English Graduate Current Courses

2024 - 2025 Graduate Courses

For English Website

All English graduate courses are held on the Rose Hill campus unless otherwise specified. Undergraduate English Majors in their senior year are welcome to request admission to the 5000-level graduate courses listed below.

If you’d like to take one of these courses, please include the specific course(s) in which you are interested and email [email protected]. 

Spring 2025

ENGL 5125: Hybrid Forms and Literary Liminality (Wednesdays 11:30 AM – 2:00 PM)
Meghan Dahn
With each development in printing and publishing technology, our understanding of what literature can be shifts. Much of what we study when we study literature is intricately tied to the economic means of production and distribution of that literature. Even as commercial and generic pressures influence what people write, experimental forms innovate at the fringes. In this course we will come to a deeper understanding of the ways in which hybrid forms, multimedia writing, and experimental texts have developed alongside the publishing industry in the 20th- and 21st-centuries. We will consider a wide range of authors such as Claudia Rankine, Teju Cole, Roland Barthes, Wanda Coleman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Carolina Ebeid, Anne Carson, Kate Zambreno, and others. Students will work on two main projects: one will take a familiar scholarly form, the other will deliberately challenge the typical forms of scholarly production.
CRN 51709
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Fulfills H3, DI

ENGL 5133: Fiction and Other Art Forms (Fridays, 2:30 – 5:00 p.m. at Lincoln Center)
 Stacey D’Erasmo
Neither the writing nor the reading of fiction happens in an aesthetic vacuum. We read, watch, listen, feel, and even taste all manner of other art forms, and these experiences inspire us, move us, and often find their way into what and how we write. In this course, we will explore the influence of music, the visual arts, film, architecture, and the internet on the fiction we read and write, and vice versa. Authors may include Sofia Samatar, Ali Smith, Gaston Bachelard, Toni Morrison, and Albert Murray.
CRN 50751
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ENGL 5211: Introduction to Old English Language and Literature (Mondays, 2:30 – 5:00 p.m.)
Thomas O’Donnell
This course is an introduction to Old English language and literature. Old English was spoken in Britain from the 7th to the 12th centuries and was the language in which Beowulf was composed. Students will receive a comprehensive introduction to the language and will read a representative selection of prose and poetry in the original language, including The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, works by King Alfred, short poems and selections from Beowulf. Students will gain experience reading from medieval manuscripts as well as from printed editions.
CRN 50752
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Fulfills H1

ENGL 5634: Modernists/Victorians (Mondays, 5:30 – 8:00 p.m.)
 Christopher GoGwilt
This course examines landmarks of Victorian literature and transatlantic English modernism, exploring breaks and continuities between Victorian and Modernist writers. Covering major texts from the 1840s to the 1940s, the course will also consider theoretical arguments about the status of the "classic" in literary history, and specifically as these define the fields of Victorian studies, modernism, modernity, and the classifications of "English" and "American" literature.
CRN 50753
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Fulfills H3

ENGL 5717: Transatlantic Women Modernists (Thursdays, 2:30 – 5:00 p.m.)
 Anne Fernald
This class looks at gender and modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. We will read a generous selection of women modernists, canonical and noncanonical, representing high modernism and “bad modernism” (to use Mao and Walkowitz’s term), fiction, film, and poetry from the first half of the 20th century. Our transatlantic focus offers a special opportunity to examine multicultural and cosmopolitan modernisms: many women writers in this period were travelers and immigrants. We will also analyze the complex and often fraught relationships among feminist criticism, feminist theory, and theories of modernism, both in the early 20th century and today. Authors include: Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Elizabeth Bishop, Una Marson, Jean Rhys, Bessie Smith, and Virginia Woolf.
CRN 50754
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Fulfills H3, DI

ENGL 5845: Early American Novel (Tuesdays, 5:30 – 8:00 p.m.)
 Leonard Cassuto
This course will sketch the tradition of the American novel from its beginnings through the Civil War. To that end, we’ll be reading a selection of representative early American novels—representative, that is, of the way that we view the history of the American novel today. We’ll be reading with several goals in mind. First, we will consider the way that the American novel comes into being: what literary categories it draws upon, and how. We will also trace the ways that American novels came to be valued (some more than others), in their own time and ours. And we will consider different ways of reading early American novels, employing approaches old and new. Authors range from traditional canonical standards such as Hawthorne and Melville to more recent additions to the tradition like Lydia Maria Child and William Wells Brown.
CRN 50755
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Fulfills H2, DI

ENGL 5115: Internship Seminar (Tutorial) TBA
 This seminar is open to graduate students pursuing internships in publishing, museum management, or arts administration during the spring 2021 semester. Please contact the Director of Graduate Studies to make sure that your internship qualifies for course credit.
CRN 44277

ENGL 5998: MA Capstone (Tutorial) TBA
 Required course for MA students who wish to fulfill the Capstone assignment. Please contact the DGS if you are unsure about which semester would be best for your Capstone completion.
CRN 45053

ENGL 5999: THEORY AND PRACTICE OF TEACHING WRITING (Wednesdays, 5:30-8:00 p.m.)
Crystal Colombini
This course builds on the foundation developed in ENGL 5999 by delving into research-supported best practices for preparing students for diverse writing contexts. Readings and discussions will highlight writing and teaching strategies that support students' critical thinking and writing skills, covering topics related to primary and secondary research, information literacy, discourse and disciplinary communities, rhetorical and audience analysis, multimodal composition, effective response and assessment strategies, cognitive scaffolding and assignment design, and more.
CRN 44282

ENGL 8935: Dissertation Seminar (Thursdays, 5:30-8:00 p.m.)
 Frank Boyle
This 0-credit seminar is designed as a resource for all doctoral students who have passed the comprehensive exam. Students working on the dissertation proposal are encouraged to take this class. During each meeting students will present and respond to work in progress. Across the semester, the seminar will treat challenges of bibliographic research and strategies of effective writing specific to large projects.
CRN 44283
Required for all PhD students preparing the dissertation prospectus.

Fall 2024

ENGL 5027: To Bear Witness: Poetry & Social Justice (Wednesdays, 12:00 - 2:00 p.m. at Lincoln Center)
Elisabeth Frost 
How do we practice writing poetry as witnesses of our time? In her important 1993 anthology Against Forgetting, Carolyn Forché defines “poetry of witness” as writing that serves as evidence, voicing resistance against political violence or trauma. Since the 1990s, a revival of documentary poetics and a transformed media landscape have widened our sense of “witness.” In this workshop, we will explore a range of modes and strategies that allow us, as poets, to engage with challenging material, whether historical or contemporary. Together, we will imagine and create an ethical poetics of witness.
CRN 52094
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ENGL 5120: Im/Possible Worlds: Race, Social Difference, Speculative Fiction, And North American Writers of Color (Fridays, 2:30 - 5:00 p.m. at Lincoln Center)
Stephen Sohn 
This course will focus on speculative fiction (penned by North American writers of color)—potentially including popular genres such as graphic narrative, young adult novels—that have often been dismissed as lowbrow or uncultured. We will reconsider them in light of their aesthetic complexity, political texture, racial and social differences, and popular constructs such as aliens, magical objects, vampires, and associated motifs and figures. Course selections may include: Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, Nidhi Chanani’s Pashmina, Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti, Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Certain Dark Things.
CRN 52095
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Fulfills H3, DI

ENGL 5650: Special Topics in Writing Studies (Thursdays, 5:30 - 8:00 p.m.)
Elisabeth Buck 
This course will survey selected issues in writing studies, with an emphasis on intersectionality. Possible topics including public writing, community writing, theories in writing program administration, WAC/WID, all with attention to the needs of increasingly diverse university settings. May be repeated when topics vary but not more than 2 courses (6 credits) may be applied to the certificate.
CRN 52124
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Fulfills DI, Rhetoric & Writing Adv Cert

ENGL 6108: The Dynamics of Space and Place: Early Modern and Other English Texts (Mondays, 2:30 - 5:00 p.m.)
 Heather Dubrow 
Who "owns" the forest in As You Like It or the island in The Tempest or the spaceship in Vonnegut's Slaughter-House Five -- and how and why does ownership take different forms in such terrains? How do concepts of space and place interact with cultural issues (e.g., gender, subjectivity etc.) as well as formal issues such as the workings of stanzas and genres? We'll discuss these and many other questions primarily in relation to early modern writings (in the sense of ones composed between about 1500-1660) but with several opportunities to engage with texts from other periods as well. While our primary focus will be academic careers, the course will also offer preparation for some other possible careers and will include the option of a creative project. We will also expand and deepen expertise in challenges like teaching and oral presentations at conferences and elsewhere (we'll have a course mini-conference).
CRN 52097
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Fulfills H2

ENGL 6235: Medieval Travel Narrative (Tuesdays, 11:30 - 2:00 p.m.)
Suzanne Yeager 
Some of the most engaging questions about the Middle Ages have to do with the narratives of cultures in contact. Join me and other scholars who work on the medieval travel genre, finding in its discourses productive sites for exploration of premodern race, gender, religion, and more. This course will focus on a range of traditions, including crusade romances, such as "Richard, Coeur de Lion" in light of contemporary chronicler, Roger of Howden’s, "Chronica." Pilgrim and merchant narratives, from Egeria to Margery Kempe, and Mandeville to Marco Polo, will provide a contrast to romance and chronicle modes. We will also study the accounts by European missionaries who left extensive records of their interactions with Mongols. This course is designed to contextualize travel within the medieval world as we read and discuss those narratives as they relate to cultural projects of salvation, conquest, and conversion.
CRN 52098
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Fulfills H1, DI

ENGL 6769: Finnegans Wake (Mondays, 5:30 - 8:00 p.m.)
Moshe Gold 
One of the most intriguing and entertaining literary works ever crafted, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake sends us on seriously hilarious trips around the world, through human (especially Irish) history, and into the sleeping mind. Joyce’s “Book of the Night,” a comic masterpiece, constructs not one thing, but "two thinks at a time," multiple meanings that uproariously cross national, linguistic, sexual, historical—just about all kinds of—boundaries. A resurrection of dead ends that generates new beginnings (finn--again), this “collideorscape” asks readers to "wipe their glosses with what they know,” and revolutionizes all kinds of creative energies and theoretical discourses. Sometimes it makes sense; sometimes it doesn't. Nearly always though, things emerge that charm, surprise, and delight.
CRN 52099
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 Fulfills H3, DI

ENGL 5001: Research Methods (Tuesdays, 2:30 - 5:00 p.m.)
Julie Kim
An introduction to English studies at the graduate level, emphasizing bibliography, scholarly writing, and critical intervention. Although the emphasis of the course will vary according to the aims of the instructor, areas covered may also include book history, textual editing, historical research, and other issues of professional concern to graduate students.

CRN 13250
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Required for all incoming PhD students.

ENGL 5115: Internship Seminar (Tutorial)
Maria Farland
This seminar is open to graduate students pursuing internships in publishing, museum management, or arts administration during the spring 2021 semester. Please contact the Director of Graduate Studies to make sure that your internship qualifies for course credit.
CRN 44277
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ENGL 5998 Master’s Capstone (Thursdays, 2:30 - 5:00 p.m.)
Maria Farland
Seminar for MA students who wish to fulfill the Capstone requirement (note: the Capstone requirement may also be fulfilled, as an independent study, during the spring or summer semesters. Please contact the DGS if you are unsure about which semester would be best for your Capstone completion.
CRN 45455
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ENGL 6004: Colloquium: Pedagogy Theory Practicum (Tuesdays, 5:30 PM - 8:00 p.m.)
Caitlin Cawley
This course introduces students to central histories, issues, and debates in writing and rhetorical studies. By highlighting key theoretical and terminological developments, this course lays the way for informed self-reflective practice based in awareness of the most current scholarly work in rhetoric and composition, thereby helping participants start to define their own identities as teachers of first-year composition as well as literature and other courses.
CRN 13269
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ENGL 8935: Dissertation Seminar (Thursdays, 5:30 - 8:00 p.m.)
Maria Farland 
This 0-credit seminar is designed as a resource for all doctoral students who have passed the comprehensive exam. Students working on the dissertation proposal are encouraged to take this class. During each meeting students will present and respond to work in progress. Across the semester, the seminar will treat challenges of bibliographic research and strategies of effective writing specific to large projects.
CRN 40212
 Required for all PhD students preparing the dissertation prospectus.
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ENGL 8936: Issues In Scholarship and Academia (Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.)
Andrew Albin
This 0-credit seminar, open to all doctoral students, provides a forum in which to discuss the issues that shape the pursuit of a career professing literature as well as the pursuit of a career outside of the academy. The semester will provide opportunities for workshopping writing-in-process in a collaborative and supportive environment, and for directed conversation on varied aspects of the academic professionalization.
CRN 14025
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