2017—2018 English Graduate Course Archive

ENGL 5001 – Research Methods
John Bugg
CRN 13250
An introduction to English studies at the graduate level emphasizing 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.

ENGL 5104 – Natural History and Ecology
Julie Kim
CRN 33279
This course will examine the genre of natural history, which flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially as Europeans engaged in ambitious projects of empire-building that brought them into contact with thousands of new plants and animals. Prior to the development of anthropology as a distinct discipline, natural histories also included within their purview the description of non-European peoples. We will think about how natural histories portrayed environments and the relationship between human and non-human actors. We will also read recent works from the fields of ecocriticism and ecology to think about the meaning and value of studying natural history today.

ENGL 5115 – Graduate Internship Seminar
Corey McEleney
CRN 33500
Seminar designed for graduate students engaged in a professionally relevant internship during the semester that the seminar is offered.

ENGL 5141 – African American Autobiography
Dennis Tyler
CRN 33280
This course explores how Black writers use their lived experiences to shape political discourses and to interrogate the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability. Considering slave narratives, memoirs, personal essays, and lyrics alongside conventional autobiographies, this class examines how and why Black writers have chosen to write their own stories as well as what is at stake in their autobiographical writings. Some writers may include William and Ellen Craft, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Claudia Rankine, Janet Mock, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

ENGL 5718 – Modern Language Politics
Rebecca Sanchez
CRN 33281
Early twentieth century literature and theory was preoccupied with the relationship between language and politics, from the acknowledgement of minority and non-standard linguistic forms, to questions over the relationship between violence and language (whether or not, to paraphrase Adorno, one can write poetry after Auschwitz), to the idea of literary form itself enacting a kind of political resistance. In this course, we will analyze some of the competing philosophies about language circulating during this period and interrogate how modernist writers responded and contributed to these discussions.

ENGL 5985– Introduction to Early Modern Studies
Mark Caldwell
CRN 33282
An introduction to the major debates, conversations, and approaches in early modern studies, with a focus on what it means to define and contribute to a field, how canons are formed, and what constitutes evidence for a literary-critical argument. Students will be exposed to, and gain practice in, a variety of methodological strategies and techniques: close reading and rhetorical analysis, archival research, theoretical and interdisciplinary work, and textual editing, among others.

ENGL 6004 – Colloquium: Pedagogy Theory/Practicum
Moshe Gold/Anne Fernald
CRN 13269
Required 10th course for PhD Students. To register, contact the graduate administrator after receiving a passing grade in the first part of the Practicum, ENGL 5999. Once students receive a grade of Pass for ENGL 5999, they will be approved to take the second part of the course in the fall semester (when English PhD students begin to teach). The second part, ENGL 6004 Colloquium: Pedagogy Theory/Practicum (taken in the fall of the English PhD student's 3rd year), introduces students to different pedagogical approaches and methods.

ENGL 6224 – French of England: Texts and Literacies in a Multilingual Culture
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
CRN 33283
French of England helps prepare graduates in medieval literature and history to deploy multilingual paradigms for the study of medieval English and related cultures.  It looks at the rich and still under-researched francophone corpus (c. 1000 literary texts and large bodies of documentary records) of medieval England from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. A major regional and transnational language, French was used in English and European literature, governance, administration, culture, trade, and the professions. Taking this into account changes our paradigms for literary history and prompts new thought about the relations between literature, literacy, and language.  The course aims to move as rapidly as possible from the pains of language-learning to the pleasures of reading text, and combines a weekly linguistic practicum with a literary seminar, running from 5.30 to 8.30pm on Tuesdays.   Previous experience of Old French is not required; basic reading or speaking of modern French is useful; experience with other languages is also sometimes enough of a help. If in doubt about whether your language experiences will be helpful, please email [email protected]

ENGL 6231 – Late Medieval Women
Mary Erler
CRN 33284
The course will study women as producers and consumers of literature, that is as writers and readers. Instead of examining women as subjects of literary representation, we will use non-literary disciplines--social history, bibliography, iconography--to recover elements of women's lives in order to understand their involvement with reading. Like much current medieval scholarship, the class will employ cultural perspectives in which literature, history, and visual materials illuminate each other.

ENGL 6905 – Concepts of Culture
Glenn Hendler
CRN 33286
What do we talk about when we talk about "culture"? This class will explore this keyword in and around literary studies along two parallel tracks. First, we will explore the historical development of different concepts of culture over the last two centuries or so. Second, we will explore a range of theoretical perspectives from the past three decades that fit loosely under the rubric of Cultural Studies. Both tracks will necessitate broadly interdisciplinary approaches to the topic. We will explore, for instance, a relatively literary manifestation of the concept in Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, but also how the concept of culture figures in the early history of the human sciences, including anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Similarly, since work in the contemporary field of Cultural Studies only rarely limits its objects of study to the literary; we will sample theoretical developments in the study of popular music, film and television, etc.

ENGL 8935 – Dissertation Seminar
Corey McEleney
CRN 19290
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. Attention will also be given to the preparation of material for academic publication.

ENGL 8936 – Academic Issues 
John Bugg
CRN 14025
This 0-credit seminar is open to all doctoral students. For Fall 2017 we will focus on the academic job market and academic publishing: students currently on the job market (or those soon to be), as well as those who wish to prepare an article for publication, are encouraged to sign up.

ENGL 8996 – Master’s Capstone 
Corey McEleney
CRN 19758
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.
 

Spring 2018

ENGL 5002 – Critical Theory
Larry Kramer
CRN 27431
A representative sampling of key theoretical studies from roughly the past seventy-five years. After reading a series of now classic essays to lay a foundation, the course will consider closely the writings of a small number of influential thinkers, possibly including Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zizek, among others.

ENGL 5115 – Graduate Internship Seminar
Corey McEleney
CRN 31422
Seminar designed for graduate students engaged in a professionally relevant internship during the semester that the seminar is offered.

ENGL 5210 – Introduction to Old Norse Language and Literature
Martin Chase
CRN 32381
The course will involve both an introduction to Old Norse language and the study of representative works from a variety of genres: historical prose, saga prose, and hagiography, as well as eddic poetry (wisdom, myth, legend) and the encomiastic poetry of the skalds. Readings will be partly in Old Norse, partly in translation. We will attempt to situate the texts in their medieval cultural context (analogues in English, French, German, and Latin literature), and we will spend some time on Old Norse paleography and codicology so that students can better appreciate their material context. There is no prerequisite for the course and no prior knowledge is assumed, but students should be aware that the course will involve language study.

ENGL 5225 – Jane Austen in Context
Susan Greenfield
CRN 32382
In this course we will read all of Jane Austen’s major novels. There are three central goals. The first one is simply to enjoy Austen’s writing (as unsophisticated as that may sound). The second is to consider the historical contexts (political, social and economic) that helped shape her prose. And the third is to survey and analyze some of the recent trends in Austen scholarship, which will, ideally, aid you in developing your own critical skills.

MVST/ENGL 5300 – Occitania: Language and Power
Nicholas Paul / Thomas O'Donnell
CRN 34027
This team-taught interdisciplinary course introduces students to the cultural world of a medieval "south": Occitania, a region defined by language stretching from the foothills of the Alps to the pathways across the Pyrenees and from the Mediterranean almost to the Loire. Students will study the Old Occitan language and its manifestations in documentary writing, historical narrative, and the poetry of the troubadours from the eleventh until the thirteenth centuries. In order to best understand the context for this literature, course topics will include urban and rural communities, gender and power, the Albigensian crusade and its aftermath, and the beginning of vernacular book production.

ENGL 5801 – Anatomy of a Bestseller
Mary Bly
CRN 32383
The class will deconstruct bestsellers in different genres, looking at the process from proposal, editing, finished manuscript and on to covers, marketing and promotion. Students will also develop their own bestseller project over the semester.

ENGL 5845 – Early American Novel 
Lenny Cassuto
CRN 32384
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.

ENGL 5999 – Colloquium: Pedagogy Theory/Practice
Moshe Gold/Anne Fernald
CRN 17980
The required 10th course for English PhD students consists of sequenced pedagogy training spanning two semesters. ENGL 5999 is the first part of the Teaching Practicum, which is to be taken in the spring of English PhD students’ 2nd Year. This part of the course is taken in the Spring (before teaching), and includes individual interviews, assignment of written work and practice teaching. Each student will have a mentor, complete a portfolio of materials, and create multiple assignments. This part of the course is graded as pass or fail. Once students pass the first part of the course in the Spring semester, they will be approved to take the second part of the course in the Fall semester - when English PhD students begin to teach. This part of the "Colloquium" introduces students to different pedagogical approaches and methods. The second part of the course is registered as ENGL 6004 Colloquium: Pedagogy Theory/Practicum.

ENGL 6104 – Crip, Queer, and Critical Race Theory
Rebecca Sanchez
CRN 34783
This seminar will examine cutting-edge work in critical race, crip and queer theories and their intersections in order to prepare you to both intervene in these discourses and effectively engage with them in your analysis of literary texts. We will consider critical embodiment in works drawn from a range of historical periods and genres. Likely writers to be considered include José Esteban Muñoz, Eli Clare, Indra Sinha, Mel Chen, Ellen and William Craft, Robert McRuer, Roderick Ferguson, Jasbir Puar, and Alison Kafer.

ENGL 7007 – PhD Seminar: Displacing the Renaissance: Travel, Race, and Colonialism
Corey McEleney
CRN 34264
This course examines how writing of the English Renaissance—in the forms of travel narratives, prose fiction, poetry, and plays—grapples with the shifting nature of English national identity as it comes into contact (and conflict) with foreign locales, bodies, languages, and texts. How have scholars conceptualized notions of nation, race, ethnicity, and empire in the early modern period? And how have literary texts been read in relation to the rise of English colonialism during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras? In addition to some foundational texts in race studies and postcolonial theory, authors to be read are likely to include Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Philip Massinger, among others.

ENGL 8935– Dissertation Writing Seminar 
John Bugg
CRN 15661
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. Attention will also be given to the preparation of material for academic publication.

ENGL 8999 – Master’s Capstone 
Corey McEleney
CRN 20785
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.