indian Love Stories
[ djw dl hum nw ]

Introduces students to writings on love, desire and sexuality from ancient India to the present. Topics include ancient eroticism, love in Urdu poetry, Gandhi's sexual asceticism, colonial regulation of sexuality, Bollywood, queer fiction and more. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 156a The Modern Prometheus
[ hum ]

Studies the theme of Prometheanism. What is the fate of ambitious efforts to improve the lot of humankind? Texts include: poetry and prose by William Blake, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley, as well as representative works from later periods. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 157a Contemporary Poetry
[ hum ]

Study of 21st-century poets, primarily American. Focus on form, innovation, and diversity. Poets to include: Louise Glück, Jo Harjo, Terence Hayes, Elisa Gonzalez, Alice Notley, Jericho Brown, Tracy K. Williams, and Ocean Vuong.. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 161a Literature and Counterculture
[ hum ]

Explores alternative, subversive publics created through literature and art. Readings into avant-garde movements and their legacies, with a focus on creative political engagements with public spheres. We'll consider writing, experimental theater, visual art, and musical performance at the cultural edges and outsides. This is creative expression that plays with textual circulation and political subversion. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 165b Victorian Poetry and Its Readers
[ hum ]

Studies how poetry was written and read during the last time poetry held a prominent role in England's public life. The course centers on Tennyson's career as poet laureate, but also gives full attention to Robert Browning's work. The course also surveys the work of E. B. Browning, the Pre-Raphaelites, and others, and concludes with the poetry of Hardy and of the early Yeats. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 166b The Promise of Poetry: Whitman, Dickinson, and Others
[ hum wi ]

Poetry of Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, and Melville, with representative poems of Whittier, Bryant, Longfellow, Poe, Sigourney, and Tuckerman. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 168b Plotting Inheritance
[ djw dl hum ]

Examines novels published in the last two decades set during slavery and indenture in the British Caribbean, alongside (and as) theorizations of accumulation, inheritance, and freedom. How does fiction account for and plot material, moral and emotional worth? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 170b Contemporary Theatre and Performance: Between Rights and the Post-Human
[ hum oc ]

Students will explore two pressing questions: How do contemporary theatre artists work to rehumanize those denied humanity? During a global climate emergency, how can the theatre, which is traditionally defined by the co-presence of humans, relocate the human as only one of many lifeforms--not the center of everything but rather entwined with other organic, inorganic, and spiritual agencies? Usually offered every second year.

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ djw hum nw ]

Examines African Feminism(s) as a literary and activist movement that underlines the need for centering African women's experiences in the study of African cultures, societies, and histories. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 175b Getting Behind in Black Gay Men's Literatures
[ deis-us hum ]

Examines black queer men’s sexualities in the field of twentieth and twenty-first century American literatures. Our focus on “getting behind” draws together topics that we will explore throughout term. These include varying attitudes that black queer writers have toward cruising and intimacy; falling behind the times; and falling behind at work, or in life, because of certain sexual pursuits. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 176b Jane Austen and George Eliot: Novel Genius
[ hum wi ]

Explores the novels of England's most inventive and surprising worldbuilders, Jane Austen and George Eliot. Their experiments in depicting unexpected aspects of reality unsettled their era's ideas about gender and class and the hidden workings of inequality. How did their innovative ways of depicting subjectivity, the passage of time, and the relationship between the ideal and the actual shape Modernist fiction, as well as the narrative arts of our own day, from film to television and beyond? Usually offered every third year.

ENG 180a The Modern American Short Story
[ hum ]

Close study of American short-fiction masterworks. Students read as writers write, discussing solutions to narrative obstacles, examining the consequences of alternate points of view. Studies words and syntax to understand and articulate how technical decisions have moral and emotional weight. Usually offered every third year.

ENG/WLIT 21a The Literature of Walking
[ hum oc ]

Explores genres of pedestrianism—rambles, strolls, promenades, treks, pilgrimages, marches. Students will take and design walks as well as read major works on the subject. Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG/WLIT 106a The Lyric Imagination from Romanticism to the Present
[ hum ]

That the poetic imagination could be not merely a source of pleasure, instruction, and inspiration, but a source of insight into the meaning of being, a way of connecting the outer world of nature and the inner world of the spirit, a source of ontological, ethical, and political truth, was a conviction entertained by many poets in English and German from the Romantic period to the present day. The course will consider these ideas in the poetry of Blake, Novalis, Eichendorff, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Goethe, Keats, Whitman, Rilke, Eliot and Celan. Special one-time offering, fall 2024.

WLIT 117a Magical Realism and Modern Myth
[ hum ]

An exploration of magical realism, as well as the enduring importance of myth, in twentieth and twenty-first century fiction and film from Columbia, India, Nigeria, the United States, England, and elsewhere. Authors include Ben Okri, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie; films include Pan's Labyrinth and Beasts of the Southern Wild. Usually offered every second year.

AMST/JOUR 113a Long-form Journalism: Storytelling for Magazines and Podcasts
[ dl oc ss ]

What makes for a great story? This course will examine the hallmarks of successful narrative nonfiction, in both written and audio form. Students will analyze award-winning magazine stories as well as reporting-based podcasts that have injected new energy and financial success into the journalism world. They will learn story structure and techniques to capture and hold the audience's attention. And they will learn by doing, producing their own podcasts and written pieces. This course fulfills the Reporting requirement of the Journalism minor. Usually offered every year.

ENG 19a Introduction to Creative Writing Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.

A workshop for beginning writers. Practice and discussion of short literary forms such as fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Other forms may also be explored. Usually offered every year.

ENG 19b The Autobiographical Imagination: Creative Nonfiction Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.

Combines the study of contemporary autobiographical prose and poetry--from primarily Asian and Pacific Islander writers in the United States--with intense writing practice arising from these texts. Examines--as writers--what it means to construct the story of one's life, and ways in which lies, metaphor, and imagination transform memory to reveal and conceal the self. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 79a Screenwriting Workshop: Beginning Screenplay
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Fundamentals of screenwriting: structure, plot, conflict, character, and dialogue. Students read screenwriting theory, scripts, analyze files, and produce an outline and the first act of an original screenplay. Usually offered every year.

ENG 109a Poetry Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

A workshop for poets willing to explore and develop their craft through intense reading in current poetry, stylistic explorations of content, and imaginative stretching of forms. Usually offered every year.

ENG 109b Fiction Workshop: Short Fiction
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

This workshop will focus on short fiction--stories ten pages and under in length. We will use writing exercises, assigned readings, and essays on craft to discuss structure, character development, point of view, and other elements of fiction. While appropriate for all levels, this workshop might be of special interest to writers who want a secure foundation in the basics. Usually offered every year.

ENG 119a Fiction Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

An advanced fiction workshop. Students are expected to compose and revise their fiction, complete typed critiques of each other's work weekly, and discuss readings based on examples of various techniques. Usually offered every year.

ENG 119b Poetry Workshop: Special Topics in Poetry
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

For those who wish to improve as poets while broadening their knowledge of poetry, through a wide spectrum of readings. Students' poems will be discussed in a "workshop" format with emphasis on revision. Remaining time will cover assigned readings and issues of craft. Usually offered every year.

ENG 129a Creative Nonfiction Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Students will learn how to use a wide range of literary techniques to produce factual narratives drawn from their own perspectives and lives. Creative assignments and discussions will include the personal essay, the memoir essay and literary journalism. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 139a Publishing Workshop: Literary Editing and Publishing
[ dl hum oc ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. This course fulfills a workshop requirement for the Creative Writing major and minor. 

Editing and publishing a literary journal -- either digital, print, or in more experimental forms -- can be an important component of a writer's creative life and sense of literary citizenship. This experiential learning course will engage students with theoretical and historical reading, as well as provide practical hands-on tools for literary publishing. Broadsided Press (www.broadsidedpress.org) will be used as a case study. A group publishing project will be part of the coursework, and this can be tied into journals already being published on campus. By the end of the semester, students will have a fuller sense of the work, mindset, difficulties, strategies, and values of a literary publisher. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 139b Screenwriting Workshop: Intermediate Screenwriting
[ hum oc wi ]

Prerequisites: ENG 79a. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

In this writing-intensive course, students build on screenwriting basics and delve more deeply into the creative process. Participants read and critique each other's work, study screenplays and view films, and submit original written material on a biweekly basis. At the conclusion of the course each student will have completed the first draft of a screenplay (100-120 pages). Usually offered every year.

ENG 149a Screenwriting Workshop: Writing the Streaming Series
[ dl hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Introduces students to the craft of writing for a variety of television programming formats, including episodic, late-night, and public service announcements. Students will read and view examples and create their own works within each genre. Usually offered every year.

ENG 149b Writing the Horror and Suspense Film
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Combining lectures, workshops, and screenings, this course introduces the principles and craft of screenwriting, specifically in the horror genre. Students develop confidence and critical thinking while honing their storytelling skills.

Class lectures cover the fundamentals of creative screenwriting: characterization, story structure, pacing, plot, and dialogue. Student participation includes discussions of the reading and viewing assignments, writing exercises, and critiques of their classmates’ original material.

Student work is informed by exploring horror films and their enduring appeal, dating from the earliest incarnations of the silent era through contemporary examples from Hollywood, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the indie film world. This course requires students to complete a polished first act and a detailed eight-to-ten-page outline of their feature-length screenplay. Usually offered every second year.

ENG 159a Screenwriting Workshop: Variations on the Short Film
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. May be repeated for credit.

Introduces writing and producing of short films for independent production. Topics will include introduction to screenwriting, script format, loglines, pitch pages, beat sheets and outlines, short form structure, and the planning involved in pre-production. Usually offered every year.

ENG 169a Eco-Writing Workshop
[ hum wi ]

Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis.

A creative writing workshop focused on writing essays and poems that engage with environmental and eco-justice concerns. Readings, writing assignments, and class discussions will be augmented by field trips. Usually offered every second year.

JOUR 114b Arts Journalism, Pop Culture, and Digital Innovation
[ ss wi ]

How do journalists cover the arts in a world of ever-expanding online options, and where artists are increasingly telling their own stories through social media? This course explores the evolution of arts and entertainment coverage, from its earliest days to its current digital incarnation. Students will develop skills using new tools and innovative approaches to deliver meaningful pop culture coverage and cultural criticism. Usually offered every second year.

THA 71a Playwriting
[ ca wi ]

Introduces students to the fundamentals of playwriting. Attention will be given to dramatic structure, the development of character, and stage dialogue. In addition to completing a number of playwriting exercises, students will write one ten-minute play and one one-act play. Work will be shared with the class and read aloud. Usually offered every year.

ENG 98a Independent Study

Usually offered every year.

ENG 98b Independent Study

Yields half-course credit. Usually offered every year.

ENG 99a The Senior Honors Essay

For seniors interested in qualifying for departmental honors when combined with a tenth course for the major. Usually offered every year.

ENG 99b The Senior Honors Essay

For seniors interested in qualifying for departmental honors when combined with a tenth course for the major. Usually offered every year.

ENG 99d The Senior Honors Thesis

For seniors interested in qualifying for departmental honors with a thesis. Usually offered every year.

AAAS 65a The Caribbean's Global Intimacies
[ djw hum ss ]

“Not an inch of this world devoid of my fingerprints…and my filth in the glitter of gems!” These words of Martinican poet and politician Aimé Césaire capture the Caribbean’s violent enrichment of the world and the ways in which global intimacies or entanglements have shaped the Caribbean. Examining sand, oil, sex work, hurricanes, care work, and earthquakes in the work of artists and other commentators, we will learn to analyze theme and form, and become familiar with concepts related to Caribbean cultural and political life. Usually offered every second year.

AMST 149a The Future as History
[ ss ]

What does art have to say about the future? What new ways of conceiving of, and caring for, the future have literary and visual texts devised over the past two centuries? In exploring the art of the future of the past two centuries, you will read sci-fi & fantasy by authors like Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, N.K. Jemisin, and Ursula Le Guin, as well as texts like Invisible Man and Velvet Goldmine that set the future not in worlds to come but in the narrative potential of the present and times gone by. By attending to alternative temporalities and their genres—queer, spectral, cyborg, planetary, and many more—we will engage topics of major importance like reparations, environmental catastrophe, and liberation theology. By the end of the semester, we will develop a new understanding of time and its relation to history. Usually offered every second year.

AMST 177b True Crime and American Culture_
[ ss ]

Explores a series of enduringly fascinating cases from the true crime files of American culture. Our crime scene investigations range from 1692 Salem to 1994 Brentwood; our line-up includes witches, outlaws, kidnappers, gangsters, murderers, and serial killers; and our evidence is drawn from literature, film, and television. Usually offered every second year.

ECS 100a European Cultural Studies Proseminar: Modernism
[ dl hum oc ]

Explores the interrelationship of literature, music, painting, philosophy, and other arts in the era of high modernism. Works by Artaud, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Mann, Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Kandinsky, Schiele, Beckett, Brecht, Adorno, Sartre, Heidegger, and others. Usually offered every fall semester.

ECS 101b Romanticism: The Shock of the New
[ hum ]

A survey of the innovative political, intellectual, and cultural movement, which excited and dismayed Europe from the end of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. Broad changes and challenges in aesthetic values, social thought, and literary form will be addressed through study of major authors from Great Britain, France, and Germany, including important precursors such as Goethe and Rousseau, as well as representative Romantic poets (Hölderlin, Shelley, Baudelaire) and representative novels (The Sorrows of Young Werther, Corinne, Frankenstein). Usually offered every second year.

ED 21a Reading Teens: Learning from Young Adult Literature
[ ss ]

Why YA? Young Adult literature isn’t always taken seriously, but it raises serious questions about crucial social issues. It wrestles with questions of identity and equity and what it means to be human. Plus, dragons. Voracious consumers of YA often don’t see themselves as “readers,” and yet they bring sophisticated strategies to their reading—strategies that could be leveraged for a lifetime of reading across genres. In this course we’ll explore a host of questions about the genre, including: What is it about YA lit that keeps teens reading? How might YA lit expand the traditional English curriculum in schools? What is the role of YA lit in the classroom and in students’ lives? What can we learn by leaning into YA lit? This course involves a LOT of reading—some of it scholarly, and much of it curl-up-on-the-couch delicious. Usually offered every second year.

FYS 3b Evil and Tragedy

Designed to instill and enhance flexible writing and research skills. A selection of readings stimulates discussion, deepens understanding, and serves as foundation for writing assignments. Students will recognize the role of writing in fostering critical thinking and learn to identify conventions of disciplinary writing.

What is the relationship between evil and tragedy? Does a tragedy necessarily involve evildoing or an evil agent? Or does tragedy occur (always? sometimes?) in the way Hegel said, not as a conflict between right and wrong, but as a conflict between right and right? This class will consider and debate the question in the course of studying three tragic literary works (Antigone, King Lear, and Uncle Vanya) and major critical statements about them. Usually offered every year.

FYS 13a Asian American Films

Designed to instill and enhance flexible writing and research skills. A selection of readings stimulates discussion, deepens understanding, and serves as foundation for writing assignments. Students will recognize the role of writing in fostering critical thinking and learn to identify conventions of disciplinary writing.

Takes a critical look at a century of Asian American representations in film. We study prime examples of how Asian Americans have been scripted and portrayed through major eras and genres of American cinema: the silent era’s love for Anna May Wong, the noir genre’s obsession with Chinatown, mid-century song and dance over devastating wars, social and memoiristic documentaries, all through the halting embrace of multiculturalism and globalism of the past three decades. Along the way, we scrutinize various difficult subjects lurking behind the silver screen: fear of the yellow peril, racialized labor strife, war legacies, racist violence, family and community crises, among others. Usually offered every year.

GECS 130b The Princess and the Golem: Fairy Tales
[ hum wi ]

Conducted in English.

Compares Walt Disney's films with German and other European fairy tales from the nineteenth and twentieth century, focusing on feminist and psychoanalytic readings. Usually offered every second year.

HISP 85a Introduction to U.S. Latinx Literatures and Cultures
[ deis-us djw dl hum ]

Offered in English.

Introduces students to U.S. Latinx cultural productions and to the interdisciplinary questions that concern U.S. Latinx communities. Latinxs have played a vital role in the history, politics, and cultures of the United States. U.S. Latinx literary works, in particular, have established important socio-historical and aesthetic networks that highlight Latinx expression and lived experiences, engaging with issues including biculturalism, language, citizenship, systems of value, and intersectional identity. Though the Latinx literary tradition spans more than 400 years, this course will focus on 20th and 21st century texts that decolonize nationalist approaches to Latinidad(es) and therefore challenge existing Latinx literary "canons." Usually offered every year.

HISP 158a Latina Feminisms
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Offered in English.

Explores the theoretical frameworks and literary productions of feminisms developed by Latina/xs. It introduces students to a diversity of backgrounds and experiences (Chicana, Dominican American, Cuban American, Salvadoran American, and Puerto Rican authors) as well as a variety of genres (i.e. novel, poetry, short stories, drama). Using intersectionality as a theoretical tool for analyzing oppressions, students will explore the complex politics of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and race in the lives of Latina/xs. They will also explore Latina/x feminists' theoretical and/or practical attempts to transcend socially-constructed categories of identity, while acknowledging existing material inequalities. Usually offered every third year.

HSSP 118b Viewing Medicine and Health Policy Through the Lens of Literature
[ oc ss ]

Literature–fiction, memoir, poetry, and drama–offers a powerful lens for studying key health policy issues. By harnessing the power of authors' imaginations, insights and compelling stories, students can gain deeper insight into topics including: patient centered care, ethics in research, access to healthcare, obesity and hunger, role of the pharmaceutical and tobacco, aging policy, disability, and clinicians' roles and training. Usually offered every second year.

HUM 1a Tragedy: Love and Death in the Creative Imagination
[ hum ]

Enrollment limited to first-year Humanities Fellows. Satisfies the First-Year Seminar core requirement.
 

Our seminar concerns elemental experiences, above all love and death. The medium through which we will explore them is tragedy, an ancient literary form closely allied with myth. Consider this remark by philosopher Simone Weil: Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil. This is the truth about authentic good and evil. With fictional good and evil it is the other way around. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound and full of charm. (S.W., On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, 160)

Hence, the appeal of the tragic, which directly addresses evil. There will be abundant, and sometimes horrifying evil in the plays, fiction, and poetry we read this term. We begin with Cormac McCarthy’s shocking Blood Meridian, a tragic tale of the American West, much as the Iliad is a tragic tale of ancient Greece. But why belabor the tragic, the mythic? Because in myth and tragedy we find not merely the self-confident moral posturing so common in modern writing but instead an attempt to get at that which underlies morality: good and evil, love and death. They are more fundamental, possibly divine, and therefore the remit of myth and tragedy rather than science and law. Usually offered every year.

HUM 10a The Western Canon
[ hum ]

May not be taken by students who have taken NEJS 18a in prior years.

Foundational texts of the Western canon: the Bible, Homer, Vergil, and Dante. Thematic emphases and supplementary texts vary from year to year.

HUM 12a Writing the Self
[ hum ]

Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows.

Explores the long history of self-writing, from antiquity through the present. We will read works from a wide range of traditions and genres, but which have in common an exploration of how people think and write about their own lives. From daily diaries to confessional narratives to graphic novels, the texts in the course will help us to consider how the inner life is constructed in relation to the outer world, including questions of religion, gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation, among others. Special one-time offering, fall 2023.

HUM 13a Timeloops and Co-presence: Indigenous Temporalities and Speculative Fiction
[ hum ]

Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows.

Explores profoundly divergent ways of grasping the nature of time and temporality by way of anthropological and literary approaches, with a particular focus on the indigenous Americas and the genre of speculative fiction. Special one-time offering, fall 2024.

HUM 14a Evil and Human Destiny: The Western Canon from Genesis to Milton
[ hum ]

Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows.

Introduces the student to the Western classics from Antiquity to the Renaissance and how they explore the perennially urgent issues of evil and human destiny. The relationships among the divine, the world, and history will be explored through the prisms of justice, suffering, and death. The focus is on how the formative cultures of our civilization – the Hebrew and the Greek – which merged in the Renaissance, wrestled with these problems and how their various resolutions endeavored to endow human life with meaning. Usually offered every year.

HUM 15a Truth in Fiction
[ hum ]

Enrollment limited to first-year Humanities Fellows. Satisfies the First-Year Seminar core requirement.
 

The fundamental question we’ll be asking is a question about truth in fiction. What is truth? At a minimum, we think that if a sentence is true, there’s something that makes it true. Much of our ordinary discourse is rendered true or false by how the actual world is. If I tell you that it is raining when it is in fact sunny outside, the world renders my utterance false. If you say that the tallest person in the world is Turkish, your utterance is made true by the fact that the current record holder was born in a village in the Mardin Province of Turkey. But what makes something true in fiction? What makes it true that Cordelia dies at the end of Lear or that Jacob has died in the Great War in Jacob’s Room or that the Governess is or is not hallucinating in The Turn of the Screw? It cannot be a fact about how the world actually is, but might it be a fact about how the world might have been? Or is it socially constructed facts agreed upon by the creators or the readers of fiction? Do reflections on truth in fiction make us reconsider our view of how we should think about everyday truth? What should we say about contexts in which people cannot agree on a single truth? Are all of our observations of the world ultimately theory-laden?

We won’t so much be trying to answer these questions once and for all as trying to make them exciting and real. We’ll do this by looking at literary texts that are particularly insightful about questions pertaining to truth in fiction, fictional entities and the nature of evidence, coupled with classical and contemporary readings in philosophy. Usually offered every year.

LGLS 144a Law in Shakespeare
[ ss ]

Explores the array of insights about law and legal institutions to be found in the plays of William Shakespeare. As the semester goes on, we will read and critically engage with such works as Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, and King Lear, with a view towards discerning the legal themes that drive the plays’ plots and motivate their characters, and at the same time, suggesting how these inquiries can inform our understandings of the nature and workings of those themes in contemporary life. Examples include the venerable problem of how best to interpret contracts, as displayed in The Merchant of Venice, and the conflicts between natural and positive law that frame the action in King Lear. Assessment will be based on the quality and consistency of participation in class discussion, as well as performance on two short papers and a final project. Usually offered every second year.

NEJS 176b Jewish Graphic Novels
[ hum ]

Examines the complex genre of the Jewish graphic novel. Explores Jewish artists' use of graphic narratives to grapple with issues of acculturation, trauma, and identity. Special focus on the reconfiguration of Jewish gender identities. Structured around primary texts. Secondary readings provide historical context and theoretical analysis. Usually offered every second year.

RECS 134b Literature and Medicine: Chekhov and the Healing Arts
[ hum wi ]

Open to all students. Conducted in English. Most students will choose to read the works in English translation, but students who know Russian may do the readings in Russian.

Explores Chekhov as a fiction writer, a dramatist, and a devoted physician. Many of his artistic works, including a number where doctors figure as primary characters, read as case studies of particular diseases, mental illnesses, and conditions induced by poverty. Chekhov practiced the healing arts in all aspects of his professional and creative life, as well as in his courageous efforts on the remote penal-colony island of Sakhalin and in his dangerous public work during a terrible cholera epidemic. Reading both Chekhov and the works of several other modern and contemporary writers who were deeply influenced by him, this course emphasizes the skills of close looking—techniques equally valuable to the writer, the dramatist, and the physician. We read works about children and the nature of childhood, about students, about “the woman question,” about peasants, about religion, about marriage and adultery, as well as two plays: The Seagull and Uncle Vanya (and adaptations of each of them). Students will consider the ebb and flow between Chekhov’s efforts as a dramatist and a story-teller and engage with Chekhov’s most vivid, candid, and intriguing letters about medicine and art. Usually offered every second year.

RECS 154a Vladimir Nabokov: Art and Ethics
[ hum ]

Open to all students. Conducted in English. Readings in English.

A concentrated study of Vladimir Nabokov, the most noted Russian author living in emigration and one of the most influential novelists of the twentieth century. Focuses on the major Russian- and English-language novels, with special attention to the interplay within them of Nabokov’s philosophy of art and his views on ethics and morality. Usually offered every third year.

RECS/WLIT 136a All in the Family: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the English Novel
[ hum ]

Selected novels and writings of Austen, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Woolf will be read to trace both the evolution of the novel and the meanings, contexts and depictions of the family. The family novel encompasses such larger questions as how we regard the pain of others and how we define community. Usually offered every second year.

THA 11a European Theater Texts and Theory I
[ ca ]

The evolution of Western drama from its ritual origins through the mid-eighteenth century. Greek tragedy, Roman comedy, medieval drama, Italian humanism, Spanish Golden Age comedias, and French neoclassicism. Attention paid to theater history, dramatic theory, and performance. Usually offered every year.

THA 11b European Theater Texts and Theory II
[ ca ]

A continuation of THA 11a, covering plays, history, and political theory. Romanticism to the present, including realism and the avant-garde. Usually offered every year.

THA 12a European Theater Texts and Theory
[ ca ]

Formerly offered as THA 11a and 11b. May not be taken for credit by students who previously took THA 11a/b.

Introduces European texts and dramatic theory from Ancient Greece through the present. Explores not only the plays, but also the contexts in which they were originally written and staged, with particular attention to theater architecture and the relationships between actors and audiences.

Students will also learn about processes and theories of adaptation – how stories and myths are written and rewritten over time in new socio-political contexts, and how directors reinterpret texts hundreds or even thousands of years later. Students will also learn to read and analyze plays as texts for live performance, asking what the scripts may suggest about the visual, physical, and aural life of a production. Usually offered every year.

THA 66a The American Drama since 1945
[ ca ]

Examines the major plays and playwrights representing styles from social realism to avant-garde performance groups and the theater of images. Usually offered every second year.

THA 102b Shakespeare: On Stage and Screen
[ ca ]

Shakespeare wrote his plays to be seen and heard, not read. This course approaches Shakespeare as a man of the theater who thought visually as well as verbally. Explores Shakespeare's scripts in their original theatrical context, subsequent production history, and migration to film. Usually offered every second year.

THA 142b Women Playwrights: Writing for the Stage by and about Women
[ ca deis-us wi ]

Introduces the world of women playwrights. This course will engage the texts through common themes explored by women playwrights: motherhood (and daughterhood), reproduction, sexuality, family relationships, etc. Students will participate in writing or performance exercises based on these themes. Usually offered every second year.

THA 143b The Color Purple: Novel, Film, Musical, Manifesto
[ ca deis-us ]

Traces the evolution of Alice Walker’s 1985 novel The Color Purple from its original publication through its adaptations as a film, a stage musical, and a musical film. Beginning in the 1970s and stretching into the present, the course explores The Color Purple’s significance as a seminal text in African American literature, women’s writing, contemporary cinema, American musical theater, and queer representation. Usually offered every second year.

THA 145a Queer Theater
[ ca deis-us ]

Explores significant plays that have shaped and defined gay identity during the past 100 years. Playwrights span Wilde to Taylor Mac. Examining texts as literature, history, and performance, we will explore cultural change, politics, gender, the AIDS epidemic, camp, and coming out. Usually offered every third year.

THA 146a Theater and the Holocaust
[ ca djw ]

By studying plays and theatrical tools, students can gain insight into the Holocaust and what made it possible as well as its lasting impact. The course will examine how theater has attempted to represent the unimaginable as and communicate about the toxic appeal of antisemitic Nazi ideology, both in the context of the Holocaust and its legacy. Usually offered every third year.

THA 150a Global Theater: Voices from Asia, Africa, and the Americas
[ ca djw nw wi ]

Explores dramatic literature and performance traditions from across the globe. Examines the ways various artists have engaged theater to express, represent, and interrogate diversity and complexity of the human condition. Usually offered every year.

WGS 112a Queer Indigenous Gothic
[ hum ]

Centers the haunting, monstrous, and spectral as critical lenses through which to read entanglements of queerness, Indigeneity, and resilience/resistance in the face of settler colonialism. We begin with horror/gothic theory’s recent upturning by Indigenous writers and creatives. Then, we move to bridge this with Indigenous Feminisms and especially Queer Indigenous Studies. We will, together, examine how Native authors and artists queer the Gothic mode to expose the violent mythologies of settler permanence and Indigenous death. We engage with literary texts, visual media, and cultural theory to explore how horror tropes (monstrosity, possession, reanimation, haunting, and the like) are transfigured into arguments for survivance, kinship, and spectral justice. Consequently, we will interrogate the aesthetic and political regimes of the Gothic not merely as a Euro-American genre, but as an unsettling and unsettled space of decolonial critique. In short, we explore questions like what does it mean to haunt back? How does horror become a mode of refusal, resurgence, and reparation for queer Indigenous life? And how does Indigenous horror’s unsettling of the Gothic mode reveal its settler colonial epistemology? Special one-time offering, fall 2025.

WGS 135b Postcolonial Feminisms
[ hum oc ]

Examines feminist theories, literature, and film from formerly colonized, Anglophone countries in South Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa. It takes the shared path of decolonization and postcoloniality to discuss the development of feminist discourse and the diverse trajectories of gendered lives. Usually offered every third year.

WLIT 178a Cult Books
[ hum ]

Explores novels on the fringe of literary respectability, books that have won passionate, if not necessarily large followings (hence the ambivalent praise implied in the term 'cult book'). Works by Renate Adler, J. G. Ballard, Thomas Bernhard, Osamu Dazai, Wei Hui, Chester Himes, Fleur Jaeggy, Anna Kavan, William Kotzwinkle, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Georges Perec, Hunter Thompson, Robert Walser, Shuo Wang and others. Usually offered every third year.