Fall 2026 Undergraduate English Courses

01  TTH4    CAC  12155   SHOCKLEY  MU-111  Black Poetry: Black Women / Radical Writing Poetry is the most capacious genre of literature, some would argue, because there is almost nothing you can’t do under its banner. Poets can tell stories, record experience, recount history, imagine the future, sing, theorize, show us new ways of seeing the world, question the status quo, express emotion, entertain us and make us laugh, offer political critique, and so much more, as poets since Sappho’s day have...

01  CAC   MW5   12156   MATHES  MU-211 This course examines how the literary form of the novel has developed throughout the black world—within the U.S., and across transnational and diasporic contexts. The arc of our survey moves from William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or the President’s Daughter (1853), the first novel published by a black American through novels focusing on and/or published in Haiti, Nigeria, Jamaica, and the UK. The assignments, lectures, and discussions in the class will focus on...

01  MW5   CAC  12157    KERNAN    SC-207 This course provides students with both exposure to some of the seminal texts of the and with the interpretive tools needed to situate those texts in their respective contemporary contexts: literary, political, and international. We will consider issues like: How did the contemporary politics and material conditions of production that surrounded the creation of Harlem Renaissance texts inform their aesthetics? How did Africa-American authors to the “triple...

01 TTH5   CAC   12167   WALLACE    HC-S126 Afro-Ecologies: Nature Writing and the African American Imagination This seminar brings to light a tradition of African American literature that is concerned to explore the relationship of African American cultural life with nature. We shall study prose and poetry from the nineteenth century to the present in order to map the ways African American writers in slavery and freedom voiced black environmental thought creatively. A significant feature of our...