Click below to see course offerings for the English Department.
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Students learn how to read and write about literature, media, and culture within their historical contexts. Students will be asked to think and read historically about literature, media, and culture, focusing on why new literary, media, and cultural practices and works emerge at a particular historical time and place but also why they change. One of the chief focuses will be the relationship between literary, media, and cultural change and other types of historical transformation. While these courses will explore the ways in which literature, media, and culture may be shaped by historical events and texts, they will also show how literature, media, and culture themselves play a role in broader social change.
Instructor: Kelly Younger
Monday 6:00 PM - 9:20 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Not Applicable
NEW CURRICULUM: Disciplinary Research (LD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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By reading and responding critically to a selection of poems drawn from various historical periods and representing a wide variety of poetic forms and cultural traditions, you will improve your ability to analyze and write about poetry.
Instructor: Dermot Ryan
MWF 9:35 AM - 10:35 AM
COURSE ATTRIBUTES:
This course does not count toward the English major or minor requirements; however, English majors interested in creative writing are advised to take one lower-division ENGL 2100 course to satisfy the Core Curriculum EXP: Creative Experience requirement.CORE ATTRIBUTES:
Creative Experience (ECRE)Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Fall - ENGL 2107.01 Introduction to Poetry
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This course explores the powers and possibilities of fiction by reading a wide range of short stories and a novel. In the first half of the class, we will read stories closely and hone skills in analyzing literature. The emphasis will be on reading fiction the first time for pleasure and rereading texts with an analytic eye. In the second half of the class, we will study writing under constraints, and students will develop creative projects in this genre.
Instructor: Paul Harris
MW 9:55 AM - 11:35 AM
COURSE ATTRIBUTES:
This course does not count toward the English major or minor requirements; however, English majors interested in creative writing are advised to take one lower-division ENGL 2100 course to satisfy the Core Curriculum EXP: Creative Experience requirement.CORE ATTRIBUTES:
Creative Experience (ECRE)Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Fall - ENGL 2108.01 Introduction to Fiction
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This course will introduce you to drama through the lens of Shakespeare and the English literary renaissance (16th and 17th centuries). It takes its examples from tragedy (and its variants), a genre which, since the time of the ancient Greeks, has been central to both theatrical practice and theories of drama, ranging from Aristotle’s notion of the audience’s catharsis to Artaud’s search for a Theatre of Cruelty. We will examine Shakespearean tragedies and tragicomedies as a means of understanding this literary form, while exploring the variety of social needs to which the theatre, more broadly, can respond. If, in Shakespeare’s words, “All the world’s a stage,” we may learn to better question our own social cues through the study of his plays. Assignments for the course will be both creative and analytical in nature, incorporating creative writing, performance, and literary analysis.
Instructor: Dr. Judy Park
T/R 9:55 AM - 11:35 AM
COURSE ATTRIBUTES:
This course does not count toward the English major or minor requirements; however, English majors interested in creative writing are advised to take one lower-division ENGL 2100 course to satisfy the Core Curriculum EXP: Creative Experience requirement.CORE ATTRIBUTES:
Creative Experience (ECRE)Click below to view the complete course description.
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This course will survey a broad range of British literature from the Anglo-Saxons to the Restoration, providing an introduction to selected works from the English literary canon. Our chosen works are widely considered to be of enduring significance, as relevant to us in the present as they were in their own times. We will examine these works as complex and inventive cultural responses to their diverse historical situations, and in doing so we will trace in these works the development of important categories of social identity, including race, class, gender, nationality, and sexuality. We will consider how these works both reflect and shape their social contexts, and how they contribute to our understanding of such categories in the past and today.
Instructor: Judy Park
TR 1:45 PM - 3:25 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Histories (LD)
NEW CURRICULUM: History of Lit, Media, and Culture (LD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Fall - ENGL 2300.01 Genres in Time
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Before the rise of the first newspapers, how did people know what was going on, and how did writers in English (and other languages of England) understand and convey “The News” and opinion on “Current Affairs?” When and how did journalism, strictly defined as we know it today, actually become “a thing?” This course investigates literary manifestations of reportage from the very earliest years (5th century) up to the meteoric rise of the first newspapers, periodical essays, and journals in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Instructor: Stephen Shepherd
TR 9:55 AM - 11:35 AM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Histories (LD)
NEW CURRICULUM: History of Lit, Media, and Culture (LD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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In this course, we will use “the play” as “the thing,” as Hamlet suggests, to heighten awareness in ourselves
and others, by reading plays by a variety of playwrights and by writing our own dramatic works. This course
assumes that the acts of reading drama and writing drama inform each other, and each activity can be used to
improve our ability to do the other well. We will analyze the language of dramatic writers and critics and
improve our ability to use dramatic literary conventions. We will discuss conventions such as character, plot,
setting, and dialogue, and we will engage a variety of critical perspectives as we read and write drama.
You will be expected to participate in class discussion, peer response workshops, and other class activities.
We will do weekly writing exercises; 10-12 page Dramatic Work ; and write a 5-7 page critical paper involving
research. Required textbooks: Dunne, Will. The Dramatic Writer’s Companion: Tools to Develop Characters,
Cause Scenes, and Build Stories. U of Chicago P, 2017. ISBN 9780226494081; Kelly, Joseph, editor. The
Seagull Book of Plays. 4th ed., W. W. Norton & Company, 2017. ISBN 9780393631616Instructor: Prof. Molly Youngkin
MW 9:55 AM - 11:35 AM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Genres (LD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Reading and Writing Genres (LD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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COURSE DESCRIPTION/PRINCIPAL TOPICS:
This course has two main goals:
1. To introduce students to key concepts and arguments within contemporary literary, cultural, and rhetorical theory
2. To use these concepts and debates to analyze literature and cultural practices and products. While our discussions will be organized around important contributions to literary, cultural, and rhetorical theory, we will also look at a range of material (“case studies”) from the world of literature, film, advertisement, music, and social media. By closely analyzing these “primary texts,” we will come to see that one does not necessarily apply theory to texts and practices; rather, we use theoretical concepts to figure out and better describe what is already happening in texts and the world around us.Instructor: Dermot Ryan
MW 11:50 AM - 1:30 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Histories (LD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Theory, Power, and Rhetoric (LD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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To paraphrase Cheryll Glotfelty, one of the founding figures of ecocriticism, this course asks what it means to engage in literary study in an age of environmental crisis, with a focus on the first millennium of writing in English (8th-17th centuries). The course proceeds chronologically through three phases of literary development defined by changes in the English language itself (Old, Middle, and Early Modern English) and invites students to consider both canonical works (among them Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Paradise Lost) and lesser-known texts from the perspective of nature. We will ask questions like: how is nature depicted in literary texts and deployed metaphorically? How does the tension between normative notions of nature and the artificiality of culture drive artistic production? Where can we seek the pre-modern roots of the current climate-change denial in, for instance, Christian mis-readings of Genesis and its emphasis on humankind’s dominion over the earth or interpretations of the apocalypse? How did humans in previous eras respond to climate disasters through literature? How does the practice of ecocriticism intersect with other feminist, post-colonial, and other critical approaches to literature?
Instructor: John Sebastian
MWF 9:25 AM - 10:35 AM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Pre-1800 (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Fall ENGL 3100.01 Pre-1800 Ecological Approaches to Early Lit
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This course encourages students to understand media production as an act of social justice that crosses disciplinary boundaries of journalism, creative writing, literary studies, history, and rhetoric. We analyze how American journalism as a professional practice and news media viewership as cultural consumption can function to produce or reiterate ideas about race and ethnicity. Students will learn the role journalism has played in both perpetuating and challenging racist ideologies alongside contemporary issues of race and representation in newsrooms.
Topics covered in the class include: the trajectories of independent newspapers geared toward Black, Chicana/o, Asian, Indigenous, and other ethnic communities in the U.S.; how ideologies of race flow through and from health reporting, audio storytelling, and visual journalism, among other formats of news media; the role of news media in civil rights and racial justice movements; and efforts to confront racism in the American newsroom from the 1990s to 2025.Instructor: Julia Lee
T/R 3:40 PM - 5:20 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Comparative (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Race, Intersectionality, and Power (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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Have you ever wondered about the role of the CIA in influencing MFA workshops? Or why poets like Maya Angelou stormed UN meetings in the 60s? In this course we will uncover the role of literature, music, and art in combating colonialism during the era of Black Power and African Independence (1950-1970). Moreover, we will investigate how these artistic outpourings spoke against and reinforced propaganda campaigns. Finally, students will appreciate the role of the artistry in speaking against global systems of oppression and inequality.
Instructor: Kweku John
T/R 1:45 PM - 3:25 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Comparative (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Race, Intersectionality, and Power (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Fall - ENGL 3600.02 Languages of Liberation
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Style in Writing examines the problem of literary style in the 19th- 21st centuries from both fictional and theoretical perspectives. We will study a range of writers characterized by stylistic peculiarities and experimentation, who display a self-reflexive interest in investigating the nature of language.
Ultimately, the problem of style brings about an encounter with the material surface of language. To read with an eye to style shifts attention from interpretation (reading for meaning) to the textures, nuances and permutations of the linguistic medium itself. This mode of reading only occurs in rereading actively and reflectively. The class’s relatively light reading load is designed to facilitate multiple readings of texts.
The overarching goal of the course is to induce students to experience style in both reading and writing texts. You must be prepared to read painstakingly, think analytically, and write attentively in this course.Instructor: Paul Harris
M/W 1:45 PM - 3:25 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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What is speculative fiction? This much-debated term encompasses a whole world of writing, including science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, horror, alternate history, and stories where things are just a little bit weird in the world. In this course, we will read and discuss published work from each of these genres, try out different forms of speculative fiction with in-class and at-home writing exercises, and engage in a full-class workshop for your own piece of speculative fiction. We will look at worldbuilding, generic distinctions (and overlaps), genre tropes and how to subvert them, and more; we will also consider the sociopolitical stakes of speculative fiction and consider the ways that genre writing is not escapism but is in fact commenting on and responding to our contemporary world.
Instructor: Claire Stanford
M/W 3:40 PM - 5:20 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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According to the American Library Association, seventeen states attempted to censor more than 100 titles in 2023, and the number of titles targeted for censorship at public libraries increased by 92% from the previous year. Reading books has been perceived as a dangerous activity throughout the U.S. since the colonial era. This upper-division course examines the recurring patterns of book censorship throughout American history, exploring how societal fears, political climates, and shifting cultural values contribute to the banning and suppression of literature. Students will analyze the cycles of banning, from historical texts to contemporary works, and explore the ways in which the same topics—like race, sexuality, and dissent—continue to spark controversy. The course will also address the ways these banned works reflect ongoing struggles for free expression and social justice.
Instructor: Robin Miskolcze
T/R 1:45 PM - 3:25 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Comparative (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Upper-Division Elective (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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his course surveys children’s literature through the combined lenses of literary and educational studies. To do so, we will consider both the aesthetic and social dimensions of children’s literature, reflecting on its literary, educational, and moral role in children’s development. Class readings and discussions will cover the history and development of children’s literature as a whole, with a special emphasis on contemporary children’s fiction and its attempts to address issues of multiculturalism and interculturalism. We will also consider the tension between the capacity of children’s literature to entertain and its institutional role and value. Of central interest to us will be the concept of imagination, its value, and the ways in which literature fosters its development. Finally, participants in this course will reflect on professional and personal values and ethics as they become informed selectors, consumers, and teachers of literature for children.
This course is required for Liberal Studies majors and English majors with an STPP concentration.
Instructor: Aimee Ross-Kilroy
M/W 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical
NEW CURRICULUM: Upper-Division Elective
Click below to view the complete course description.
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In 1897, William Butler Yeats, Isabella Augusta Gregory, and Edward Martyn proclaimed a new vision for Irish drama, proposing to “bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland” and show that “Ireland is not the home of buffoonery” (Harrington ix). This course traces the development of Irish drama from 1897 to the present, in order to better understand the establishment, rise, and current status of one of the most important national dramatic traditions.
We will read plays by Yeats, Gregory, John Millington Synge, George Bernard Shaw, Sean O'Casey, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, Conor McPherson, and Marina Carr. We will examine the literary elements used by these playwrights as they negotiated how (and whether) to accurately represent the lives of Irish people, and we will examine how the various political and cultural pressures on Ireland shaped the literary representations produced by these playwrights.
You will be expected to participate in class discussion; complete take-home midterm and final exam; produce a short research project to prepare for the final project and a final project, a content-rich website for one of the authors we are studying. Required textbook: Harrington, John P., ed. Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama. 2nd ed. W. W. Norton & Co., 2009. ISBN 9780393932430
Instructor: Molly Youngkin
M/W 11:50 AM - 1:30 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Comparative (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Upper-Division Elective (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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Do you like to read? Do you like to eat? Do you like to read and eat?
Combine two of the most pleasurable forms of consumption in this course, where we will devour both works of literature and food. Through novels, cookbooks, memoirs, food criticism, poetry, and essays, students will analyze how food reflects histories of migration, colonialism, and resistance, while also serving as a means of cultural preservation and self-expression. Readings may include works by authors such as Jamaica Kincaid, Grace M. Cho, Rudolfo Anaya, and more. Students will engage in critical discussions, analytical writing, and creative projects that explore how food in literature shapes individual and collective identities across different cultures. Since this class meets at dinner time, we will obviously need physical as well as intellectual sustenance, so everyone will pitch in to bring their favorite snacks once during the semester. At the end of the semester, students will cook/bake something for a holiday feast open to the entire English Department. Maybe we can even put together a department cookbook!Instructor: Julia Lee
Thursday 6:00 PM - 9:20 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Comparative (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Fall - ENGL 5000.01 SAS: Literature and Food (Undergraduate)
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This course explores the theory and practice of teaching writing and literature. We will investigate the history of composition studies and pedagogical approaches to better understand current trends and movements. We will consider theories of language learning and critical pedagogy, and these explorations will inform our discussion of practical issues such as grading, classroom management, and diversity. We will discuss the (sometimes problematic) relationship between teaching literature and writing. We will also focus specifically on the Jesuit Rhetorical tradition and teaching rhetoric at LMU. This course is designed for those interested in teaching literature and composition, especially graduate teaching fellows who will eventually teach in the First Year Seminar and Rhetorical Arts programs.
Instructor: Aimee Ross-Kilroy
Monday 4:30 PM - 7:00 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical
NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar
Click here for complete course description (undergraduate)
2025 Fall - Theory of Teaching Writing and Literature (Undergraduate)
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Using a variety of theoretical models—some modern and some written more than six centuries ago—the course will examine the rise of the idea of English as a literary medium, beginning with the growing anti-Norman sentiment of the 12th century, and concentrating especially on the “English explosion” that occurred after the devastating 14th-century pandemic of the Black Death. This was an age when the choice to write in English, viewed as the language of the underclass (as opposed to French and Latin) was often desperate, nearly always radical, very often dangerous, and sometimes even heretical. In this spirit, even the most famous authors in English, such as Chaucer, Langland, Margery Kempe, and Julian of Norwich (all of whom we will read), were driven to interrogate the legitimacy of their own work. This course will also engage real manuscripts and early printed books as the physical manifestations of this turbulent but formative period.
Instructor: Shepherd
T/R 7:55 PM - 9:35 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Fall - ENGL 5000.03 SAS: The Invention of English (Undergraduate)
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The writer Karen Russell has said: “Writing a novel is kind of like scaling Mt. Everest and passing by your own bones on the way.” In this generative novel workshop, we will work toward scaling the Mt. Everest of writing a first novel together. Whether this is your first attempt at writing a novel or your tenth, this course will offer a supportive, encouraging environment for generating and revising your ideas and words; it will also offer a challenging and rigorous structure, with approximately five pages of writing due each week, for a total of 30-40 pages of a novel draft over the course of the semester. In taking this class, you should be excited about generating new writing each week, workshopping your peers’ work, and reading and studying examples of debut novels, including Justin Torres’s We the Animals, Weike Wang’s Chemistry, and others. Additionally, we will read secondary work on the craft of novel-writing and the scholarship of novel theory; the class will also include a session on getting your novel out in the world, with information on querying agents and publishing.
Instructor: Claire Stanford
Wednesday 6:00 PM - 9:20 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar (UD)
(A complete course description is not available for this course.)
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Do you like to read? Do you like to eat? Do you like to read and eat?
Combine two of the most pleasurable forms of consumption in this course, where we will devour both works of literature and food. Through novels, cookbooks, memoirs, food criticism, poetry, and essays, students will analyze how food reflects histories of migration, colonialism, and resistance, while also serving as a means of cultural preservation and self-expression. Readings may include works by authors such as Jamaica Kincaid, Grace M. Cho, Rudolfo Anaya, and more. Students will engage in critical discussions, analytical writing, and creative projects that explore how food in literature shapes individual and collective identities across different cultures. Since this class meets at dinner time, we will obviously need physical as well as intellectual sustenance, so everyone will pitch in to bring their favorite snacks once during the semester. At the end of the semester, students will cook/bake something for a holiday feast open to the entire English Department. Maybe we can even put together a department cookbook!Instructor: Julia Lee
This course fulfills the following M.A. Program Requirement:
Literature Elective
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Fall - ENGL 5000.05 Literature and Literature (Graduate)
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This course explores the theory and practice of teaching writing and literature. We will investigate the history of composition studies and pedagogical approaches to better understand current trends and movements. We will consider theories of language learning and critical pedagogy, and these explorations will inform our discussion of practical issues such as grading, classroom management, and diversity. We will discuss the (sometimes problematic) relationship between teaching literature and writing. We will also focus specifically on the Jesuit Rhetorical tradition and teaching rhetoric at LMU. This course is designed for those interested in teaching literature and composition, especially graduate teaching fellows who will eventually teach in the First Year Seminar and Rhetorical Arts programs.
Instructor: Aimee Ross-Kilroy
Monday 4:30 PM - 7:00 PM
This course fulfills the following English M.A. requirement:
Theory Elective
Click here for complete course description (graduate)
2025 Fall - ENGL 5000.06 Theory of Teaching Writing and Literature (Graduate)
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Using a variety of theoretical models—some modern and some written more than six centuries ago—the
course will examine the rise of the idea of English as a literary medium, beginning with the growing anti-
Norman sentiment of the 12th century, and concentrating especially on the “English explosion” that occurred
after the devastating 14th-century pandemic of the Black Death. This was an age when the choice to write in
English, viewed as the language of the underclass (as opposed to French and Latin) was often desperate,
nearly always radical, very often dangerous, and sometimes even heretical. In this spirit, even the most
famous authors in English, such as Chaucer, Langland, Margery Kempe, and Julian of Norwich (all of whom we
will read), were driven to interrogate the legitimacy of their own work. This course will also engage real
manuscripts and early printed books as the physical manifestations of this turbulent but formative period.Instructor: Shepherd
T/R 7:55 PM - 9:35 PM
This course fulfills the following M.A. Program Requirement:
Literature Elective
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Fall - ENGL 5000.07 The Invention of English (Graduate)
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The writer Karen Russell has said: “Writing a novel is kind of like scaling Mt. Everest and passing by your own bones on the way.” In this generative novel workshop, we will work toward scaling the Mt. Everest of writing a first novel together. Whether this is your first attempt at writing a novel or your tenth, this course will offer a supportive, encouraging environment for generating and revising your ideas and words; it will also offer a challenging and rigorous structure, with approximately five pages of writing due each week, for a total of 30-40 pages of a novel draft over the course of the semester. In taking this class, you should be excited about generating new writing each week, workshopping your peers’ work, and reading and studying examples of debut novels, including Justin Torres’s We the Animals, Weike Wang’s Chemistry, and others. Additionally, we will read secondary work on the craft of novel-writing and the scholarship of novel theory; the class will also include a session on getting your novel out in the world, with information on querying agents and publishing.
Instructor: Claire Stanford
Wednesday 6:00 PM - 9:20 PM
This course fulfills the following M.A. Program Requirement:
Creative Writing Seminar
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar (UD)
(A complete course description is not available for this course.)
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"Critical Methodologies" is a foundational course designed for Master's level students to cultivate advanced research skills and critical thinking essential for scholarly work in the humanities. This course highlights the complexities of conducting research within the broader intellectual landscape of literary studies, including literary periods, ideological and theoretical trends, and interdisciplinarity. Students will investigate various methodologies, engage in close reading practices, and understand the theoretical frameworks that form the basis of critical analysis.
Instructor: Dr. K.J. Peters
Wednesday 4:30 PM - 7:00 PM
This course fulfills the following M.A. Program Requirement:
Critical Methodology
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Fall - ENGL 6600.01 Critical Methodology
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Who taught you how to see? In this course we will investigate the power of the speaker's gaze in poetry through the lens of photography, to appreciate the echoes and dissonance(s) between these creative mediums. We will also utilize photography as a means of ekphrasis and analyze how poets incorporate photography into their collections, with special focus on the work of Claudia Rankine and A. Van Jordan.
Instructor: Kweku John
Tuesday 4:30 PM - 7:00 PM
This course fulfills the following M.A. Program Requirement:
Creative Writing Seminar
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 - Fall ENGL 6610.01 SCW Poetry Meets Photography
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The oceans have profoundly shaped human history and artistic expressions, serving as both a literal and metaphorical conduit for exploration, trade, and cultural exchange. From ancient seafaring civilizations like the Phoenicians and Polynesians to the Age of Exploration, the oceans have been central to cultures around the globe. In literature, the vast and mysterious nature of the sea has inspired countless works, symbolizing everything from the unknown and the sublime to freedom and escape. Yet studying representations of oceans has only recently been foregrounded by oceanic critics as crucial to our socially and ecologically connected histories and futures. If we are to heed the climate crisis, we need to understand and evaluate the stories we tell about the sea so that we can be agents for future change. This class delves into the emergent and multi-disciplinary fields of oceanic studies and blue humanities as we examine fiction and films by diverse authors who portray the ocean, its creatures, and humanity’s relationship with the watery world of the sea.
Instructor: Robin Miskolcze
Tuesday: 4:30 PM - 7:00 PM
This course fulfills the following M.A. Program Requirement:
Literature Elective
Click below to view the complete course description.
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Creativity Through Constraints invites students to experience ways in which imposing constraints on writing literary texts produces innovative, original, and creative work. We will do close readings of a range of writers characterized by unique experiments with constraint-based production, including members of the Oulipo group (Workshop for Potential Literature) based in Paris. The philosophy of the Oulipo is that constraints liberate the writer’s imagination, and induce writers to explore the possibilities of literature in ways they would never expect or accomplish otherwise. Students will study the different kinds of constraints the Oulipo have used and then engage in creating texts under constraints they get to choose. The overarching goal of the course is to induce students to experience literary creativity in both reading and writing texts. You must be prepared to read painstakingly, think analytically, and write attentively in this course. This class is a workshop, defined as a place where an artisan practices applied techniques and produces and delivers particular goods. The encompassing ethos of this class emphasizes experimentation and rigorous play. Challenging oneself to do difficult things, including reading complex texts and writing original works, takes one into new, unexpected territories.
Instructor: Paul Harris
TR 12:00 PM - 3:45 PM (online)
This course does not count toward the English major or minor requirements; however, English majors interested in creative writing are advised to take one lower-division ENGL 2100 course to satisfy the Core Curriculum EXP: Creative Experience requirement.
CORE ATTRIBUTES:
Creative Experience (ECRE)Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Summer Session I: ENGL 2122.01 Creativity Through Constraints
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Students learn how to read and write about literature, media, and culture within their historical contexts. Students will be asked to think and read historically about literature, media, and culture, focusing on why new literary, media, and cultural practices and works emerge at a particular historical time and place but also why they change. One of the chief focuses will be the relationship between literary, media, and cultural change and other types of historical transformation. While these courses will explore the ways in which literature, media, and culture may be shaped by historical events and texts, they will also show how literature, media, and culture themselves play a role in broader social change.
Instructor: Kelly Younger
Monday 6:00 PM - 9:20 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Not Applicable
NEW CURRICULUM: Disciplinary Research (LD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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Students will study forms, techniques, and conventions of literary, short-form creative writing through writing exercises and discussion of literary work. They will craft, workshop, and revise their own original short-form literary works in four prose genres: poetry and fiction (including hybrid forms), creative nonfiction (memoir and lyric essay), and drama (ten-minute play).
Instructor: Jeffrey Nazzaro
MWF 9:25 AM - 10:35 AM
COURSE ATTRIBUTES:
This course does not count toward the English major or minor requirements; however, English majors interested in creative writing are advised to take one lower-division ENGL 2100 course to satisfy the Core Curriculum EXP: Creative Experience requirement.
CORE ATTRIBUTES:
Creative Experience (ECRE)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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Students will study forms, techniques, and conventions of literary, short-form creative writing through writing exercises and discussion of literary work. They will craft, workshop, and revise their own original short-form literary works in four prose genres: poetry and fiction (including hybrid forms), creative nonfiction (memoir and lyric essay), and drama (ten-minute play).
Instructor: Jeffrey Nazzaro
MWF 12.15 PM - 1:25 AM
COURSE ATTRIBUTES:
This course does not count toward the English major or minor requirements; however, English majors interested in creative writing are advised to take one lower-division ENGL 2100 course to satisfy the Core Curriculum EXP: Creative Experience requirement.
CORE ATTRIBUTES:
Creative Experience (ECRE)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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In this course, students will have the opportunity to draft, craft, workshop and revise their work in the forms of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. By way of carefully curated readings, viewings, in-class and out-of-class writing exercises, and the study of selected samples, students will be able to experience the breadth and depth of various writing traditions and create space for themselves as writers. This course seeks to situate writing in these forms as a healing practice that allows students to hone their own unique voices and share in nurturing and nourishing creative community with one another.
Instructor: Kaelyn Sabal-Wilson
TR 11:50 AM - 1:30 PM
COURSE ATTRIBUTES:
This course does not count toward the English major or minor requirements; however, English majors interested in creative writing are advised to take one lower-division ENGL 2100 course to satisfy the Core Curriculum EXP: Creative Experience requirement.
CORE ATTRIBUTES:
Creative Experience (ECRE)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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In this course, students will have the opportunity to draft, craft, workshop and revise their work in the forms of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. By way of carefully curated readings, viewings, in-class and out-of-class writing exercises, and the study of selected samples, students will be able to experience the breadth and depth of various writing traditions and create space for themselves as writers. This course seeks to situate writing in these forms as a healing practice that allows students to hone their own unique voices and share in nurturing and nourishing creative community with one another.
Instructor: Kaelyn Sabal-Wilson
TR 1:45 PM - 3:25 PM
COURSE ATTRIBUTES:
This course does not count toward the English major or minor requirements; however, English majors interested in creative writing are advised to take one lower-division ENGL 2100 course to satisfy the Core Curriculum EXP: Creative Experience requirement.
CORE ATTRIBUTES:
Creative Experience (ECRE)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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Poetry Matters is a creative writing and theory of poetics course where students have an opportunity to compose original poems while studying basic craft, form, and critical elements of poetry from the 20th and 21st century canons. 19th century poetry, alongside prior century forms and sensibilities are also studied to appreciate their impact on modern poetics. Taking to heart former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove’s tenet “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful”— this course invites students to express themselves through language and to hone their overall writing skills as they explore contemporary/modern poetry by reading and analyzing work from its historical movements. In turn, students will demonstrate techniques observed through the writing they generate and their attention to workshopping collaboratively with fellow students. Strong focus will center on developing a foundational understanding of craft (line, image, syntax, rhythm, language, metaphor), a critical vocabulary for in-class discussion of poetry and poetics, and a sense of poetry’s connection to vital personal/political forces of the past and present.
Instructor: Dr. Michelle Bitting
MWF 12:15 PM - 1:25 PM
This course does not count toward the English major or minor requirements; however, English majors interested in creative writing are advised to take one lower-division ENGL 2100 course to satisfy the Core Curriculum EXP: Creative Experience requirement.
CORE ATTRIBUTES:
Creative Experience (ECRE)Click below to view the complete course description.
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Poetry Matters is a creative writing and theory of poetics course where students have an opportunity to compose original poems while studying basic craft, form, and critical elements of poetry from the 20th and 21st century canons. 19th century poetry, alongside prior century forms and sensibilities are also studied to appreciate their impact on modern poetics. Taking to heart former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove’s tenet “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful”— this course invites students to express themselves through language and to hone their overall writing skills as they explore contemporary/modern poetry by reading and analyzing work from its historical movements. In turn, students will demonstrate techniques observed through the writing they generate and their attention to workshopping collaboratively with fellow students. Strong focus will center on developing a foundational understanding of craft (line, image, syntax, rhythm, language, metaphor), a critical vocabulary for in-class discussion of poetry and poetics, and a sense of poetry’s connection to vital personal/political forces of the past and present.
Instructor: Dr. Michelle Bitting
MWF 12:15 PM - 1:25 PM
COURSE ATTRIBUTES:
This course does not count toward the English major or minor requirements; however, English majors interested in creative writing are advised to take one lower-division ENGL 2100 course to satisfy the Core Curriculum EXP: Creative Experience requirement.CORE ATTRIBUTES:
Creative Experience (ECRE)Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Spring: ENGL 2107.02: Introduction to Poetry
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This course will introduce you to drama through the lens of Shakespeare and the English literary renaissance (16th and 17th centuries). It takes its examples from tragedy (and its variants), a genre which, since the time of the ancient Greeks, has been central to both theatrical practice and theories of drama, ranging from Aristotle’s notion of the audience’s catharsis to Artaud’s search for a Theatre of Cruelty. We will examine Shakespearean tragedies and tragicomedies as a means of understanding this literary form, while exploring the variety of social needs to which the theatre, more broadly, can respond. If, in Shakespeare’s words, “All the world’s a stage,” we may learn to better question our own social cues through the study of his plays. Assignments for the course will be both creative and analytical in nature, incorporating creative writing, performance, and literary analysis.
This course does not count toward the English major or minor requirements; however, English majors interested in creative writing are advised to take one lower-division ENGL 2100 course to satisfy the Core Curriculum EXP: Creative Experience requirement.
CORE ATTRIBUTES:
Creative Experience (ECRE)Click below to view the complete course description.
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Creativity Through Constraints invites students to experience ways in which imposing constraints on writing literary texts produces innovative, original, and creative work. We will do close readings of a range of writers characterized by unique experiments with constraint-based production, including members of the Oulipo group (Workshop for Potential Literature) based in Paris. The philosophy of the Oulipo is that constraints liberate the writer’s imagination, and induce writers to explore the possibilities of literature in ways they would never expect or accomplish otherwise. Students will study the different kinds of constraints the Oulipo have used and then engage in creating texts under constraints they get to choose. The overarching goal of the course is to induce students to experience literary creativity in both reading and writing texts. You must be prepared to read painstakingly, think analytically, and write attentively in this course. This class is a workshop, defined as a place where an artisan practices applied techniques and produces and delivers particular goods. The encompassing ethos of this class emphasizes experimentation and rigorous play. Challenging oneself to do difficult things, including reading complex texts and writing original works, takes one into new, unexpected territories.
Instructor: Paul Harris
TR 9:55 AM - 11:35 AM
This course does not count toward the English major or minor requirements; however, English majors interested in creative writing are advised to take one lower-division ENGL 2100 course to satisfy the Core Curriculum EXP: Creative Experience requirement.
CORE ATTRIBUTES:
Creative Experience (ECRE)Click below to view the complete course description.
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Arthurian legend has long held a fascination for readers and writers since its initial formulation, and currently enjoys an enduring global reach. As a History of Literature, Media and Culture course, this class will examine the overlap between literature and history by first examining the origins of Arthurian stories and their use in creating medieval propaganda, then examine moments up to the present day when aspects of the Arthurian mythos have been used in various forms of media as a means to affect cultures globally.
Our examination will be informed by the following questions:
What constitutes Arthurianism, and why does it endure?
How can understanding Arthurianism help us to better understand concepts like literary history, periodization, intertextuality and mythopoesis?
How has the enduring Arthurian mythos been deployed at various moments in history as a form of propaganda and/or nation building?
Finally, what is the value of the past in the present and how do we construct this relationship through narrative?
Instructor: Aimee Ross-Kilroy
MW 8:00 AM - 9:40 AM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Histories (LD)
NEW CURRICULUM: History of Literature, Media, and Culture (LD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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This course will introduce students to literary and cultural history by focusing on Irish literature and culture from 1890 to the present. These were years of profound cultural and political change in Ireland and we will consider the role of literature in turbulent times that witnessed the Irish Literary Revival, the War of Independence, the Irish Civil War, and Ireland’s abandonment of national isolation by joining the European Common Market. In other word, we will chart Ireland’s transition from a country that was largely Catholic and rural to a country whose identity is increasingly secular and urban. The course will explore Ireland’s complex and changing relationship with Great Britain, expressed most tragically in the armed conflict in Northern Ireland.
Instructor: Dermot Ryan
TR 9:55 AM - 11:35 AM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Histories (LD)
NEW CURRICULUM: History of Literature, Media, and Culture (LD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Spring - ENGL 2300.02: Irish Literature and Culture, 1890 to Present
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This course will examine postapocalyptic and dystopian fiction through a theoretical and historical lens. We’ll be examining how literature, in its most prescient and admonishing mode, serves up visions of future societies. Among the numerous traditions the genre encompasses, we’ll be dipping into Afrofuturism, speculative fiction, and eco-fiction, with special attention to how class, race, gender, and sexuality inform various authors’ expressions of what the future of the world might hold. Although a genre that is predominantly set in the future, all dystopian and postapocalyptic novels are topical—about our times—delving into the urgent struggles that society faces today. We’ll be exploring questions of identity, what it means to be part of a society, to be an outcast, or even the last human to survive on a dead planet. What are the shifting contours of personhood and our role on the planet, and beyond? How do humans shift from a parasitical relationship to the earth to one based on mutualism? Will science and technology save us? And, if so, at what cost? How do concepts of the posthuman, AI, family, religion, nation, race, class, and gender factor into this world-building genre? Though often bleak and misanthropic, postapocalyptic and dystopian fiction allows us to explore what a future world of inclusion, tolerance, difference, and hope might look like because mere “survival is insufficient.”
Instructor: Alexandra Neel
MW 9:55 AM - 11:35 AM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Genres
NEW CURRICULUM: Reading and Writing Genres
Click below to view the complete course description.
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In this course, we will develop an awareness of the art of the short story, by reading short stories by a variety of writers and by writing our own fictional stories. This course assumes that the acts of reading and writing short stories inform each other, and each activity can be used to improve a student’s ability to do the other well.
We will analyze the language of creative writers and literary critics and improve our ability to use the literary conventions of fiction. We will discuss conventions such as plot, character, setting, point of view, and style, and we will engage a variety of critical perspectives as we read and write short stories.
You will be expected to participate in class discussion, peer response workshops, and other class activities. We will do weekly writing exercises; write an 8-10 page short story; and write a 5-7 page critical paper involving research.
Instructor: Dr. Molly Youngkin
TR: 1:45 PM - 3:25 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Genres
NEW CURRICULUM: Reading and Writing Genres
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Spring - ENGL 2400.02: The Art of the Short Story
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This course has two main goals:
- To introduce students to key concepts and arguments within contemporary literary, cultural, and rhetorical theory
- To use these concepts and debates to analyze literary and cultural practices/products.
While our discussions will be organized around important contributions to literary, cultural, and rhetorical theory, we will also look at a range of material from the world of literature, film, advertisement, music, and social media. By closely analyzing these “primary texts,” we will come to see that one does not necessarily apply theory to texts and practices; rather, we use theoretical concepts to recognize and figure out the theoretical work that is informing and animating the world around us.
Instructor: Dermot Ryan
TR 11:50 AM - 1:30 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Histories (LD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Theory, Power, and Rhetoric (LD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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Literary observers and spectators of the theatre in Shakespeare’s time were concerned not simply with the meaning of literary works, but with the possibility of literature to affect its audiences. Monarchs and other figures of authority thought drama to wield such powers of influence that theatres and plays were at once censored and exploited so as to suppress as well as to harness their effects. Underlying the impulse of authority to regulate the theatre was the implicit belief in the political nature of drama and performance, in particular their capacity to subvert or to affirm existing hierarchies and social relations. The potential of drama to enact the opposing forces of repression and insurrection led to such contradictory claims that plays could, on the one hand, instruct subjects to obey their rulers by showing them the ultimate downfall of those that have ventured “tumults, commotions and insurrections” (Apology for Actors) and, on the other, inspire the contempt of subjects for their rulers by making the figure of monarchs appear ridiculous on the stage. How is drama political, and how do plays reveal the workings of power and authority? We will explore these questions and others through the study of Shakespeare’s plays.
Instructor: Dr. Judy Park
MW 11:50 AM - 1:30 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Authors (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Pre-1800 (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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This course examines constructions of extreme otherness in medieval English literature. The governing idea of the course is that spiritual orthodoxy, heresy (the state of being outcast by orthodox spiritual ideology), and alterity are always elastic and ambiguous concepts; they emerge out of and are persistently renegotiated through conflicts and narratives of varying degrees of severity, intense emotion, even transcendent beauty. Attending to theological, linguistic, philosophical, historical, gender, cultural, and political issues, students will examine major themes, including heresy and orthodoxy, reform, mysticism, vernacularity, the spirituality of women, crusade, witchcraft, and monsters and magic.
Instructor: Stephen Shepherd
TR 9:55 AM - 11:35 AM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Pre-1800 (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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In this class, students examine prison literature as one form of what has been called resistance literature. In order to understand how, and what, literature might resist, we read works by political prisoners and incarcerated writers as well as about the prison-industrial complex, the rise of the prison system and how it has served as an eliminatory practice. Class discussions examine the concepts of power and personhood, discourse and justice.
Instructor: Juan Mah y Busch
MWF 10:50 AM - 12:00 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Comparative (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Race, Intersectionality, and Power (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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This interdisciplinary course encourages students to reflect on the meaning of the desert as it has
been conceived in the literatures of ancient Christian monasticism and contemporary contemplative
practice; through the art, literature and politics of the American West and Borderlands; and as a
site of ecological sublimity, complexity, and precarity. We will explore the varied meanings of the
desert in diverse historical and cultural moments and ask what it means not just to imagine but
also inhabit the desert today. These inquiries have real implications for what it means to inhabit
the world with some sense of meaning and purpose—both in the profound sense of individual spiritual
development as well as the pursuit of social and environmental justice. Into the Desert seeks to
entwine these threads through close readings across genres as well as through embodied experience:
a key class activity is a field trip into the desert itself. The class carries an Interdisciplinary
Connections core designation and an Engaged Learning flag.Instructor: Rubén Martínez
Tuesday 6:00 PM - 9:20 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Comparative (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Race, Intersectionality, and Power (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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While many contemporary readers might encounter verse strictly on the page, Afro-diasporic understandings of poetry involve performance, music, and movement. This course will introduce students to contemporary and ancient poetic forms that incorporate movement and dance such as Yoruba Masque theatre, Ghanaian dirge culture, as well as contemporary experimental spoken word. Moreover, we will investigate the role of these joint creative forces in Black resistance movements in the Americas, such as the Malê uprising in Brazil and the Stono Rebellion in the U.S. Finally, we will study the creative possibilities of including movement and mindfulness as steps in the writing process.
Instructor: Kweku John
MW 1:45 PM - 3:25 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Spring: ENGL 4500.01 On Movement--Intersections of Verse and Dance
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This course will look at works of memoir and personal essay by people of color and members of other underrepresented communities. We will address topics like colonization/decolonization, intergenerational and historical trauma, survivance, and the racial imaginary. This course will address genre, form, and narrative technique, as well as questions about publishing and professionalization. Courses will be a combination of discussion and writing workshops.
Instructor: Julia Lee
TR 1:45 PM - 3:25 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Spring - ENGL 4500.02: Memoir and Personal Essay
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What is speculative fiction? This much-debated term encompasses a whole world of writing, including science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, horror, alternate history, and stories where things are just a little bit weird in the world. In this course, we will read and discuss published work from each of these genres, try out different forms of speculative fiction with in-class and at-home writing exercises, and engage in a full-class workshop for your own piece of speculative fiction. We will look at worldbuilding, generic distinctions (and overlaps), genre tropes and how to subvert them, and more; we will also consider the sociopolitical stakes of speculative fiction and consider the ways that genre writing is not escapism but is in fact commenting on and responding to our contemporary world.
Instructor: Claire Stanford
MW 3:40 PM - 5:20 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Spring - ENGL 4500.03: Speculative Fiction
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This course is about nothing. We will examine nothing from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, including literature, film, mathematics, philosophy, theology, and art. Nothing is a potently paradoxical and productive thing to study and contemplate, leading to challenging and boundary-exploring thinking. Students will be given options to write creative and or critical work for assignments.
Instructor: Paul Harris
MW 11:50 AM - 1:30 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Upper-Division Elective (UD)
The course also fulfills the Interdisciplinary Connect Core requirement.
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Spring: ENGL 4600.01 A Course About Nothing
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Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world. –bell hooks
This course will cover a selection of fiction, poetry, essays, and critical theory by Black diasporic women writers. Among the topics we will discuss are the racial imaginary and constructions of Black womanhood, intersectional identity, queerness, the uncanny, the politics of respectability, and more. Our focus will be on survivance, futurity, joy, and healing. There will be music! And art! And community!
Instructor: Julia Lee
Thursday 4:30 PM - 7:00 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Comparative (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Race, Intersectionality, and Power (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.
--bell hooks
This course will cover a selection of fiction, poetry, essays, and critical theory by Black diasporic women writers. Among the topics we will discuss are the racial imaginary and constructions of Black womanhood, intersectional identity, queerness, the uncanny, the politics of respectability, and more. Our focus will be on survivance, futurity, joy, and healing. There will be music! And art! And community!
Instructor: Julia Lee
Thursday 4:30 PM - 7:00 PM
This course fulfills the following M.A. Program Requirement:
Literature Elective
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Spring: ENGL 5000.02: Black Women Writers (Graduate Section)
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This course takes a deep dive into arguably the first novel expression of our fear and fascination with artificial intelligence—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The first third of the semester will be devoted to the Romantic cultures that gave rise to Shelley’s “hideous progeny,” from scientific experiments and global explorations to artistic and literary trends (e.g., the gothic novel) during the period. We’ll explore the novel’s legacy in contemporary fiction, film, and television, including works such as Poor Things (novel and film), Ex Machina, and The Lifecycle of Software Objects, and conclude the semester with an exploration of the various ways we understand AI and our posthuman future today. How has the discourse surrounding machines and learning shifted? What are the limits of both human and artificial intelligence? Can we think of non-human intelligence as something other than a power to be mastered and harnessed by human wrangling?
Instructor: Alexandra Neel
Wednesday 4:30 PM - 7:00 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Spring: ENGL 5000.03 Frankenstein to AI (Undergraduate)
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This course takes a deep dive into arguably the first novel expression of our fear and fascination with artificial intelligence—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The first third of the semester will be devoted to the Romantic cultures that gave rise to Shelley’s “hideous progeny,” from scientific experiments and global explorations to artistic and literary trends (e.g., the gothic novel) during the period. We’ll explore the novel’s legacy in contemporary fiction, film, and television, including works such as Poor Things (novel and film), Ex Machina, and The Lifecycle of Software Objects, and conclude the semester with an exploration of the various ways we understand AI and our posthuman future today. How has the discourse surrounding machines and learning shifted? What are the limits of both human and artificial intelligence? Can we think of non
Instructor: Alexandra Neel
Wednesday 4:30 PM - 7:00 PM
This course fulfills the following M.A. Program Requirement:
Literature Elective
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Spring - ENGL 5000.04 Frankenstein to AI (Graduate)
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When we are writing fiction, our choice of point of view is one of the first and most impactful craft decisions we make. In this course, we will explore advanced techniques in crafting point of view, including unusual points of view (you, we), retrospective narration, unreliable narration, and more. In this course, we will read and discuss published works of fiction that employ innovative uses of POV, experiment with point of view with in-class and at-home writing exercises, and engage in a full-class workshop for a longer piece of your writing. Along with the craft stakes of point of view, we will also consider the sociopolitical stakes of point of view in terms of race, gender, socioeconomic class, and environment (including non-human points of view).
Instructor: Claire Stanford
Wednesday 6:00 PM - 9:20 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry (UD
Click below to view the complete course description.
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When we are writing fiction, our choice of point of view is one of the first and most impactful craft decisions we make. In this course, we will explore advanced techniques in crafting point of view, including unusual points of view (you, we), retrospective narration, unreliable narration, and more. In this course, we will read and discuss published works of fiction that employ innovative uses of POV, experiment with point of view with in-class and at-home writing exercises, and engage in a full-class workshop for a longer piece of your writing. Along with the craft stakes of point of view, we will also consider the sociopolitical stakes of point of view in terms of race, gender, socioeconomic class, and environment (including non-human points of view).
Instructor: Claire Stanford
Wednesday 6:00 PM - 9:20 PM
This course fulfills the following M.A. Program Requirement:
Creative Writing Seminar
Click below to view the complete course description.
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In this seminar, you will research and write a substantial original project. Creative, critical, and hybrid projects are welcome. The form/genre of your project may be a creative dramatic, fictional, or poetic work; a critical essay about literature, rhetoric or theory; or a hybrid work that combines creative and critical elements, uses visual and written media, etc. In consultation with Prof. Youngkin and your peers, you will construct an appropriate reading list for your project, learn how to write professional documents such as project descriptions and abstracts, write multiple drafts of your project, and present your project to others at the end of the semester.
Instructor: Molly Youngkin
TR: 11:50 AM - 1:30 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Critical Theoretical (UD) or Creative/Artistry (UD)
NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar (UD)
Click below to view the complete course description.
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A semester-long exploration of Louise Erdrich, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. We will look at the historical and cultural contexts that contribute to Erdrich's work as an Indigenous writer who consistently explores the past and contemporary lives of Ojibwe families in North America. Included will be course work devoted to feminist Indigenous theory, as well as an examination of debates within Indigenous criticism concerning such issues as aesthetics, cultural realism and settler colonialist appropriation/stereotypes.
Instructor: Robin Miskolcze
Tuesday 4:30 PM - 7:00 PM
This course fulfills the following M.A. Program Requirement:
Major Writer / Genre / Literary Period
Click below to view the complete course description.
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The scope of this seminar includes critical thinking from the 1800s to contemporary critical interventions. Continental philosophy and the literary movements and theoretical perspectives informed by theorists such as Paul de Man, Walter Benjamin, and Gayatri C. Spivak will be our focus. Students may develop an understanding of literary analysis methods. However, the application of theory to literature is not a goal. We aim to examine a range of theoretical inquiries and debates concerning the unconscious, stylistics, genre, semiotics, subject formation, power, and the articulation of agency. The critical perspectives to be examined include Psychoanalytic Criticism, Marxism, Feminism, New Criticism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Gender Criticism, African American Criticism, and Postcolonial Criticism.
Instructor: KJ Peters
Thursday 7:20 PM - 9:50 PM
This course fulfills the following M.A. Program Requirement:
Contemporary Critical Theory
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Spring - ENGL 6605.01: Contemporary Critical Theory
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Contemporary poet, Courtney Lamar Charleston once said, “when you put two poems next to each other in a collection, it changes the meaning of both poems.” As such, in this upper-division seminar, students will move beyond drafting poems/creative to better understand the power of the poetic sequence. We will analyze contemporary chapbooks and short poetry collections to appreciate how authors develop meaning, nuance, tension, and plot through various poetic sequencing techniques. Students’ final projects will thus be in form of a cohesive chapbook (portfolio) that may be revised for submission and publication.
Instructor: Kweku John
Monday 4:30 PM - 7:00 PM
This course fulfills the following M.A. Program Requirement:
Creative Writing Seminar
Click below to view the complete course description.
2025 Spring: ENGL 6610.01 Writing the Chapbook
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This seminar serves not only as an introduction to the English Major, but also as instruction for, the words of Wallace Stevens, "How to Live. What to Do." The primary goal of the course is to create a community of scholars and creative artists. There will be field trips to cultural events, guests speakers, indpendent projects, and other exciting opportunites. In addition, students learn to research and write for the major. The course instructs students in the tools, data sets, search strategies, reading methods, and disposition literary scholars use to develop and answer research questions. Students will develop transferable research, reading, analytical, and composing skills. Competency will be demonstrated and assessed at various stages in the discovery, invention, synthesis, and composing process, as well as in the final, evidence-based argument. All of this will prepare you for success in the English Major, as well as success in life.
Instructor: Kelly Younger
Monday: 6:00 - 9:20PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: n/a
NEW CURRICULUM: Disciplinary Research
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Times of great change and upheaval inspire need and desire for cultivating imagination and personal expression. We tell stories to save our lives and each other, making magic and re-envisioning mythologies toward an evolving embrace of humankind. We are all writers, and this course aims to help carry your unique voice and inspire your imagined narratives onto the page. In this course, students have an opportunity to read closely, learn about, and write into a variety of forms, including Poetry, Fiction, and Dramatic scenes or monologues as we read masterful examples across genres and discuss traditional and innovative approaches. Attention to various writers’ structural choices, as well as an emphasis on Play and Experimentation are key to nurturing Flow and Invention. We will read and contemplate modern and contemporary writers with an eye and ear to how they mine memory, imagination, personal experience, mythology, history, and current events to create work that blends and shapes new paths of literary perception, adding, in the spirit of Leo Tolstoy “our light to the sum of light.” Some authors considered include Diane Seuss, Carmen Maria Machado, Anton Chekhov, Natalie Diaz, George Saunders, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Terrance Hayes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sam Shepard, Joyce Carol Oates, and others. In turn, students will demonstrate techniques observed through the writing they generate and their attention to workshopping collaboratively with fellow students. Strong focus will be on developing a basic understanding of craft, a critical vocabulary for supportive in-class discussion of Poetry, Prose, and Theater, and a sense of connection, via art, to vital personal, political & cultural forces of the past and present. Students will respond to in-class exercises and prompts designed to develop flow, innovation, and depth. Craft talks, journaling, workshops, anthology examples, theoretical writings, viewings, and great author examples stimulate discussion and inspire new student work.
Instructor: Dr. Bitting
MWF: 9:25 AM - 10:35 AM (Section 1)
MWF: 10:50 AM - 12:00 PM (Section 2)
This course fulfills the following undergraduate core requirement:
Creative Experience
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We live in an age when what is true and what is not true is blurred by spin and contested by polarizing opinions on what “really happened.” This is not anything new. This course traces the representation of truth in American culture by exploring American realism in novels and short stories written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Realism, both a literary technique and an artistic movement that aimed to represent ordinary events and experiences, arose as a challenge to romanticism and emerged in tandem with the rise of journalism, anthropology, ethnography and evolutionary science. Artists, writers, and photographers aimed to represent life truthfully and without sentimental coloring as the country encountered massive urban growth, a second Industrial Revolution, post-Reconstruction migration and a burgeoning middle class.
Instructor: Robin Miskolcze
Thursday: 3:40 - 5:20PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English Major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Histories
NEW CURRICULUM: History of Literature, Media, and Culture
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These courses show students how to analyze and practice a specific genre, form, or mode. Students will learn how genres organize verbal discourse and contribute to the meaning of texts; they will understand the ways in which genres offer horizons of expectations that may be met, modified, or subverted by texts. Students will become knowledgeable practitioners within the world of their chosen genre by writing critically about them and by experimenting creatively with them.
Instructor: Kelly Younger
Monday/Wednesday: 3:40 - 5:20PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Genres
NEW CURRICULUM: Reading and Writing Genres
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In this course, we will develop an awareness of the art of the short story, by reading short stories by a variety of writers and by writing our own fictional stories. This course assumes that the acts of reading and writing short stories inform each other, and each activity can be used to improve a student’s ability to do the other well. We will analyze the language of creative writers and literary critics and improve our ability to use the literary conventions of fiction. We will discuss conventions such as plot, character, setting, point of view, and style, and we will engage a variety of critical perspectives as we read and write short stories. You will be expected to participate in class discussion, peer response workshops, and other class activities. We will do weekly writing exercises; write an 8-10 page short story; and write a 5-7 page critical paper involving research.
Instructor: Molly Youngkin
MWF: 1:40 - 2:50PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Genres
NEW CURRICULUM: Reading and Writing Genres
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This course views “borders” as a paradoxical phenomenon in the social and cultural sense: on the one hand imagined (and to an extent practiced) as fixed demarcations between communities but also experienced as permeable sites of dynamic identity formation (something like “third spaces,” to borrow urban theorist Edward Soja’s term). There are spaces where two dominant communities collide (like galaxies sometimes do in space): Black and Latine in South Los Angeles; indigenous Mexican and Korean in Greater K-Town; Latine and Chinese in the San Gabriel Valley; Ethiopian and Jewish in the Fairfax District, etc. This course both theorizes why and how such spaces come to be, and practices them through creative narrative projects. We will study the literatures of Los Angeles that represent the "borderlands," digging deep historically and up to the present. The class includes immersive activities like field trips and community-based research projects.
Instructor: Professor Martínez
Wednesday: 6:00 - 9:20PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Comparative
NEW CURRICULUM: Race, Intersectionality, and Power
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This course is about nothing. We will examine nothing from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, including literature, film, mathematics, philosophy, theology, and art. Nothing is a potently paradoxical and productive thing to study and contemplate, leading to challenging and boundary-exploring thinking. Students will be given options to write creative and or critical work for assignments.
Instructor: Professor Harris
Thursday: 1:45 - 3:25PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical
NEW CURRICULUM: Upper-Division Elective
+ Interdisciplinary Connections core
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This course introduces students to classic stories in the modern Jewish literary canon through close reading, reflection, discussion, interpretation, evaluation, comparison, and analysis, providing students with a conceptual framework for understanding and deriving aesthetic pleasure and cultural understanding from these vivid stories. Students will gain exposure to translated fictional works originally written in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Russian and English by prominent Jewish authors. Through their study, students will learn how the breakdown of pre-modern Jewish society, immigration, the challenges of Jewish integration and exclusion, and the establishment of new Jewish communities, influenced the creation of this.
Instructor: Dr. Holli Levitsky
Thursday: 11:50AM -1:30PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Comparative
NEW CURRICULUM: Upper-Division Elective
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This course surveys children’s literature through the combined lenses of literary and educational studies. To do so, we will consider both the aesthetic and social dimensions of children’s literature, reflecting on its literary, educational, and moral role in children’s development. Class readings and discussions will cover the history and development of children’s literature as a whole, with a special emphasis on contemporary children’s fiction and its attempts to address issues of multiculturalism and interculturalism. We will also consider the tension between the capacity of children’s literature to entertain and its institutional role and value. Of central interest to us will be the concept of imagination, its value, and the ways in which literature fosters its development. Finally, participants in this course will reflect on professional and personal values and ethics as they become informed selectors, consumers, and teachers of literature for children.
Instructor: Aimee Ross-Kilroy
Monday/Wednesday: 3:40 - 5:20PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical
NEW CURRICULUM: Upper-Division Elective
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This course engages a range of materials from across the disciplines designed to cultivate a planetary perspective, an ecological awareness of the human species’ present situation, as well as its history and prospective futures. Drawing on work from diverse cultural contexts, the course centers on the notion of “cultivating” both as a practice of gardening, cultivating the earth, and a practice of personal development, cultivating one’s mind and spirit to evolve a planetary ethical, ecological perspective. The class will integrate the study of gardens as expressions of philosophies of nature and living, and we will study contemporary artists and landscape designers who create planetary perspectives by integrating cosmology and ecology in their work.
Instructor: Professor Harris
Thursday: 4:30 - 7:00PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical
NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar
Click here for complete course description (undergraduate)
This course fulfills the following English M.A. requirement:
Theory Elective
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This course explores the theory and practice of teaching writing and literature. We will investigate the history of composition studies and pedagogical approaches to better understand current trends and movements. We will consider theories of language learning and critical pedagogy, and these explorations will inform our discussion of practical issues such as grading, classroom management, and diversity. We will discuss the (sometimes problematic) relationship between teaching literature and writing. We will also focus specifically on the Jesuit Rhetorical tradition and teaching rhetoric at LMU. This course is designed for those interested in teaching literature and composition, especially graduate teaching fellows who will eventually teach in the First Year Seminar and Rhetorical Arts programs.
Instructor: Aimee Ross-Kilroy
Monday/Wednesday: 6:00 - 7:40PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical
NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar
Click here for complete course description (undergraduate)
This course fulfills the following English M.A. requirement:
Theory Elective
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The ocean has been essential to stories and storytelling for hundreds of years. Often mapped as a surface rather than a submersive space where human and non-human existences are entangled, the ocean has only recently been foregrounded by oceanic critics as crucial to our socially and ecologically connected histories and futures. This class will delve into the emergent and multi- disciplinary fields of oceanic studies and blue humanities as we examine how short stories, novels, and films by diverse authors represent the ocean, its creatures, and humanity's relationship to the watery world.
Instructor: Dr. Robin Miskolcze
Tuesday: 6:00 - 9:20PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical
NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar
Click here for complete course description (undergraduate)
This course fulfills the following English M.A. requirement:
Theory Elective
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Diverse in invention, style, arrangement, delivery, and appeals to memory, cultural rhetorics as a field of research, practice, and activism, embraces mutually supportive relationships and solidarity among diverse collectives of race, sexuality, class, and gender, among many others. While it produces research that both informs and is informed by the rhetorical tradition, it also enlarges and revises this tradition by contributing to the rhetorical practices and socio-political development and enrichment of its cultural sites of origin. In non-linear fashion, this course will provide a contemporary historical context and framework by covering selected theories from broader movements that enabled the emergence of the cultural rhetorics field; survey current research and interdisciplinary approaches that are contributing to the field’s development; and require participants to generate original seminar projects that both inform the field and enrich the communities in which participants situate their studies, projects, or original works of literary art.
Instructor: Professor Ching
Tuesday: 7:20 - 9:50PM
This course fulfills the following English M.A. requirement:
Rhetoric/Composition Theory and Practice
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Students are introduced to key concepts and critical frameworks within literary theory, rhetoric and critical cultural theory. Literary theory offers concepts and methods that help describe what is happening in literary texts and their contexts. Rhetoric offers students a range of thought, from classical understanding, such as the means of persuasion that writer or orator may use to move an audience, to more modern understandings in which rhetoric is a critique of power, a critique of ideologies that enforce distributions of power in the material world, and a critique of power that renders some communities powerful and others powerless. Critical cultural theory introduces students to the topic of power from the perspective of the vulnerable and the marginalized as articulated in critical race and ethnic studies, gender and queer theory, and postcolonial studies in order to understand how critical practices empower and challenge power.
Instructor: Dr. Ryan
Thursday: 12-3:30
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Histories
NEW CURRICULUM: Theory, Power, and Rhetoric
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This course examines Los Angeles Assemblage Art, literature, and film through the theoretical lens of assemblage. The specific meanings of assemblage as art practice, philosophical concept, and critical-urban theory will be compared as a means to make sense of the city’s cultural history. Like the sculptural constructions that first brought the city cultural attention, Los Angeles itself is similarly complex, diverse, and fractal. The diverse artists to be studied in the course Noah Purifoy, John Outterbridge, Betye Saar, and the Womanhouse/CalArts Feminist Art Program, to name a few. We will examine Watts through the work of Noah Purifoy and the Watts Rebellion, Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers of Los Angeles, and jazz musician Charles Mingus’s autobiography Beneath the Underdog. We will also study literature and theory of The Everyday with special attention to the writings and methods of George Perec.
Instructor: Professor Harris
Thursday: 4:00-7:30
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical
NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar
This course fulfills the following English M.A. requirement:
Literature/Theory Elective
Click here for complete course description
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This course approaches adaptation in two different senses: media to media and culture to culture. In both cases, we will ask questions about the nature of transformation. What is gained and what is lost in the transition? As a case study, we will focus on cinematic adaptations of Jewish literature and the ways these films reflect and shape modern Jewish experience, including issues of identity, gender, religion, persecution, immigration, and culture. The texts and films are in original English or translated from Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and other languages.
Instructor: Holli Levitsky
Thursday: 11:20-12:50
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Comparative
NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar
This course fulfills the following English M.A. requirement:
Literature/Theory Elective
Click here for complete course description
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Here’s an opportunity to try your hand at writing in several genres—prose, poetry and drama. Through reading, discussion, quizzes, and brief responses to exemplary works and literary events; writing exercises in poetry, prose, and drama (both during and outside of class), and in drafting, workshopping and revising creative pieces, you’ll draft and craft your work for inclusion in a final portfolio, developing greater skill in responding constructively and imaginatively to your own writing and that of fellow students, while gaining knowledge of key concepts and greater critical acumen.
Instructor: Sarah Mclay
MWF: 10:50 - 12:00PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate core requirement
Creative Experience
Click here for complete course description
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Introduction to Fiction is a Creative Experience university Core course introducing strategies for creating fiction and writing about it as critics. As members of a literary community, participants develop the language to analyze fiction critically and academically. As practicing writers, participants create original works of fiction and analyze the form and technique involved in composing fiction. As we read, write, and analyze fiction, we also consider the role fictions play in shaping culture, and how they are shaped by it.
Instructor: Dr. Robin Miskolcze
SECTION ONE: T/R 1:45PM - 3:25PM
SECTION TWO: T/R 3:40PM - 5:20PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate core requirement
Creative Experience
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Creativity Through Constraints invites students to experience ways in which imposing constraints on writing literary texts produces innovative, original, and creative work. We will do close readings of a range of writers characterized by unique experiments with constraint-based production, including members of the Oulipo group (Workshop for Potential Literature) based in Paris. The philosophy of the Oulipo is that constraints liberate the writer’s imagination, and induce writers to explore the possibilities of literature in ways they would never expect or accomplish otherwise. Students will study the different kinds of constraints the Oulipo have used and then engage in creating texts under constraints they get to choose. The overarching goal of the course is to induce students to experience literary creativity in both reading and writing texts. You must be prepared to read painstakingly, think analytically, and write attentively in this course. This class is a workshop, defined as a place where an artisan practices applied techniques and produces and delivers particular goods. The encompassing ethos of this class emphasizes experimentation and rigorous play. Challenging oneself to do difficult things, including reading complex texts and writing original works, takes one into new, unexpected territories.
Instructor: Professor Harris
MWF 10:50AM - 12:00 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate core requirement:
Creative Experience
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Modernist writer Virginia Woolf said that “on or about December 1910, human character changed.” This course focuses on changes and continuities between the British Victorians (1837-1901) and Moderns (1901-1941) to show how literature and media can be analyzed in its historical context and how they influence cultural attitudes. In looking at the Victorians, we will examine literature and media within contexts such as work and poverty, faith and doubt, empire and race, and the politics of gender. In looking at the Moderns, we will examine literature and media within contexts such as Irish independence, World War I, the rise of psychology, the modern landscape, and World War II. While this course aims to show the depth of literature and media by Victorians and Moderns, the texts we will examine should be thought of as representative examples of a complex cultural tradition.
Instructor: Molly Youngkins
MW 9:55AM - 11:35AM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English Major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Histories
NEW CURRICULUM: History of Literature, Media, and Culture
Click here for complete course description
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This course will introduce students to literary and cultural history by focusing on Irish and British literature and culture from 1945 to the present. These were years of profound cultural and political change in both countries and we will consider the role of literature and culture in turbulent times that witnessed the shrinking of the British Empire; the transition of Britain to a multicultural welfare state; and Ireland’s transition from a country that was largely Catholic and rural to a country whose identity is increasingly secular and urban. Much of the course will explore the two nations’ complex and changing relationship, expressed most tragically in the armed conflict in Northern Ireland.
Instructor: Dr. Ryan
Tuesday/Thursday 9:55AM - 11:35AM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English Major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Histories
NEW CURRICULUM: History of Literature, Media, and Culture
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This course will explore a genre termed geo-fictions, a strand of ecological-themed fiction where geological forces, or even the Earth itself, are central actants of the plot. These works depict a deeply interconnected world where humans lose some of their privileged status and become enmeshed with other presences in the text (animals, plants, environments). Developing an understanding of the genre’s parameters will widen our understanding of the possibilities of fiction and its potential purposes within a rapidly changing planetary situation. Drawing on a range of critical work and fiction from diverse cultural contexts, the course will center on different ways in which specific texts imagine and facilitate a planetary ethical, ecological perspective.
Instructor: Professor Harris
MWF 3:05 PM - 4:15 PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Genres
NEW CURRICULUM: Reading and Writing Genres
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This course will introduce students to the genre of the pastoral and its related mode pastoralism, both of which represent life in the country, drawing an implicit or explicit contrast with urban life. It will be this course’s contention that Americans throughout history have relied on pastoralism as an indispensable conceptual apparatus—a fundamental tool for organizing and participating in reality. This course will treat pastoralism as a cultural grammar that Americans unconsciously and consciously employ to understand what it means to be American and to navigate fundamental questions of class, race, sexuality, and gender. We will analyze pastoralism as it appears in literature, film, music, and cultural politics more broadly.
Instructor: Dr. Ryan
Tuesday/Thursday 11:50AM - 1:30PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirements:
OLD CURRICULUM: Genres
NEW CURRICULUM: Reading and Writing Genres
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Devils and werewolves, saints who walled themselves inside churches, and a Queen who never married: England in the pivotal years from 1450-1650 saw upheaval, radical transformation, and imaginative anomalies. This course covers 200 years of transition from the English middle ages to the early modern. This course will examine literature of this time period through the lenses of religion, politics, and the adaptation of previous forms and tropes to a new era.
Instructor: Dr. Aimee Ross-Kilroy
MW 9:55AM - 10:50AM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English Major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical
NEW CURRICULUM: Pre-1800
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This interdisciplinary course encourages students to reflect on the meaning of the desert as it has been conceived in the literatures of ancient Christian monasticism and contemporary contemplative practice; through the art, literature and politics of the American West and Borderlands; and as a site of ecological sublimity, complexity, and precarity. We will explore the varied meanings of the desert in diverse historical and cultural moments and ask what it means not just to imagine but also inhabit the desert today. These inquiries have real implications for what it means to inhabit the world with some sense of meaning and purpose—both in the profound sense of individual spiritual development as well as the pursuit of social and environmental justice. Into the Desert seeks to entwine these threads through close readings across genres as well as through embodied experience: a key class activity is a field trip into the desert itself.
Instructor: Rubén Martínez/Douglas Christie
Tuesday 6:00PM – 9:20PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English Major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Comparative
NEW CURRICULUM: Race, Intersectionality, and Power
+ Interdisciplinary Connections core & Engaged Learning Flag
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Through this workshop, students will learn to appreciate the fundamentals of writing for stage and screen; to comprehend and use the language of theater, film, and television; to hone the skill of reading and interpreting scripts; to think dramatically about the ways we look at ourselves, each other, and the world around us; to construct compelling, entertaining, and commercially viable scripts; to analyze the subtle but profound differences between plays, screenplays, and teleplays with an eye toward adaptation; to prepare for a possible future in writing for stage and screen; and to foster a life-long love of storytelling through theater, film, and television.
Instructor: Kelly Younger
Monday: 6:00PM - 9:20PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirements:
OLD CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry
NEW CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry
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This is an advanced poetry writing workshop that focuses on exploring the imaginative possibilities of the art form, with special emphases on metaphor, persona, surrealism and “leaping poetry.” Students will write original poetry, read and write about books of contemporary poetry, workshop the poetry of other students, revise their own poetry, and put together portfolios of original, revised poetry.
Instructor: Sarah Maclay
MWF 3:05PM – 4:15PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English Major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry
NEW CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry
Clcik here for complete course description
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This course will delve deep into the sciences, scholarly sub-disciplines, and related critical/theoretical arts used to facilitate the understanding of the physical books, manuscripts, scrolls, and other objects that preserved the first examples of literature in English from between 500 and 1500 years ago. Students will gain access to new skills that can radicalize their critical interpretations of sometimes familiar texts like Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Malory’s Morte Darthur, or The Book of Margery Kempe. These skills can also be translated to modern endeavors such as publishing, library sciences, law, advanced graduate study, even law-enforcement.
Instructor: Professor Shepherd
MW: 7:55 - 9:35PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English Major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Comparative
NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar
This course fulfills the following English M.A. requirement:
Literature Elective
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In this course we will consider what fiction does besides (or in addition to) "tell a story." We will pay attention to language and the nature of meaning making as it is shared between reading and writing, and we will ask what fiction can be "about" other than "what happens." Ultimately, in reading fiction and in writing our own, we will explore how fiction asks questions and question the distinction between critical and creative discourse.
Instructor: Professor Krause
Tuesday/Thursday: 7:55 - 9:35PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English Major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry
NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar
This course fulfills the following English M.A. requirement:
Creative Writing Course
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In this seminar, you will research and write a substantial original project. Creative, critical, and hybrid projects are welcome. The form/genre of your project may be a creative dramatic, fictional, or poetic work; a critical essay about literature, rhetoric or theory; or a hybrid work that combines creative and critical elements, uses visual and written media, etc. In consultation with Prof. Youngkin and your peers, you will construct an appropriate reading list for your project, learn how to write professional documents such as project descriptions and abstracts, write multiple drafts of your project, and present your project to others at the end of the semester.
Instructor: Molly Youngkin
MW: 1:45 - 3:25PM
This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:
OLD CURRICULUM: Specialization
NEW CURRICULUM: Capstone Seminar (Creative and Critical)
Click here for complete course description