Fall 2026 Undergraduate English Courses

01   CAC   MW4    12142    AIELLO    MU-212 The Norman Conquest! In the year 1066, a fleet of warships from Normandy, led by a duke, crossed the English Channel and forever changed the laws, landscapes, and literatures of England. The Norman victory transformed this duke into a king – William I of England, William the Conqueror – and began more than two centuries of French rule over England: colonial occupation, mass violence, forced transformation, and the suppression and denigration of the English language...

01   TF2    CAC  12143     NOVACICH    MU-204 Dream Visions In Medieval Dream Visions we will read a number of celebrated works – including poetry by Chaucer and the Pearl-poet – to consider what kinds of special knowledge, play, or experimental thinking dreams were understood to enable in the Middle Ages. Most of these works will be in Middle English, and so we will move slowly in order to read them in the original and to become more familiar with the poetic sensibilities of a different age. Assignments will...

01   CAC  MW4  12163      KLEIN    ABW-2100    This course is an intensive study of Old English, the language written and spoken in England from approximately 450 to 1100 AD. The goal of the course is to give students the basic skills necessary to read and interpret Old English texts. We will examine a variety of poetic and prose writings, including Old English alliterative shorter poems dealing with exile, gender roles, and early medieval cults of the cross; chronicles and historical narratives designed to...

01   CAC   MW5   12164    AIELLO  HC-S120  Reading Medieval Manuscripts What if your textbook was over 750 years old? What would happen if you read a piece of early literature not as an isolated text printed in a modern paperback, but as it originally existed: hand-written (“manu”-“script”), artistically constructed, and sharing the page with other supposedly random texts? This seminar introduces students to the vibrant world of medieval manuscripts through one remarkable thirteenth-century manuscript,...