Fall 2026 Undergraduate English Courses

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,...

01   CAC   TTH4     12166     IANNINI    ABE-2250  This seminar will provide an intensive introduction to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. The bulk of the semester will be devoted to a patient and careful reading of the novel itself, tracing some of the key philosophical, aesthetic, and political questions that animate the book, including the relationship between fate, chance and free-will as forces governing the shape and pattern of individual lives, between nationalism and cosmopolitanism as impulses...

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...

01   TF3  CAC   12168    MANGHARAM     HC-S120 How does the study of postcolonial literatures help us understand the impact of colonialism on our planetary climate? After all, the extractive and finance capitalism that continues to devastate our planet was forcibly spread all over the world through colonialism, carrying with it hierarchical ideas about the way humans relate to the world, their environments, and to each other. If our planetary climate crisis has its roots in colonialism, how can...

01   MW5    CAC   12193   MCGILL   AB-2200   Since its importation into England in the mid-16th century, the sonnet has become the preeminent poetic genre for exploring the conjunction of love and power.  In this class, we will study the history of the sonnet and bring our growing understanding of this compact poetic form to bear on a number of large questions in poetic theory. Our sustained study of the sonnet will give us a testing ground for a number of theories about the nature of lyric poetry: do short...