University Bulletin (2021-2022)

• 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

Doctor of Philosophy in English

Core Skills

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 and research—including clear, convincing arguments, appropriate voice, and stylistic range.
4. Expertise in teaching.

Knowledge

1. Understanding of a range of literary texts and criticism across different racial, ethnic, cultural, geographical, historical, generic traditions in the English-speaking world.
2. Understanding of the history of the discipline of English and the development of major schools of criticism and theory.

Social Justice

1. An understanding of literature’s relationship to questions of social justice.

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 have a Bachelor's degree, preferably with a major in English and a reading knowledge a language other than English with evident relevance to intended field of study or to professional commitments. They are required to submit a sample of their critical writing not to exceed thirty-five pages; the thirty-five-page maximum may consist of a single critical essay or two shorter essays of approximately equal length. The general requirements for admission to the Graduate School, as specified in an earlier section of this Bulletin, apply to candidates for admission to this area of study.

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

Ulka Anjaria, Director of Graduate Studies
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.

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

Emilie Diouf (on leave academic year 2020-2021)
Anglophone and Francophone African literature. Caribbean literature. Critical Theory. Film/Media. Gender and Sexuality studies. Postcolonial literature and theory.

William Flesch
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.

Thomas King
Early modern English drama and social performance. 18th-century British studies. Performance studies. Queer studies. Gender studies.

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, Undergraduate Advising Head
Romanticism. Literature and philosophy. Eighteenth-century literature.

David Sherman
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.

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

Jerome Tharaud
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)
Jerónimo Arellano (Romance Studies)
Robin Feuer Miller (German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature)
Cheryl Walker (Classical Studies)

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. Five English courses, with the following exception: only one creative writing workshop may count toward the minor.
2. Students are encouraged to speak with the UAH or their faculty advisor about clustering or distributing courses counted toward the minor.
3. Transfer credits, Advanced Placement credit, and cross-listed courses do not count toward the minor. Cross-listed courses taught by English department faculty are considered within the department and are not included in this restriction.
4. 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. Transfer credits, Advanced Placement credit, and cross-listed courses do not count toward the minor. Cross-listed courses taught by English Department faculty are considered within the department and are not included in this restriction.
4. 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 semester 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, courses taken while on study abroad, and transfer credits. 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 one of the following: Any ENG course approved for WI or AAAS/ENG 80a or COML/ENG 148a.
   • Fulfill the oral communication requirement by successfully completing one of the following: ENG 32a, ENG 43b, ENG 60a, ENG 64a, ENG 143a, or ENG 188b.
   • Fulfill the digital literacy requirement by successfully completing one of the following: ENG 14a, ENG 28a, ENG 41a, ENG 58a, ENG 72a, ENG 120a, ENG 123a, ENG 137b, ENG 143a, ENG 143b, ENG 146a, ENG 151b, or ENG 152b.

   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.

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.

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 add deadline of the first thesis-writing semester. The UAH, in consultation with the faculty director, will assign a second reader by the beginning of 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 96d will be considered to have completed a senior honors thesis and those majors who complete ENG 96a/b 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 primary 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 semester 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, courses taken while on study abroad, and transfer credits. 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 one of the following: ENG 19a, ENG 19b, ENG 79a, ENG 109a, ENG 109b, ENG 119a, ENG 119b, ENG 129a, ENG 139b, or ENG 149a.
   • Fulfill the oral communication requirement by successfully completing one of the following: ENG 109a, ENG 109b, ENG 119a, ENG 139a, or ENG 139b.
   • Fulfill the digital literacy requirement by successfully completing one of the following: ENG 79a, ENG 119b, ENG 139a, or ENG 149a.
   No single course may satisfy all three foundational literacies.

Senior Creative Writing Honors Project Option

One semester of ENG 96a or 96b, 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. Also required is the satisfactory completion of two semesters of the Senior Creative Writing Thesis (ENG 96d) of which one semester may count as a creative writing workshop while the second semester will count as the eleventh course.

ENG 96d (Senior 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, 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, courses taken while on study abroad, and transfer credits. 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 one of the following: Any ENG course approved for WI.
   • Fulfill the oral communication requirement by successfully completing one of the following: Any ENG course approved for OC.
   • Fulfill the digital literacy requirement by successfully completing one of the following: Any ENG course approved for DL.
   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.

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 semester 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, courses taken while on study abroad, and transfer credits. 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 maximum of three courses taken outside the department may be counted toward the majors. This restriction includes courses taken while on study abroad and approved as transfer credit. Cross-listed courses taught by English Department faculty are considered within the department and are not included in this restriction.

The following policy is for students who transfer to Brandeis after one year or more at another postsecondary institution. To use transfer credit (awarded by the Office of the University Registrar) toward the major requirements, students must complete the Registrar’s Office online Undergraduate Major/Minor Substitution Petition. The student may be asked to provide a syllabus, a transcript of grades, and in some cases examples of written work done in courses for which credit is being sought. The number of major requirements that can be satisfied with transfer credit is at the discretion of the undergraduate advising committee but generally will follow these guidelines for the following tracks only: literature major, literature/creative writing double major, and the literature major/creative writing minor.

A student who transfers to Brandeis with sophomore standing can transfer up to two courses from previous postsecondary work toward one of the aforementioned tracks. If the student does transfer two courses than the maximum of three cross-listed courses noted above is reduced to two. If the student transfers only one course, then the maximum of three cross-listed courses remains in place.

A student who transfers to Brandeis with junior standing can transfer up to four courses from previous postsecondary work toward one of the aforementioned tracks. If the student does transfer four courses than the maximum of three cross-listed courses noted above is reduced to one. If the student transfers one to three courses, then the maximum of three cross-listed courses noted above is reduced to two.

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

Eight courses in the Department of English; at least three courses must be 200-level seminars and one course must be ENG 301a (Master's Directed Research). (For more information about ENG
301a, see below.) ENG 200a (Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies) is optional but recommended. Master's students are expected to take all eight required courses 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. (ENG 301a and ENG 352a/b cannot be counted towards the 200-level requirement.) ENG 350a (Proseminar) and ENG 360c (Article Publication Proseminar) are credit/no-credit courses that do not count towards the eight course requirement.

Residence Requirement

Students may enroll on a full or part-time basis. There is a one-year minimum 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. Students who wish to enroll in the program on a part-time basis are strongly encouraged to complete all the requirements within four years.

 

Master's Research Paper Requirement (ENG 301a)

This 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. Each paper will be evaluated by two faculty members, one of whom may be the faculty member for whom the paper was originally written. The second reader need not be from the English department. The paper 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

Eight courses, three of which must be 200-level seminars; 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); ENG 200a (Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies) is optional but recommended. (ENG 352a/b cannot be counted towards the 200-level requirement.)

Residence Requirement

The minimum residence requirement is one year, though students with inadequate preparation may require more.

 

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 the Feminist Inquiry course offered through the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies).
3. Five additional courses in the English department selected from 100-level courses and graduate seminars (200-level courses). At least three of these courses must be at the 200 level. One of these five courses 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.(ENG 352a/b cannot be counted towards the 200-level requirement.) Normally, only one of these courses may be a Directed Research course.
4. One Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course in a department other than the English department.
5. Joint MA paper 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. The paper 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.
6. The program may take an additional one or two semesters beyond the first year to complete as an Extended Master's student.

Note: ENG 350a (Proseminar) and ENG 360c (Article Publication Proseminar) are credit/no-credit courses that do not count towards the eight course requirement.

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, and the WGS course in another department) will not count towards course credit for the Ph.D.

Program of Study

• Students are expected to complete a minimum of twelve courses no later than the end of the third year, ten of which are normally taken within the English department.
• 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. Of the eight additional courses required for the PhD degree, at least seven are normally taken within the English department.
• The program reserves the right to require additional courses to assure thorough mastery of the area of study.
• 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.
• 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 pass/fail seminar that is in addition to the twelve course requirement.
• 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.
• 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 who come to Brandeis with a BA degree complete their course work
• Students are encouraged to take or audit additional courses during their third year as well as make progress toward their field exam, to be taken no later than October 1 of their 4^th

Notes Pertaining to Courses

• Creative Writing Workshops do not count towards the PhD degree.
• ENG 360c (Article Publication Proseminar) is optional and does not count towards required courses for the degree.
• ENG 352a/b, Directed Research,
  • Cannot be counted towards the 200-level requirement.
  • First-year students usually cannot enroll in a section of ENG 352a/b, Directed Research.
  • Normally, only one section of ENG 352a/b, Directed Research, can count towards required coursework for a graduate degree.
• Students may apply to the director of graduate studies for permission to take courses offered
  • In other departments at Brandeis,
  • Through consortium arrangements with Boston College, Boston University, and Tufts University
  • 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 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. To qualify for ABD status, all doctoral students must satisfy the department's requirements for training in teaching. Training in teaching takes place through assistantships in the department and pedagogical workshops offered by the DGS.

Teaching assignments vary according to the pedagogical needs of the individual student, the curricular needs of the department, and enrollments. The university reserves the right to change these assignments as necessary.

• First-year graduate students have no teaching responsibilities; instead they devote themselves to course work.
• Second-year students serve one semester as a teaching assistant in a department course and one semester with no teaching responsibilities.
• Third-year students serve as teaching assistants in two department courses, one each semester.
• Beginning in Fall 2020, fourth-year students complete an internship in one semester and have the option to serve as instructor of record in an English or University Writing course in the other.
• Fifth-year students have no teaching responsibilities.

Residence Requirement

The minimum 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

Students have an obligation to review their preparation in their field with their advisers and to ensure that they are acquiring a comprehensive knowledge of the various historical periods and genres of English and a deeper knowledge of the particular period or field they propose to offer as a specialty.

All candidates for the PhD are required to pass an oral examination in the field in which the candidate expects to write a dissertation. No later than the end of the third year, students should have prepared a reading list for the field examination and submitted it to a committee of three faculty members for approval. Each student will submit a field essay of approximately 20 pages to the examining committee at least one week before the exam. The essay will identify topics of scholarly concern and critical debates in the field and explain their significance.

This examination is taken no later than the first of October during the fourth 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. If a student is asked to retake a portion of the exam, the time frame for the second examination will be set by the examiners in consultation with the student.

Dissertation Prospectus Conference

Students should meet with their prospectus committees one to three months after their field exam to discuss the prospectus. No later than six months after passing the field exam, and in time to establish eligibility for fifth-year funding, students must hold a prospectus conference, which both first and second readers will attend. The prospectus must be signed by both readers in order to be approved by the department. The specific length and design of the prospectus will be agreed upon by the doctoral candidate and the first and second readers. A prospectus typically describes the topic, the questions to be explored, the method of research, and reasons for believing the dissertation will be an original contribution to knowledge. The student's director and/or second reader may also require a chapter outline and/or bibliography.

Dissertation Defense

Each student will submit a dissertation in a form approved by the dissertation director and by a committee appointed by the director of graduate studies. One member of this committee must be from a graduate department at Brandeis outside the department of English or from another university. The student will defend the dissertation at a final oral examination.

Annual Status and Funding Review and Probation

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. Using suitable academic progress (see below) as its guide, the department will determine if a student continues in the program, is put on probation, or is recommended for termination from the program. Continued enrollment is also subject to the Graduate School’s status and funding review process.

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.

Students placed on probation will be informed of that decision by letter and should feel free to meet with the DGS and their advisor to discuss it. Students who are put on probation are required to meet with the DGS and to submit to the DGS a written plan to return to good standing--which might include completing missing work, meeting certain deadlines, and participating more robustly in the life of the department. Failure to return to good standing within one academic year will normally lead to recommendation for termination in the subsequent end-of-year meeting.

Students who do not establish candidacy according to the deadlines noted in each section above will be placed on probation automatically and may become ineligible for funding. Students who do not demonstrate satisfactory academic progress during the probationary year will be withdrawn from the program. Failure to pass the field exam or defend the dissertation prospectus by the required deadlines may result in the student's being recommended for termination from the program.

Completion of Degree

Students entering the PhD program with a BA must earn the degree within eight years. Students entering the PhD program with an MA must earn the degree within seven years. A student requesting an extension must demonstrate significant progress toward completing the dissertation by submitting a prospectus (or equivalent, including a chapter outline) and at least one chapter to the student's adviser. If the student's adviser agrees to support the requested extension, the adviser will refer the case to the graduate committee for approval.

Enrollment in all 200-level graduate seminars is by signature of the instructor or departmental representative. Enrollment in these courses by English department graduate students is guaranteed.

First-year students cannot enroll in a section of ENG 352a/b, Directed Research. Only one section of ENG 352a/b, Directed Research can count towards required coursework for a graduate degree.

Students should also consult the general degree requirements and academic regulations found in an earlier section of this Bulletin.

AAAS/ENG 80a Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]
Formerly offered as ENG 80a.
Explores photography and Africans, African-Americans and Caribbean people, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This course will examine fiction that refers to the photograph; various photographic archives; and theorists on photography and looking. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

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.
Jerome Tharaud

COML/ENG 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.
Caren Irr

ENG 1a Introduction to Literary Studies
[ hum ]
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.
Staff

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.
Jerome Tharaud

ENG 7a American Literature from 1900 to 2000
[ hum wi ]
Focuses on literature and cultural and historical politics of major authors. Prose and poetry. May include Eliot, Frost, Williams, Moore, Himes, Cather, and Faulkner as well as contemporary authors. Usually offered every second year.
John Burt or Caren Irr

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.
Staff

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

ENG 12b Literature of the Pacific Rim
[ hum ]
The Pacific is vast, remote, and mysterious—or is it? By reading fictional and artistic works from twentieth and twenty-first century East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Americas, this course will explore how the geographically remote regions of the Pacific have interacted closely with each other in historical, economic, and political relations and how such interactions allow us to envision a just and ethical global future. Themes covered will include racial dynamics, war, capitalism, and the environment in relation to the geopolitical relations surrounding the Pacific. Special one-time offering, spring 2022.
Nayoung Kim

ENG 14a Media Stories: Circulating Love, Hate, Revolution
[ dl hum ]
Examines the possibility that contemporary digital terminology and media theory may help explain how gossip, sentiment, love, news, and art circulated during an earlier transformative period in media history, the eighteenth century. Beginning with an explosion in the number of newspapers, novels, and political tracts, the period ends in a string of revolutions, fomented around human rights and new modes of governance. With an emphasis on race, gender, sexuality, and class, this course explores what earlier literary and practical texts may reveal about media technologies and communication. Special one-time offering, fall 2021.
Jenny Factor

ENG 15b Black Joy
[ 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.
Brandon Callender

ENG 17a Alternative and Underground Journalism
[ hum ]
A critical history of twentieth-century American journalism. Topics include the nature of journalistic objectivity, the style of underground and alternative periodicals, and the impact of new technologies on independent media. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

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.
John Plotz

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.
Visiting Writer

ENG 19b The Autobiographical Imagination: Creative Nonfiction Workshop
[ hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
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.
Staff

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.
Ulka Anjaria

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

ENG 21a Young Adult Literature
[ hum ]
Literature for adolescents can't afford any self-indulgences: its audience is too impatient. So it's a great place to see what's essential to storytelling. Authors may include Shelley, Twain, Salinger, Pullman, and Rowling, whom we'll use to test basic narrative theory. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

ENG 22b Asian American Literature
[ 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. Major authors include Julie Otzuka, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-Rae Lee, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Usually offered every fourth year.
Howie Tam

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.
Paul Morrison

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.
Caren Irr or Jerome Tharaud

ENG 28b Queer Readings: Before Stonewall
[ hum ]
Students read texts as artifacts of social beliefs, desires, and anxieties about sexed bodies and their pleasures. Readings may include Plato, Virgil, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Phillips, Behn, Gray, Tennyson, Lister, Whitman, Dickinson, Wilde, Freud, Woolf, Barnes, Stein, Larsen, Genet, and Baldwin. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas King

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.
Caren Irr

ENG 31b Rethinking the Gay Bar: Queer Utopias from Stonewall to Pulse
[ hum ]
Identifies genre in LGBT literature, history and theory. Pays special attention to literary and artistic experimentation in representing LGBT spaces. Authors may include Leslie Feinberg, Michel Foucault, José Esteban Muñoz, Audre Lorde, Martin Duberman, Terrance Hayes, and Samuel R. Delany. Special one-time offering, spring 2019.
Brenden O'Donnell

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.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 32b Chaucer I
[ hum ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 132b in prior years.
In addition to reading Chaucer's major work The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, pays special attention to situating the Tales in relation to linguistic, literary, and social developments of the later Middle Ages. No previous knowledge of Middle English required. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

ENG 33a Shakespeare
[ hum ]
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.
William Flesch or Ramie Targoff

ENG 35b Women's Friendship (and More) in Nineteenth-century Literature
[ hum ]
While many people think nineteenth-century fiction is all about marriage, other relationships are equally important. This course will focus on intimate relationships between women, including friendship, sisterhood, and queer romance, in authors including Austen, Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Oliphant, and Levy. Special one-time offering, spring 2020.
Abigail Arnold

ENG 37b Modern Drama: Theatres of Rupture, Resistance, and Engagement
[ hum ]
How did theatre artists take “the modern” as a goal to be realized in the future and a crisis to be managed in the present? Playwrights include Ibsen, Wilde, Chekhov, Shaw, Synge, Glaspell, Brecht, Williams, Beckett, Pinter, Fugard, Fornes, Hwang, Churchill, Kushner, and Parks. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King

ENG 38a Fantasy Worlds: From Lilliput and Middle Earth to LARPs
[ hum ]
Fantasy is as old as Gilgamesh, as new as Harry Potter; appleaing to both young and old readers as few other genres do. We explore its historical roots in satires like Gulliver's Travels, its modern rebirth in Narnia, Middle Earth, Le Guin's Earthsea, as well as on film. Also explores recent participatory fantasy realms, including online gaming and live action role-playing. Usually offered every third year.
John Plotz

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.
John Plotz

ENG 40bj The Birth of the Short Story
[ hum wi ]
How did the genre of the short story emerge and what distinctive work has it performed in its long and protean history? What unique publication and reading practices have been a part of this history? And why does the short story still matter? With a focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers such as Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Chekhov, Mansfield, Hemingway, O’Connor, García Márquez, Johnson, Wallace, and Moore, we will work through the techniques and craft that have defined the short story tradition. And we will consider recent experiments in short stories, mapping where the genre is going next. Offered as part of JBS program.
David Sherman

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.
Dorothy Kim

ENG 42a Blackness and Horror
[ deis-us djw hum ]
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.
Brandon Callender

ENG 42b Animals and Literature
[ hum ]
Explores the role that non-human animals play in world literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Thinking with animals provides a unique vantage onto pressing contemporary issues like climate change, colonialism and its afterlives, the politics of meat-eating, race and racialization, the nature of language, and more. Usually offered every third year.
Joshua Williams

ENG 43b Medieval Play: Drama, LARP, and Video Games
[ 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.
Dorothy Kim

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.
John Burt

ENG 48b The Black Fantastic
[ deis-us hum ]
What is the "fantastic" and how does its definition shift when preceded by the adjective "black"? How do black authors use fantastic forms to not only tell "truths" unavailable in "realistic" narratives, but to imagine freer futures? Usually offered every third year.
Gabrielle Everett

ENG 50a Love Poetry from Sappho to Neruda
[ hum ]
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.
Ramie Targoff

ENG 52a Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
[ hum nw ]
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.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 54b Encountering the Other: "Savages," Monsters, and the Doubles in Modern English Literature
[ hum ]
Examines the representation of the Other in modern literature and film, with a focus on eighteenth-century British literature. Asks questions about the definition of the human, race, gender, and power. Special one-time offering, spring 2020.
Haram Lee

ENG 58a Literature and Medicine
[ dl hum wi ]
How has literature grappled with illness, healing, and the patient-doctor encounter? How can poetry and storytelling communicate with experience of bodily pain--and how does the body seek to communicate its suffering without language? We examine literary responses to the body's biological vulnerabilities, and seek to contextualize the vulnerable body within the cultural and political fields that shape medical knowledge and practice. Readings in fiction, poetry, essay, and drama will suggest the art, or craftsmanship, involved in the healing sciences, as well as the diagnostic nature of literary criticism. Reading for new approaches, generated by the literary imagination, to controversial issues in medical ethics. Usually offered every third year.
David Sherman

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.
David Sherman

ENG 60aj Storytelling Performance
[ hum oc ]
This experiential course is a workshop for students to craft and perform stories as part of the Brandeis Storytelling Brigade. Through a series of collaborative exercises and rehearsals, students will develop a repertoire of at least four stories: one fictional story for young children, one folk tale for young children, one story based on historical research for young adults or adults, and one autobiographical or fictional story for young adults or adults. We will tell our individual and group stories, as a team, at youth summer programs, libraries, teen centers, open mics, and other public spaces. Offered as part of JBS program.
David Sherman

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.
William Flesch

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.
Emilie Diouf

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.
Emilie Diouf

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.
Tom King

ENG 66b Contemporary Global Dystopias
[ hum wi ]
Explores the sources, moods, and effects of dystopian fiction from around the world. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

ENG 67b Modern Poetry
[ hum ]
A course on the major poets of the twentieth century. Usually offered every third year.
Paul Morrison

ENG 68b Race, Colonialism, and Modernism
[ djw hum wi ]
A critical introduction to the ever-expanding field of modernist studies. We will read canonical modernists along with writers from Black America, the Caribbean, and Africa to explore the convergence of race, colonialism, and modernism. We will examine what has been silenced and left behind in the modernist compulsion to “make it new” and highlight the contributions of writers across the black diaspora to the ongoing debates about modernism and modernity. The aim is to rethink the canon of modernism critically and explore different implications of the modern from a global perspective. Special one-time offering, spring 2021.
Chih-Chien Hsieh

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.
John Plotz

ENG 72a The Caribbean's Asias: Asian Migration & Heritage in the Caribbean
[ dl hum nw ]
Studies fiction and theory by and about Caribbean people of South Asian origin, and Caribbean people of Chinese origin from the late nineteenth century to the present. Examines how they have been implicated in discussions of nationalism, hybridity, diaspora, and neoliberalism. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

ENG 73a Witchcraft and Magic in the Renaissance
[ hum ]
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.
Staff

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.
John Plotz

ENG 76a American Urban Literature
[ hum ]
Explores urban spaces as they are made, evoked, and discussed in literature and art. Of special interest will be the intersection between urban spatial design and the social interactions of urban inhabitants. Texts will primarily be drawn from western anglophone works of the 20th century and will include novel, poetry, short story, essay, theater, and film. Special one-time offering, fall 2021.
Sarah Perkins

ENG 78a Virginia Woolf
[ hum ]
An immersion in Woolf's astonishing body of writing. How did her fiction and non-fiction re-imagine the self in the changing social worlds of the early twentieth century? How did her experiments with narrative open new understandings of gender, sexuality, war, the knowing subject, the dimensions of space and time. A chronological survey of her diverse forms of writing that energized, all at once, modernist aesthetics, feminist politics, and philosophical speculation. Usually offered every third year.
David Sherman

ENG 79a Screenwriting Workshop: Beginning Screenplay
[ dl hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. 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 third year.
Marc Weinberg

ENG 84a Nostalgia, Clutter, and Decay: Marking Time in the Enlightenment
[ hum ]
Offers undergraduates the opportunity to consider the many ways of knowing time as presented in various eighteenth-century English texts. We will consider multiple literary forms—poetry, novel, the familiar letter, philosophical essay—for their ability to provide compelling examinations into how historical and literary subjects mark time, and how that epistemology connects to issues of historiography and nationalism. Special one-time offering, spring 2019.
Sarabeth Grant

ENG 87b Queer Readings: Beyond Stonewall
[ hum ]
How have LGBTQ writers explored the consolidation, diaspora, and contestation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer personhoods since the 1960s? Texts include fiction, poetry, drama, memoirs, and film. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas King

ENG 88b Rednecks, Hillbillies, and White Trash: Literature and Culture of the "Deplorables"
[ hum ]
Examines cultural, historical, and theoretical material by/about poor white people. Defines whiteness as a socially constructed and economic incorporated entity to consider the deep entanglement of race and class in American culture. Analyzes literature, television, film, and new media. Special one-time offering, spring 2019.
Courtney Miller

ENG 96a Creating Writing Senior Honors Project
Required for creative writing majors fulfilling the project option. Usually offered every year.
Staff

ENG 96d Senior Creative Writing Thesis
Required for creative writing majors fulfilling the thesis option. Usually offered every year.
Staff

ENG 98a Independent Study
Usually offered every year.
Staff

ENG 98b Independent Study
Usually offered every year.
Staff

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.
Staff

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.
Staff

ENG 99d The Senior Honors Thesis
For seniors interested in qualifying for departmental honors with a thesis. Usually offered every year.
Staff

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.
Staff

HUM 89a Humanities Internship
[ hum ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 89a in prior years.
Open to students who will be working in appropriate internship work in the business, political, publishing, entertainment, gaming, media, education, or non-profit sector either during the summer or in the fall. Any kind of productive work related in one or another way to the humanities would be appropriate, for example working for publishers, the press, journals, libraries and other research institutions (on- or off-campus), advertising agencies, political candidates or office-holders, literary agents, the hospitality industry, or business communication in general. The work would involve creative and analytic attention to language, expression, meaning, or context, and could range from drafting press releases to analyzing policies and mission statements, to considering philosophical and ethical aspects of the work that the intern is part of. Usually offered every year.
William Flesch

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.
Staff

CLAS/ENG 153b Race Before Race: Premodern Critical Race Studies
[ deis-us djw dl hum wi ]
Provides an introduction to ancient and medieval attitudes towards race and ethnicity through the theoretical lens of premodern critical race studies. Special one-time offering, fall 2020.
Caitlin Gillespie and Dorothy Kim

COML/ENG 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.
Robin Feuer Miller

COML/ENG 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.
Laura Quinney

COML/ENG 148a Fiction of the Second World War
[ hum wi ]
Studies novels of the Second World War from Great Britain, France, Germany, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan (all readings in English). Usually offered every fourth year.
John Burt

COML/ENG 149a Dante's Hell and Its Legacy
[ 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.
Laura Quinney

COML/ENG 191a Environmental Aesthetics
[ djw hum oc ]
Explores major schools of thought about nature, ecology, and art. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

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.
William Flesch

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.
Paul Morrison

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.
Brandon Callender

ENG 104a Eighteenth-Century British Poetry, from Dryden to Blake
[ hum ]
The major British poets of the 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.
William Flesch

ENG 105b After Jane Austen: Sex, Death, and Fiction
[ hum wi ]
Focuses on Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad. Explores the relationship between the novel, the era's most popular culture, and our own popular culture. It examines desire, concealment, sex, and romance, as well as the role that literature plays in creating and upsetting communities, defining racial and ethnic categories. Film screenings. Usually offered every third year.
John Plotz

ENG 107a Women Writing Desire: Caribbean Fiction and Film
[ hum ]
About eight novels of the last two decades (by Cliff, Cruz, Danticat, Garcia, Kempadoo, Kincaid, Mittoo, Nunez, Pineau, Powell, or Rosario), drawn from across the region, and read in dialogue with popular culture, theory, and earlier generations of male and female writers of the region. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

ENG 107b Literary Witnessing and the Poetics of Memory
[ hum wi ]
Investigation of the memorial function of modern literature as a response to historical trauma. How is the present haunted by the past; how is literature haunted by the dead? Historical contexts are primarily slavery in the Americas and European genocides. Readings will include theoretical and philosophical considerations of the role of the witness, collective memory, and historical evidence. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

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.
Laura Quinney

ENG 109a Poetry Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. 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.
Elizabeth Bradfield or Visiting Writer

ENG 109b Fiction Workshop: Short Fiction
[ hum oc wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. 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.
Stephen McCauley or Visiting Writer

ENG 110b The Great American Picture Book
[ hum ]
The Great American Picture Book: Contemporary consumers and citizens are constantly bombarded by words and images designed to shape how we think, feel, and act. This course explores the history and theory of American “imagetexts,” multimedia works that combine pictures and words to simulate the real thing, whether the abundance of New World nature, New York’s immigrant neighborhoods, or “vanishing” Native American cultures. We trace the phenomenon from Audubon’s Birds of America to the graphic novel. Usually offered every third year.
Jerome Tharaud

ENG 111aj Narrative Theory
[ hum ]
Explores fundamental concepts in narrative theory and narratology, from Aristotle until today. We will consider the formal features of plots, characters, and narrative discourse. And we will read theoretical accounts of the role that narrative plays in personal identity, community belonging, moral judgment, historical knowledge, and political authority. As a prominent body of scholarship within literary studies, narrative theory offers insights into a fundamental way in which we organize our experiences and make sense of our world. Offered as part of JBS program.
David Sherman

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.
Joshua Williams

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.
John Burt

ENG 117a The Harlem Renaissance
[ deis-us hum ]
Examines the explosive artistic, political, and cultural period known as the Harlem Renaissance. A major movement in African American literature, the Harlem Renaissance sought to redefine American blackness and establish artistic freedom. Usually offered every third year.
Gabrielle Everett

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.
John Burt

ENG 119a Fiction Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit.
An advanced fiction workshop for students primarily interested in the short story. Students are expected to compose and revise three stories, complete typed critiques of each other's work weekly, and discuss readings based on examples of various techniques. Usually offered every year.
Stephen McCauley or Visiting Writer

ENG 119b Poetry Workshop: Special Topics in Poetry
[ dl hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. 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.
Elizabeth Bradfield or Visiting Poet

ENG 120a Thirties Movies
[ 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.
William Flesch

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.
Paul Morrison

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.
Thomas King

ENG 125a Romanticism I: Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
[ hum ]
Examines the major poetry and some prose by the first generation of English Romantic poets who may be said to have defined Romanticism and set the tone for the last two centuries of English literature. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt or Laura Quinney

ENG 125b Romanticism II: Byron, Shelley, and Keats
[ hum ]
The "younger generation" of Romantic poets. Byron, Shelley, and Keats continue and react against poetic, political, and philosophical preoccupations and positions of their immediate elders. Examines their major works, as well as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt, William Flesch, or Laura Quinney

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.
David Sherman

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.
Ulka Anjaria

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.
Faith Smith

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 third year.
Paul Morrison

ENG 129a Creative Nonfiction Workshop
[ hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. 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.
Visiting Writer

ENG 131a Comedy: Literature, Film, and Theory
[ hum ]
Explores comedy as an enigma at the heart of social belonging, psychological coherence, and philosophical speculation. Investigates the strangeness of human laughter. Compares comic literary and film genres in different historical periods as a way to ask: what is the nature of comic pleasure? How does comedy organize desire and make sense of suffering? How are communities regulated by comedy, and how is comedy involved in social freedom? How are basic philosophical questions about minds and bodies illuminated by comedy? Texts by Chaplin, Shakespeare, Monty Python, Swift, Marx Brothers, Aristophanes, Wilde, and others. Usually offered every third year.
David Sherman

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.
Joshua Williams

ENG 133a Advanced Shakespeare
[ hum wi ]
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.
William Flesch and Thomas King

ENG 133b Imagining Money: Literature and Economics from Barter to Bitcoin
[ hum ]
Money works because it is socially shared fiction; literature works because it has socially shared value. We will discuss the economics of literary experience: both literature about money (e.g. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Zola) and the picoeconomic game theory literature relies on. Usually offered every third year.
William Flesch

ENG 134b Subjectivity
[ hum ]
Studies how the experience of subjectivity and selfhood is represented in literature and philosophy of the early modern period, primarily in Britain. Authors include Renaissance lyric poets, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Blake, with philosophical texts by Descartes, Pascal, Locke, Hume, and Kant. Usually offered third year.
Laura Quinney

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.
Jerome Tharaud

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.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 138b Toni Morrison
[ hum ]
An advanced introduction to the oeuvre of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. Reading her novels and nonfiction, we investigate concerns that shaped our world in the last century and haunt the current one, foregrounding Morrison's writing as a key site of trouble and of transformation. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

ENG 139a Publishing Workshop: Literary Editing and Publishing
[ dl hum oc ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of an introductory letter including student's major, writing/editing experience, why publishing is of interest to them, any experimental literary publications/performances they've experienced. This course fulfills a workshop requirement for the Creative Writing major and minor. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within the Registration periods.
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.
Elizabeth Bradfield

ENG 139b Screenwriting Workshop: Intermediate Screenwriting
[ hum oc wi ]
Prerequisites: ENG 79a. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. 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 second year.
Marc Weinberg

ENG 140a American War Novels of the 20th Century
[ hum wi ]
Studies classic war novels of the 20th and 21st century, from Hemingway, Heller, and O'Brien through recent novels by Jin, Benedict and Vollman. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt

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.
Brandon Callender

ENG 143a The History of Mediascapes and Critical Maker Culture
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]
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, the girdle book, the wampum, pamphlets, zines, and wearable media technology. Usually offered every year.
Dorothy Kim

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.
Dorothy Kim

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.
Dorothy Kim

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.
Thomas King

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.
Laura Quinney

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.
Jerome Tharaud

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.
Paul Morrison

ENG 148a Inventing Farewell: A Practicum on Elegy
[ hum ]
Every modern generation re-invents its relation to the dead. This course explores recent experiments in poetic elegy that construct the presence of the dead and work through loss. We'll approach this writing in close conversation with other sorts of innovations in mourning and memorial work, including emerging commemorative rituals, mortuary practices, funerary architecture, historical monuments, and cemetery design. In the experiential, creative component of this course, students will research local memorial acts and commemorative spaces in order to design their own. Usually offered every third year.
David Sherman

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.
Staff

ENG 149a Screenwriting Workshop: Writing for Television
[ dl hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. 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 second year.
Marc Weinberg

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.
John Plotz

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.
Thomas King

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.
Thomas King

ENG 152a Indian Love Stories
[ djw 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.
Ulka Anjaria

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.
Staff

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

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.
Jerome Tharaud

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.
Laura Quinney

ENG 156b When Genius is a Family Affair: Henry, William, and Alice James
[ hum ]
Focuses on William, Henry, and Alice James, and on the different ways they approach the representation of human interaction, thought, perception, and suffering in their novels, philosophical essays, and diary. Pays particular attention to their intellectual and aesthetic contexts. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

ENG 159a Screenwriting Workshop: The Short Film and the Web Series
[ hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit.
Introduces writing and producing of short films for independent production. In this class we will also discuss writing for formats including a YouTube or Vimeo narrative series, IGTV narrative series and other independent production platforms. Topics will include introduction to screenwriting, script format, loglines, pitch pages, beat sheets & outlines, short form structure, and the planning involved in pre-production. Usually offered every year.
Paloma Valenzuela

ENG 160a Digital Media and Culture
[ hum ]
Studies the history and development of digital media, with an emphasis on modes of literature and entertainment. We will examine the digital revolution's effect on such concepts as narrative, politics, aesthetics, identity, knowledge, and humanism. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

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.
David Sherman

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.
Staff

ENG 166a Writing Reconstruction: Race and Reaction after the Civil War
[ hum ]
Examines the struggle for racial equality during and after the Reconstruction period. What are the measures of social or political equality? What powers can public institutions use to secure them? What are the cultural conditions under which struggles about equality are waged? Includes texts from both sides of the political divide, and from different racial perspectives. Students will also gain some familiarity with the historical scholarship about the period. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt

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.
John Burt

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.
Faith Smith

ENG 169a Eco-Writing Workshop
[ hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information.
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.
Elizabeth Bradfield

ENG 170a The Globalization of Nollywood
[ 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.
Emilie Diouf

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.
Thomas King

ENG 171a The History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to Postmodernism
[ hum wi ]
Explores major documents in the history of criticism from Plato to the present. Texts will be read as representative moments in the history of criticism and as documents of self-sufficient literary and intellectual interest. Usually offered every third year.
Paul Morrison or Laura Quinney

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ 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.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 172b African Literature and Human Rights
[ hum nw ]
Human rights have been central to thinking about Africa. What do we mean when we speak of human rights? Are we asserting a natural and universal equality among all people, regardless of race, class, gender, or geography? Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

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.
William Flesch

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.
John Plotz

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.
Paul Morrison

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.
Staff

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.
David Sherman

ENG 181a Making Sex, Performing Gender
[ hum ]
Recommended preparation: An introductory course in gender/sexuality and/or a course in critical theory.
Gender and sexuality studied as sets of performed traits and cues for interactions among social actors. Readings explore the possibility that differently organized gender and sexual practices are possible for men and women. Usually offered every third year.
Thomas King

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.
Ramie Targoff and Jonathan Unglaub

ENG 186a The Literature of Objects
[ djw hum ]
Foregrounds material objects in world literature from John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) onwards. What do things do and mean in novels, short stories, plays, poems and films? And how might attention to the materiality and even agency of things square with the historical legacy of dehumanization that has produced the putatively less-than-human figures of the enslaved, the dispossessed, the othered and the “freak?” Usually offered every fourth year.
Joshua Williams

ENG 188b Capitalism and Culture
[ hum oc ]
How does capitalism influence the culture of advanced economies? How are the arts, dreams, and everyday lives of capitalist cultures organized? What traces of pre- or non-capitalist cultures survive? When, if at all, do we imagine worlds after capitalism? Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

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.
Staff

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.
Thomas King

ENG 213a Milton
Considers the writings of John Milton in terms of the revolutionary world of mid-seventeenth century England. We will focus on Milton's active engagement in political and religious controversy, as well as his extraordinary innovations as a poet. Works to be read include major poems and prose. Usually offered every third year.
William Flesch or Ramie Targoff

ENG 216b The James Siblings
Focuses on the powerful and competing ideas of human nature and social interaction that Henry, William and Alice James articulated and embodied, in their writing considered on its own and in the intense familial interaction that so affected their thinking. Works may include Ivy Tower and Sacred Font. Usually offered every third year.
William Flesch

ENG 220a Poetry and Philosophy
Studies the interrelations of poetry and philosophy, from Plato to the present day. Usually offered every fourth year.
Laura Quinney

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.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 227a Studies in Modernism
An exploration of the concept of the modern through an intensive reading of The Waste Land, Ulysses, Between the Acts, and Endgame. Usually offered every third year.
Paul Morrison

ENG 229a The Orlando Project
Explores the uses of pastoral in queer literary history and for a queered understanding of selfhood. Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography guides a survey of English pastoral, queer and postcolonial literary criticism, and feminist and queer ecocriticism. Pondering the nature and capacities of poetry, gendered selfhood, erotic desire, and even Nature itself, Orlando canvasses the history of English literature and criticism from the age of Shakespeare to that of Freud. Usually offered every third year.
Thomas King

ENG 230a Realism
An intensive study of literary realism. Students will trace how critics and authors have defined realism, and explore its vexed history in relation to naturalism and modernism. Readings will consider contemporary debates around peripheral realisms and the future of realism. Usually offered every third year.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 237a Reading the Black Transnation
Fiction, theory, film of what is variously termed the African Diaspora or the Black Atlantic. Acquaints students with major and lesser-known figures, concepts, and strategies. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

ENG 238a Capitalism and the American Novel
How does American fiction envision the processes, conflicts, and ideologies associated with capitalism? These topics have had a major presence in the American novel since before independence, but they took hold with particular force during the rapid industrialization of the late nineteenth century as well as the crises of the 1930s and the turn to financial capitalism in the 1970s and 80s, and they continue to preoccupy many of the most important American novelists today. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

ENG 240a Genre, Form, Mode: Problems of Aesthetic Classification
Have recent theoretical accounts of aesthetic form and mode made the category of genre superfluous? Do recent quantitative methods undermine or complement qualitative approaches both historical (New Historicism) and hermeneutic (close reading)? Studies the benefits and implications of various ways literature has been, taxonomized, classified, and historically contextualized. Test cases for that exploration will largely though not exclusively be drawn from satirical, comical, humorous and farcical works, from Jonathan Swift forward. Usually offered every third year.
John Plotz

ENG 243a Women and the Renaissance
Explores women's writing in the Renaissance. Although the primary focus will be on England, texts will also be read in translation from Italy and France. Both published works and private diaries and letters will be examined. Usually offered every third year.
Ramie Targoff

ENG 246a Race and Reaction: Writing Reconstruction after the Civil War
The struggle for racial equality during and after the Reconstruction period. What are the measures of social or political equality? What powers can public institutions use to secure them? What are the cultural conditions under which struggles about equality are waged? Studies texts from both sides of the political divide, and from different racial perspectives. Students will also gain some familiarity with the historical scholarship about the period. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt

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.
Jerome Tharaud

ENG 248a Environmental Humanities
How do humanists contribute to knowledge of the natural environment? How do environmental questions disrupt conventional understandings of the human? These paired questions form the spine of this seminar, although we will also build outward to topic such as the history of the nature concept, critical science studies, and animal rights, relations between environmental justice and deep ecology, and other related themes. Usually offered every fourth year.
Caren Irr

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.
Dorothy Kim

ENG 250a Religion and Literature
Surveys issues and methods in the interdisciplinary study of literature and religion, focusing on American literary and cultural studies. Key themes include lived religion, theories of sacred space, secularization theory, and literary apocalypticism. Authors include Cather, Black Elk, John Marrant, Stowe, Nat Turner, Thoreau, and Twain. Usually offered every third year.
Jerome Tharaud

ENG 250b Film Theory
Introduces the theoretical principles that structure the production and reception of film. We will pay particular attention to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Usually offered every third year.
Paul Morrison

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.
Caren Irr

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.
Dorothy Kim

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.
David Sherman

ENG 261a Classroom Pedagogy and the 'New Mainstream': Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Explores theory and research on pedagogy, focusing on educational tactics that advance social justice. Examines higher education tactics that seek social transformation by better reaching members of historically marginalized groups—students who make up the new mainstream. Usually offered every third year.
Joshua Lederman

ENG 298a Independent Study
Staff

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.
Staff

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.
Staff

ENG 352a Directed Research
Specific sections for individual faculty members as requested. Permission of the director of graduate studies required.
Staff

ENG 352b Directed Research
Staff

ENG 360c Article Publication Proseminar
Yields half-course credit per semester. Offered exclusively on a credit/no-credit basis. May be repeated for credit.
Focuses on scholarly journal publication, encompassing various aspects of the process. Usually offered every year.
Staff

ENG 402d Dissertation Research
Specific sections for individual faculty members as requested.
Staff

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.
Staff

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

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.
Staff

COML 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.
Laura Quinney

COML/ENG 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.
Laura Quinney

COML/ENG 191a Environmental Aesthetics
[ djw hum oc ]
Explores major schools of thought about nature, ecology, and art. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

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.
William Flesch

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

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

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.
William Flesch

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.
Paul Morrison

ENG 110b The Great American Picture Book
[ hum ]
The Great American Picture Book: Contemporary consumers and citizens are constantly bombarded by words and images designed to shape how we think, feel, and act. This course explores the history and theory of American “imagetexts,” multimedia works that combine pictures and words to simulate the real thing, whether the abundance of New World nature, New York’s immigrant neighborhoods, or “vanishing” Native American cultures. We trace the phenomenon from Audubon’s Birds of America to the graphic novel. Usually offered every third year.
Jerome Tharaud

ENG 111aj Narrative Theory
[ hum ]
Explores fundamental concepts in narrative theory and narratology, from Aristotle until today. We will consider the formal features of plots, characters, and narrative discourse. And we will read theoretical accounts of the role that narrative plays in personal identity, community belonging, moral judgment, historical knowledge, and political authority. As a prominent body of scholarship within literary studies, narrative theory offers insights into a fundamental way in which we organize our experiences and make sense of our world. Offered as part of JBS program.
David Sherman

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.
Joshua Williams

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.
Paul Morrison

ENG 131a Comedy: Literature, Film, and Theory
[ hum ]
Explores comedy as an enigma at the heart of social belonging, psychological coherence, and philosophical speculation. Investigates the strangeness of human laughter. Compares comic literary and film genres in different historical periods as a way to ask: what is the nature of comic pleasure? How does comedy organize desire and make sense of suffering? How are communities regulated by comedy, and how is comedy involved in social freedom? How are basic philosophical questions about minds and bodies illuminated by comedy? Texts by Chaplin, Shakespeare, Monty Python, Swift, Marx Brothers, Aristophanes, Wilde, and others. Usually offered every third year.
David Sherman

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.
Joshua Williams

ENG 133b Imagining Money: Literature and Economics from Barter to Bitcoin
[ hum ]
Money works because it is socially shared fiction; literature works because it has socially shared value. We will discuss the economics of literary experience: both literature about money (e.g. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Zola) and the picoeconomic game theory literature relies on. Usually offered every third year.
William Flesch

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.
Thomas King

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.
Thomas King

ENG 160a Digital Media and Culture
[ hum ]
Studies the history and development of digital media, with an emphasis on modes of literature and entertainment. We will examine the digital revolution's effect on such concepts as narrative, politics, aesthetics, identity, knowledge, and humanism. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

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.
David Sherman

ENG 171a The History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to Postmodernism
[ hum wi ]
Explores major documents in the history of criticism from Plato to the present. Texts will be read as representative moments in the history of criticism and as documents of self-sufficient literary and intellectual interest. Usually offered every third year.
Paul Morrison or Laura Quinney

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ 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.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 181a Making Sex, Performing Gender
[ hum ]
Recommended preparation: An introductory course in gender/sexuality and/or a course in critical theory.
Gender and sexuality studied as sets of performed traits and cues for interactions among social actors. Readings explore the possibility that differently organized gender and sexual practices are possible for men and women. Usually offered every third year.
Thomas King

ENG 188b Capitalism and Culture
[ hum oc ]
How does capitalism influence the culture of advanced economies? How are the arts, dreams, and everyday lives of capitalist cultures organized? What traces of pre- or non-capitalist cultures survive? When, if at all, do we imagine worlds after capitalism? Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

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.
William Flesch and Eli Hirsch

AAAS 134b Novel and Film of the African Diaspora
[ 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.
Faith Smith

AAAS/ENG 80a Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]
Formerly offered as ENG 80a.
Explores photography and Africans, African-Americans and Caribbean people, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This course will examine fiction that refers to the photograph; various photographic archives; and theorists on photography and looking. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

COML/ENG 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.
Caren Irr

ENG 14a Media Stories: Circulating Love, Hate, Revolution
[ dl hum ]
Examines the possibility that contemporary digital terminology and media theory may help explain how gossip, sentiment, love, news, and art circulated during an earlier transformative period in media history, the eighteenth century. Beginning with an explosion in the number of newspapers, novels, and political tracts, the period ends in a string of revolutions, fomented around human rights and new modes of governance. With an emphasis on race, gender, sexuality, and class, this course explores what earlier literary and practical texts may reveal about media technologies and communication. Special one-time offering, fall 2021.
Jenny Factor

ENG 17a Alternative and Underground Journalism
[ hum ]
A critical history of twentieth-century American journalism. Topics include the nature of journalistic objectivity, the style of underground and alternative periodicals, and the impact of new technologies on independent media. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

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.
Ulka Anjaria

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.
Paul Morrison

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.
Caren Irr

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.
Dorothy Kim

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.
William Flesch

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.
Emilie Diouf

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.
John Plotz

ENG 110b The Great American Picture Book
[ hum ]
The Great American Picture Book: Contemporary consumers and citizens are constantly bombarded by words and images designed to shape how we think, feel, and act. This course explores the history and theory of American “imagetexts,” multimedia works that combine pictures and words to simulate the real thing, whether the abundance of New World nature, New York’s immigrant neighborhoods, or “vanishing” Native American cultures. We trace the phenomenon from Audubon’s Birds of America to the graphic novel. Usually offered every third year.
Jerome Tharaud

ENG 120a Thirties Movies
[ 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.
William Flesch

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 third year.
Paul Morrison

ENG 143a The History of Mediascapes and Critical Maker Culture
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]
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, the girdle book, the wampum, pamphlets, zines, and wearable media technology. Usually offered every year.
Dorothy Kim

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.
Paul Morrison

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.
Thomas King

ENG 160a Digital Media and Culture
[ hum ]
Studies the history and development of digital media, with an emphasis on modes of literature and entertainment. We will examine the digital revolution's effect on such concepts as narrative, politics, aesthetics, identity, knowledge, and humanism. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

ENG 170a The Globalization of Nollywood
[ 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.
Emilie Diouf

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.
Paul Morrison

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.
David Sherman

AAAS 79b African American Literature of the Twentieth Century
[ hum ss ]
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.
Brandon Callender or Faith Smith

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.
Faith Smith

AAAS 133b The Literature of the Caribbean
[ hum nw ss wi ]
An exploration of the narrative strategies and themes of writers of the region who grapple with issues of colonialism, class, race, ethnicity, and gender in a context of often-conflicting allegiances to North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Usually offered every second year.
Faith Smith

AAAS 134b Novel and Film of the African Diaspora
[ 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.
Faith Smith

AAAS 164b Afrofuturism
[ ss ]
Analyzes the various ways in which African Diaspora cultural producers - writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers - use Afrofuturism to critique racial asymmetries in the present and to imagine as-yet-unrealized, free black futures. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AAAS/ENG 80a Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]
Formerly offered as ENG 80a.
Explores photography and Africans, African-Americans and Caribbean people, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This course will examine fiction that refers to the photograph; various photographic archives; and theorists on photography and looking. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

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.
Staff

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.
Staff

CLAS/ENG 153b Race Before Race: Premodern Critical Race Studies
[ deis-us djw dl hum wi ]
Provides an introduction to ancient and medieval attitudes towards race and ethnicity through the theoretical lens of premodern critical race studies. Special one-time offering, fall 2020.
Caitlin Gillespie and Dorothy Kim

COML 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.
David Sherman

ENG 12b Literature of the Pacific Rim
[ hum ]
The Pacific is vast, remote, and mysterious—or is it? By reading fictional and artistic works from twentieth and twenty-first century East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Americas, this course will explore how the geographically remote regions of the Pacific have interacted closely with each other in historical, economic, and political relations and how such interactions allow us to envision a just and ethical global future. Themes covered will include racial dynamics, war, capitalism, and the environment in relation to the geopolitical relations surrounding the Pacific. Special one-time offering, spring 2022.
Nayoung Kim

ENG 15b Black Joy
[ 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.
Brandon Callender

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.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 22b Asian American Literature
[ 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. Major authors include Julie Otzuka, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-Rae Lee, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Usually offered every fourth year.
Howie Tam

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.
Ulka Anjaria

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.
Dorothy Kim

ENG 42a Blackness and Horror
[ deis-us djw hum ]
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.
Brandon Callender

ENG 48b The Black Fantastic
[ deis-us hum ]
What is the "fantastic" and how does its definition shift when preceded by the adjective "black"? How do black authors use fantastic forms to not only tell "truths" unavailable in "realistic" narratives, but to imagine freer futures? Usually offered every third year.
Gabrielle Everett

ENG 52a Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
[ hum nw ]
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.
Emilie Diouf

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.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 66b Contemporary Global Dystopias
[ hum wi ]
Explores the sources, moods, and effects of dystopian fiction from around the world. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

ENG 68b Race, Colonialism, and Modernism
[ djw hum wi ]
A critical introduction to the ever-expanding field of modernist studies. We will read canonical modernists along with writers from Black America, the Caribbean, and Africa to explore the convergence of race, colonialism, and modernism. We will examine what has been silenced and left behind in the modernist compulsion to “make it new” and highlight the contributions of writers across the black diaspora to the ongoing debates about modernism and modernity. The aim is to rethink the canon of modernism critically and explore different implications of the modern from a global perspective. Special one-time offering, spring 2021.
Chih-Chien Hsieh

ENG 72a The Caribbean's Asias: Asian Migration & Heritage in the Caribbean
[ dl hum nw ]
Studies fiction and theory by and about Caribbean people of South Asian origin, and Caribbean people of Chinese origin from the late nineteenth century to the present. Examines how they have been implicated in discussions of nationalism, hybridity, diaspora, and neoliberalism. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

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.
Brandon Callender

ENG 107a Women Writing Desire: Caribbean Fiction and Film
[ hum ]
About eight novels of the last two decades (by Cliff, Cruz, Danticat, Garcia, Kempadoo, Kincaid, Mittoo, Nunez, Pineau, Powell, or Rosario), drawn from across the region, and read in dialogue with popular culture, theory, and earlier generations of male and female writers of the region. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

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.
Joshua Williams

ENG 117a The Harlem Renaissance
[ deis-us hum ]
Examines the explosive artistic, political, and cultural period known as the Harlem Renaissance. A major movement in African American literature, the Harlem Renaissance sought to redefine American blackness and establish artistic freedom. Usually offered every third year.
Gabrielle Everett

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.
Ulka Anjaria

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.
Faith Smith

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.
Joshua Williams

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.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 138b Toni Morrison
[ hum ]
An advanced introduction to the oeuvre of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. Reading her novels and nonfiction, we investigate concerns that shaped our world in the last century and haunt the current one, foregrounding Morrison's writing as a key site of trouble and of transformation. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

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.
Brandon Callender

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.
Dorothy Kim

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.
Dorothy Kim

ENG 152a Indian Love Stories
[ djw 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.
Ulka Anjaria

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.
Faith Smith

ENG 170a The Globalization of Nollywood
[ 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.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ 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.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 172b African Literature and Human Rights
[ hum nw ]
Human rights have been central to thinking about Africa. What do we mean when we speak of human rights? Are we asserting a natural and universal equality among all people, regardless of race, class, gender, or geography? Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 186a The Literature of Objects
[ djw hum ]
Foregrounds material objects in world literature from John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) onwards. What do things do and mean in novels, short stories, plays, poems and films? And how might attention to the materiality and even agency of things square with the historical legacy of dehumanization that has produced the putatively less-than-human figures of the enslaved, the dispossessed, the othered and the “freak?” Usually offered every fourth year.
Joshua Williams

CLAS/ENG 153b Race Before Race: Premodern Critical Race Studies
[ deis-us djw dl hum wi ]
Provides an introduction to ancient and medieval attitudes towards race and ethnicity through the theoretical lens of premodern critical race studies. Special one-time offering, fall 2020.
Caitlin Gillespie and Dorothy Kim

COML/ENG 149a Dante's Hell and Its Legacy
[ 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.
Laura Quinney

COML/HUM 21a Renaissance Literary Masterpieces
[ hum ]
Introduces students to some of the greatest works written in Europe during the Renaissance. Readings will include works by Dante, Petrarch, Michelangelo, Luther, Erasmus, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Rabelais, and Cervantes. All readings will be in English. Usually taught every third year.
Ramie Targoff

ENG 14a Media Stories: Circulating Love, Hate, Revolution
[ dl hum ]
Examines the possibility that contemporary digital terminology and media theory may help explain how gossip, sentiment, love, news, and art circulated during an earlier transformative period in media history, the eighteenth century. Beginning with an explosion in the number of newspapers, novels, and political tracts, the period ends in a string of revolutions, fomented around human rights and new modes of governance. With an emphasis on race, gender, sexuality, and class, this course explores what earlier literary and practical texts may reveal about media technologies and communication. Special one-time offering, fall 2021.
Jenny Factor

ENG 28b Queer Readings: Before Stonewall
[ hum ]
Students read texts as artifacts of social beliefs, desires, and anxieties about sexed bodies and their pleasures. Readings may include Plato, Virgil, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Phillips, Behn, Gray, Tennyson, Lister, Whitman, Dickinson, Wilde, Freud, Woolf, Barnes, Stein, Larsen, Genet, and Baldwin. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas King

ENG 32b Chaucer I
[ hum ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 132b in prior years.
In addition to reading Chaucer's major work The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, pays special attention to situating the Tales in relation to linguistic, literary, and social developments of the later Middle Ages. No previous knowledge of Middle English required. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

ENG 33a Shakespeare
[ hum ]
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.
William Flesch or Ramie Targoff

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.
John Plotz

ENG 43b Medieval Play: Drama, LARP, and Video Games
[ 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.
Dorothy Kim

ENG 50a Love Poetry from Sappho to Neruda
[ hum ]
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.
Ramie Targoff

ENG 54b Encountering the Other: "Savages," Monsters, and the Doubles in Modern English Literature
[ hum ]
Examines the representation of the Other in modern literature and film, with a focus on eighteenth-century British literature. Asks questions about the definition of the human, race, gender, and power. Special one-time offering, spring 2020.
Haram Lee

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.
Tom King

ENG 73a Witchcraft and Magic in the Renaissance
[ hum ]
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.
Staff

ENG 84a Nostalgia, Clutter, and Decay: Marking Time in the Enlightenment
[ hum ]
Offers undergraduates the opportunity to consider the many ways of knowing time as presented in various eighteenth-century English texts. We will consider multiple literary forms—poetry, novel, the familiar letter, philosophical essay—for their ability to provide compelling examinations into how historical and literary subjects mark time, and how that epistemology connects to issues of historiography and nationalism. Special one-time offering, spring 2019.
Sarabeth Grant

ENG 104a Eighteenth-Century British Poetry, from Dryden to Blake
[ hum ]
The major British poets of the 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.
William Flesch

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.
Laura Quinney

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.
Thomas King

ENG 133a Advanced Shakespeare
[ hum wi ]
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.
William Flesch and Thomas King

ENG 133b Imagining Money: Literature and Economics from Barter to Bitcoin
[ hum ]
Money works because it is socially shared fiction; literature works because it has socially shared value. We will discuss the economics of literary experience: both literature about money (e.g. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Zola) and the picoeconomic game theory literature relies on. Usually offered every third year.
William Flesch

ENG 134b Subjectivity
[ hum ]
Studies how the experience of subjectivity and selfhood is represented in literature and philosophy of the early modern period, primarily in Britain. Authors include Renaissance lyric poets, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Blake, with philosophical texts by Descartes, Pascal, Locke, Hume, and Kant. Usually offered third year.
Laura Quinney

ENG 143a The History of Mediascapes and Critical Maker Culture
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]
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, the girdle book, the wampum, pamphlets, zines, and wearable media technology. Usually offered every year.
Dorothy Kim

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.
Dorothy Kim

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.
Dorothy Kim

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.
Thomas King

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.
Jerome Tharaud

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.
Staff

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.
Staff

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

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.
Jerome Tharaud

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.
William Flesch

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.
Ramie Targoff and Jonathan Unglaub

AAAS 79b African American Literature of the Twentieth Century
[ hum ss ]
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.
Brandon Callender or Faith Smith

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.
Faith Smith

AAAS 133b The Literature of the Caribbean
[ hum nw ss wi ]
An exploration of the narrative strategies and themes of writers of the region who grapple with issues of colonialism, class, race, ethnicity, and gender in a context of often-conflicting allegiances to North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Usually offered every second year.
Faith Smith

AAAS 164b Afrofuturism
[ ss ]
Analyzes the various ways in which African Diaspora cultural producers - writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers - use Afrofuturism to critique racial asymmetries in the present and to imagine as-yet-unrealized, free black futures. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AAAS/ENG 80a Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]
Formerly offered as ENG 80a.
Explores photography and Africans, African-Americans and Caribbean people, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This course will examine fiction that refers to the photograph; various photographic archives; and theorists on photography and looking. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

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.
Jerome Tharaud

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.
John Burt

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.
Staff

COML 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.
David Sherman

COML/ENG 148a Fiction of the Second World War
[ hum wi ]
Studies novels of the Second World War from Great Britain, France, Germany, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan (all readings in English). Usually offered every fourth year.
John Burt

ENG 1a Introduction to Literary Studies
[ hum ]
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.
Staff

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.
Jerome Tharaud

ENG 7a American Literature from 1900 to 2000
[ hum wi ]
Focuses on literature and cultural and historical politics of major authors. Prose and poetry. May include Eliot, Frost, Williams, Moore, Himes, Cather, and Faulkner as well as contemporary authors. Usually offered every second year.
John Burt or Caren Irr

ENG 12b Literature of the Pacific Rim
[ hum ]
The Pacific is vast, remote, and mysterious—or is it? By reading fictional and artistic works from twentieth and twenty-first century East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Americas, this course will explore how the geographically remote regions of the Pacific have interacted closely with each other in historical, economic, and political relations and how such interactions allow us to envision a just and ethical global future. Themes covered will include racial dynamics, war, capitalism, and the environment in relation to the geopolitical relations surrounding the Pacific. Special one-time offering, spring 2022.
Nayoung Kim

ENG 15b Black Joy
[ 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.
Brandon Callender

ENG 17a Alternative and Underground Journalism
[ hum ]
A critical history of twentieth-century American journalism. Topics include the nature of journalistic objectivity, the style of underground and alternative periodicals, and the impact of new technologies on independent media. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

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.
John Plotz

ENG 21a Young Adult Literature
[ hum ]
Literature for adolescents can't afford any self-indulgences: its audience is too impatient. So it's a great place to see what's essential to storytelling. Authors may include Shelley, Twain, Salinger, Pullman, and Rowling, whom we'll use to test basic narrative theory. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

ENG 22b Asian American Literature
[ 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. Major authors include Julie Otzuka, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-Rae Lee, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Usually offered every fourth year.
Howie Tam

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.
Caren Irr or Jerome Tharaud

ENG 31b Rethinking the Gay Bar: Queer Utopias from Stonewall to Pulse
[ hum ]
Identifies genre in LGBT literature, history and theory. Pays special attention to literary and artistic experimentation in representing LGBT spaces. Authors may include Leslie Feinberg, Michel Foucault, José Esteban Muñoz, Audre Lorde, Martin Duberman, Terrance Hayes, and Samuel R. Delany. Special one-time offering, spring 2019.
Brenden O'Donnell

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.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 35b Women's Friendship (and More) in Nineteenth-century Literature
[ hum ]
While many people think nineteenth-century fiction is all about marriage, other relationships are equally important. This course will focus on intimate relationships between women, including friendship, sisterhood, and queer romance, in authors including Austen, Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Oliphant, and Levy. Special one-time offering, spring 2020.
Abigail Arnold

ENG 37b Modern Drama: Theatres of Rupture, Resistance, and Engagement
[ hum ]
How did theatre artists take “the modern” as a goal to be realized in the future and a crisis to be managed in the present? Playwrights include Ibsen, Wilde, Chekhov, Shaw, Synge, Glaspell, Brecht, Williams, Beckett, Pinter, Fugard, Fornes, Hwang, Churchill, Kushner, and Parks. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King

ENG 38a Fantasy Worlds: From Lilliput and Middle Earth to LARPs
[ hum ]
Fantasy is as old as Gilgamesh, as new as Harry Potter; appleaing to both young and old readers as few other genres do. We explore its historical roots in satires like Gulliver's Travels, its modern rebirth in Narnia, Middle Earth, Le Guin's Earthsea, as well as on film. Also explores recent participatory fantasy realms, including online gaming and live action role-playing. Usually offered every third year.
John Plotz

ENG 40bj The Birth of the Short Story
[ hum wi ]
How did the genre of the short story emerge and what distinctive work has it performed in its long and protean history? What unique publication and reading practices have been a part of this history? And why does the short story still matter? With a focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers such as Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Chekhov, Mansfield, Hemingway, O’Connor, García Márquez, Johnson, Wallace, and Moore, we will work through the techniques and craft that have defined the short story tradition. And we will consider recent experiments in short stories, mapping where the genre is going next. Offered as part of JBS program.
David Sherman

ENG 42a Blackness and Horror
[ deis-us djw hum ]
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.
Brandon Callender

ENG 42b Animals and Literature
[ hum ]
Explores the role that non-human animals play in world literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Thinking with animals provides a unique vantage onto pressing contemporary issues like climate change, colonialism and its afterlives, the politics of meat-eating, race and racialization, the nature of language, and more. Usually offered every third year.
Joshua Williams

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.
John Burt

ENG 48b The Black Fantastic
[ deis-us hum ]
What is the "fantastic" and how does its definition shift when preceded by the adjective "black"? How do black authors use fantastic forms to not only tell "truths" unavailable in "realistic" narratives, but to imagine freer futures? Usually offered every third year.
Gabrielle Everett

ENG 52a Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
[ hum nw ]
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.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 58a Literature and Medicine
[ dl hum wi ]
How has literature grappled with illness, healing, and the patient-doctor encounter? How can poetry and storytelling communicate with experience of bodily pain--and how does the body seek to communicate its suffering without language? We examine literary responses to the body's biological vulnerabilities, and seek to contextualize the vulnerable body within the cultural and political fields that shape medical knowledge and practice. Readings in fiction, poetry, essay, and drama will suggest the art, or craftsmanship, involved in the healing sciences, as well as the diagnostic nature of literary criticism. Reading for new approaches, generated by the literary imagination, to controversial issues in medical ethics. Usually offered every third year.
David Sherman

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.
David Sherman

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.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 66b Contemporary Global Dystopias
[ hum wi ]
Explores the sources, moods, and effects of dystopian fiction from around the world. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

ENG 67b Modern Poetry
[ hum ]
A course on the major poets of the twentieth century. Usually offered every third year.
Paul Morrison

ENG 68b Race, Colonialism, and Modernism
[ djw hum wi ]
A critical introduction to the ever-expanding field of modernist studies. We will read canonical modernists along with writers from Black America, the Caribbean, and Africa to explore the convergence of race, colonialism, and modernism. We will examine what has been silenced and left behind in the modernist compulsion to “make it new” and highlight the contributions of writers across the black diaspora to the ongoing debates about modernism and modernity. The aim is to rethink the canon of modernism critically and explore different implications of the modern from a global perspective. Special one-time offering, spring 2021.
Chih-Chien Hsieh

ENG 72a The Caribbean's Asias: Asian Migration & Heritage in the Caribbean
[ dl hum nw ]
Studies fiction and theory by and about Caribbean people of South Asian origin, and Caribbean people of Chinese origin from the late nineteenth century to the present. Examines how they have been implicated in discussions of nationalism, hybridity, diaspora, and neoliberalism. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

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.
John Plotz

ENG 76a American Urban Literature
[ hum ]
Explores urban spaces as they are made, evoked, and discussed in literature and art. Of special interest will be the intersection between urban spatial design and the social interactions of urban inhabitants. Texts will primarily be drawn from western anglophone works of the 20th century and will include novel, poetry, short story, essay, theater, and film. Special one-time offering, fall 2021.
Sarah Perkins

ENG 78a Virginia Woolf
[ hum ]
An immersion in Woolf's astonishing body of writing. How did her fiction and non-fiction re-imagine the self in the changing social worlds of the early twentieth century? How did her experiments with narrative open new understandings of gender, sexuality, war, the knowing subject, the dimensions of space and time. A chronological survey of her diverse forms of writing that energized, all at once, modernist aesthetics, feminist politics, and philosophical speculation. Usually offered every third year.
David Sherman

ENG 87b Queer Readings: Beyond Stonewall
[ hum ]
How have LGBTQ writers explored the consolidation, diaspora, and contestation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer personhoods since the 1960s? Texts include fiction, poetry, drama, memoirs, and film. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas King

ENG 88b Rednecks, Hillbillies, and White Trash: Literature and Culture of the "Deplorables"
[ hum ]
Examines cultural, historical, and theoretical material by/about poor white people. Defines whiteness as a socially constructed and economic incorporated entity to consider the deep entanglement of race and class in American culture. Analyzes literature, television, film, and new media. Special one-time offering, spring 2019.
Courtney Miller

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.
Paul Morrison

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.
Brandon Callender

ENG 105b After Jane Austen: Sex, Death, and Fiction
[ hum wi ]
Focuses on Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad. Explores the relationship between the novel, the era's most popular culture, and our own popular culture. It examines desire, concealment, sex, and romance, as well as the role that literature plays in creating and upsetting communities, defining racial and ethnic categories. Film screenings. Usually offered every third year.
John Plotz

ENG 107a Women Writing Desire: Caribbean Fiction and Film
[ hum ]
About eight novels of the last two decades (by Cliff, Cruz, Danticat, Garcia, Kempadoo, Kincaid, Mittoo, Nunez, Pineau, Powell, or Rosario), drawn from across the region, and read in dialogue with popular culture, theory, and earlier generations of male and female writers of the region. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

ENG 107b Literary Witnessing and the Poetics of Memory
[ hum wi ]
Investigation of the memorial function of modern literature as a response to historical trauma. How is the present haunted by the past; how is literature haunted by the dead? Historical contexts are primarily slavery in the Americas and European genocides. Readings will include theoretical and philosophical considerations of the role of the witness, collective memory, and historical evidence. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

ENG 110b The Great American Picture Book
[ hum ]
The Great American Picture Book: Contemporary consumers and citizens are constantly bombarded by words and images designed to shape how we think, feel, and act. This course explores the history and theory of American “imagetexts,” multimedia works that combine pictures and words to simulate the real thing, whether the abundance of New World nature, New York’s immigrant neighborhoods, or “vanishing” Native American cultures. We trace the phenomenon from Audubon’s Birds of America to the graphic novel. Usually offered every third year.
Jerome Tharaud

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.
Joshua Williams

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.
John Burt

ENG 117a The Harlem Renaissance
[ deis-us hum ]
Examines the explosive artistic, political, and cultural period known as the Harlem Renaissance. A major movement in African American literature, the Harlem Renaissance sought to redefine American blackness and establish artistic freedom. Usually offered every third year.
Gabrielle Everett

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.
John Burt

ENG 125a Romanticism I: Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
[ hum ]
Examines the major poetry and some prose by the first generation of English Romantic poets who may be said to have defined Romanticism and set the tone for the last two centuries of English literature. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt or Laura Quinney

ENG 125b Romanticism II: Byron, Shelley, and Keats
[ hum ]
The "younger generation" of Romantic poets. Byron, Shelley, and Keats continue and react against poetic, political, and philosophical preoccupations and positions of their immediate elders. Examines their major works, as well as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt, William Flesch, or Laura Quinney

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.
David Sherman

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.
Ulka Anjaria

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.
Faith Smith

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.
Jerome Tharaud

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.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 138b Toni Morrison
[ hum ]
An advanced introduction to the oeuvre of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. Reading her novels and nonfiction, we investigate concerns that shaped our world in the last century and haunt the current one, foregrounding Morrison's writing as a key site of trouble and of transformation. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

ENG 140a American War Novels of the 20th Century
[ hum wi ]
Studies classic war novels of the 20th and 21st century, from Hemingway, Heller, and O'Brien through recent novels by Jin, Benedict and Vollman. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt

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.
Brandon Callender

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.
Laura Quinney

ENG 148a Inventing Farewell: A Practicum on Elegy
[ hum ]
Every modern generation re-invents its relation to the dead. This course explores recent experiments in poetic elegy that construct the presence of the dead and work through loss. We'll approach this writing in close conversation with other sorts of innovations in mourning and memorial work, including emerging commemorative rituals, mortuary practices, funerary architecture, historical monuments, and cemetery design. In the experiential, creative component of this course, students will research local memorial acts and commemorative spaces in order to design their own. Usually offered every third year.
David Sherman

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.
John Plotz

ENG 152a Indian Love Stories
[ djw 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.
Ulka Anjaria

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.
Laura Quinney

ENG 156b When Genius is a Family Affair: Henry, William, and Alice James
[ hum ]
Focuses on William, Henry, and Alice James, and on the different ways they approach the representation of human interaction, thought, perception, and suffering in their novels, philosophical essays, and diary. Pays particular attention to their intellectual and aesthetic contexts. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

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.
David Sherman

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.
Staff

ENG 166a Writing Reconstruction: Race and Reaction after the Civil War
[ hum ]
Examines the struggle for racial equality during and after the Reconstruction period. What are the measures of social or political equality? What powers can public institutions use to secure them? What are the cultural conditions under which struggles about equality are waged? Includes texts from both sides of the political divide, and from different racial perspectives. Students will also gain some familiarity with the historical scholarship about the period. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt

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.
John Burt

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.
Faith Smith

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.
Thomas King

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ 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.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 172b African Literature and Human Rights
[ hum nw ]
Human rights have been central to thinking about Africa. What do we mean when we speak of human rights? Are we asserting a natural and universal equality among all people, regardless of race, class, gender, or geography? Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

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.
John Plotz

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.
Staff

ENG 186a The Literature of Objects
[ djw hum ]
Foregrounds material objects in world literature from John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) onwards. What do things do and mean in novels, short stories, plays, poems and films? And how might attention to the materiality and even agency of things square with the historical legacy of dehumanization that has produced the putatively less-than-human figures of the enslaved, the dispossessed, the othered and the “freak?” Usually offered every fourth year.
Joshua Williams

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.
Visiting Writer

ENG 19b The Autobiographical Imagination: Creative Nonfiction Workshop
[ hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing, preferably four to seven pages. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within registration periods.
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.
Staff

ENG 79a Screenwriting Workshop: Beginning Screenplay
[ dl hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. 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 third year.
Marc Weinberg

ENG 109a Poetry Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. 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.
Elizabeth Bradfield or Visiting Writer

ENG 109b Fiction Workshop: Short Fiction
[ hum oc wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. 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.
Stephen McCauley or Visiting Writer

ENG 119a Fiction Workshop
[ hum oc wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit.
An advanced fiction workshop for students primarily interested in the short story. Students are expected to compose and revise three stories, complete typed critiques of each other's work weekly, and discuss readings based on examples of various techniques. Usually offered every year.
Stephen McCauley or Visiting Writer

ENG 119b Poetry Workshop: Special Topics in Poetry
[ dl hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. 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.
Elizabeth Bradfield or Visiting Poet

ENG 129a Creative Nonfiction Workshop
[ hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. 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.
Visiting Writer

ENG 139a Publishing Workshop: Literary Editing and Publishing
[ dl hum oc ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of an introductory letter including student's major, writing/editing experience, why publishing is of interest to them, any experimental literary publications/performances they've experienced. This course fulfills a workshop requirement for the Creative Writing major and minor. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within the Registration periods.
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.
Elizabeth Bradfield

ENG 139b Screenwriting Workshop: Intermediate Screenwriting
[ hum oc wi ]
Prerequisites: ENG 79a. Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. 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 second year.
Marc Weinberg

ENG 149a Screenwriting Workshop: Writing for Television
[ dl hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. 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 second year.
Marc Weinberg

ENG 159a Screenwriting Workshop: The Short Film and the Web Series
[ hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit.
Introduces writing and producing of short films for independent production. In this class we will also discuss writing for formats including a YouTube or Vimeo narrative series, IGTV narrative series and other independent production platforms. Topics will include introduction to screenwriting, script format, loglines, pitch pages, beat sheets & outlines, short form structure, and the planning involved in pre-production. Usually offered every year.
Paloma Valenzuela

ENG 169a Eco-Writing Workshop
[ hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information.
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.
Elizabeth Bradfield

THA 71a Playwriting
[ ca wi ]
Prerequisite: THA 10a or permission of the instructor.
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.
Ryan McKittrick

ENG 96d Senior Creative Writing Thesis
Required for creative writing majors fulfilling the thesis option. Usually offered every year.
Staff

ENG 98a Independent Study
Usually offered every year.
Staff

ENG 98b Independent Study
Usually offered every year.
Staff

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.
Staff

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.
Staff

ENG 99d The Senior Honors Thesis
For seniors interested in qualifying for departmental honors with a thesis. Usually offered every year.
Staff

AAPI 142a The War in Vietnam in Literature and Film
[ djw hum ]
What we have come to call the Vietnam 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 American literary texts and films from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. All course materials are in English; no Vietnamese language knowledge is required. Special one-time offering, fall 2021.
Howie Tam

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.
Thomas Doherty

COML 122b Writing Home and Abroad: Literature by Women of Color
[ hum nw ]
Examines literature (prose, poetry, and memoirs) written by women of color across a wide spectrum of geographical and cultural sites. Literature written within the confines of the "home country" in the vernacular, as well as in English in immigrant locales, is read. The intersections of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and class as contained by the larger institutions of government, religion, nationalism, and sectarian politics are examined. Usually offered every third year.
Harleen Singh

COML 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.
Stephen Dowden

COML 185a Dickens and Dostoevsky
[ hum ]
Considers such issues as narrative, literary realism, and the manipulation of the grotesque and the sublime in representative works of Dickens and Dostoevsky. Because Dostoevsky was an avid reader of Dickens, class addresses questions of influence, particularly with regard to their shared thematic interests. Usually offered every second year.
Robin Feuer Miller

COML/REC 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.
Robin Feuer Miller

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.
Stephen Dowden

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.
Sabine von Mering

HISP 85a Introduction to U.S. Latinx Literatures and Cultures
[ deis-us djw dl hum ]
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.” Taught in English. Usually offered every year.
María J. Durán

HISP 120b Don Quixote
[ hum ]
Taught in English.
Don Quixote is: a) a compendium of prior literary genres; b) the first modern novel; c) a funny book; d) a deep meditation on the human condition; e) the best novel ever written; f) all of the above. Usually offered every second year.
James Mandrell

HISP 152b Monsters, Creatures, and Cyborgs in Latin/x American Cinema, Fiction, and BioArt
[ hum nw ]
Taught in English.
Explores posthuman and creaturely life in monster films, science fiction, and bioart created by Latin American and Latinx artists. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which the non- and post-human emerges as a space in which artists wrestle with otherness, identity, racial capitalism, and the rise of new technologies. Usually offered every second year.
Jerónimo Arellano

HISP 158a Latina Feminisms
[ deis-us djw hum ]
Taught 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.
María J. Durán

HISP 178b Latinx Futurisms
[ deis-us djw hum ]
Examines critical theory about and cultural productions of Latinx futurisms. Engaging with Latinx speculative and science fiction aesthetics, it will explore questions of race, ethnicity, citizenship, immigration, gender, and sexuality, among other sociopolitical issues. Special one-time offering, spring 2020.
Maria Duran

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 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 third year.
Deborah Garnick

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.
Ellen Kellman

RECS 154a The Art of Vladimir Nabokov
[ 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. Usually offered every second year.
David Powelstock

SAS 101a Women Writers from South Asia
[ hum nw ]
Includes literature by South Asian women writers such as Amrita Pritam, Ismat Chugtai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kamila Shamsie, Tahmina Anam, and Chandini Lokuge. Some of the works were originally written in English, while others have been translated from the vernacular. Usually offered every second year.
Harleen Singh

SAS 110b New Nations, New Stories: Postcolonial Literature
[ hum nw ]
Examines the postcolonial novel written in English within the shared history of colonialism, specifically British imperialism, for South Asia. Writers include R.K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Mohsin Hamid, Romesh Gunesekera and Daniyal Mueenudin. Usually offered every second year.
Harleen Singh

SAS 130a Film and Fiction of Crisis
[ hum nw ]
Examines novels and films as a response to some pivotal crisis in South Asia: Independence and Partition, Communal Riots, Insurgency and Terrorism. We will read and analyze texts from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka in an effort to examine how these moments of crisis have affected literary and cinematic form while also paying close attention to how they contest or support the narrative of the unified nation. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Singh

SAS 140a We Who Are at Home Everywhere: Narratives from the South Asian Diaspora
[ hum ]
Looks at narratives from various locations of the South Asian Diaspora, while paying close attention to the emergence of an immigrant South Asian public culture. Examines novels, poetry, short stories, film, and music in order to further an understanding of South Asian immigrant culture. Usually offered every third year.
Harleen Singh

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.
Arthur Holmberg

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.
Arthur Holmberg

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.
Arthur Holmberg

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.
Arthur Holmberg

THA 142b Women Playwrights: Writing for the Stage by and about Women
[ ca deis-us wi ]
Introduces the world of female playwrights. This course will engage the texts through common themes explored by female 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.
Adrianne Krstansky

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.
Dmitry Troyanovsky

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.
Harleen Singh