2024—2025 Graduate Course Archive

Fall 2024

ENGL 5027:  To Bear Witness: Poetry & Social Justice 
Elisabeth Frost
CRN 52094
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.
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ENGL 5120:  Im/Possible Worlds: Race, Social Difference, Speculative Fiction, And North American Writers of Color
Stephen Sohn
CRN 52095
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.
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Fulfills H3, DI

ENGL 5650:  Special Topics in Writing Studies
Elisabeth Buck
CRN 52124
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.
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Fulfills DI, Rhetoric & Writing Adv Cert

ENGL 6108: The Dynamics of Space and Place: Early Modern and Other English Texts
Heather Dubrow
CRN 52097
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).
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Fulfills H2

ENGL 6235:  Medieval Travel Narrative
Suzanne Yeager
CRN 52098
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.
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Fulfills H1, DI

ENGL 6769:  Finnegans Wake
Moshe Gold
CRN 52099
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.
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Fulfills H3, DI

ENGL 5001: Research Methods
Julie Kim
CRN 13250
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
CRN 44277
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.
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ENGL 5998 Master’s Capstone
Maria Farland
CRN 45455
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.
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ENGL 6004: Colloquium: Pedagogy Theory Practicum
Caitlin Cawley
CRN 13269
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.
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ENGL 8935: Dissertation Seminar
Maria Farland
CRN 40212
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.

Required for all PhD students preparing the dissertation prospectus.
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ENGL 8936: Issues In Scholarship and Academia
Andrew Albin
CRN 14025
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.
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