Spring 2026 Undergraduate English Courses

MA  MTH3   CAC  12243  CAPONEGRO   MU-303 Writing Lab: AI and Media Exploration Looking to grow as a writer and communicator? Whether you are a confident storyteller with a project in mind, a STEM student aiming to sharpen your communication skills, or simply curious about new and effective ways to express ideas, this class is for you. In this mini-course we will experiment with a variety of platforms and media, from manual printing presses and handmade inks to audio storytelling, visual rhetoric, and...

01  TTH5   CAC   12244   MCGILL    MU-114  Edgar Allan Poe is widely known as an innovator or inventor of a number of popular genres:  the locked-room mystery, science fiction, the gothic tale, and the newspaper hoax.  But he has also had a huge impact on more elite literary and cultural pursuits:  his writing was central to the development of Symbolist poetry, modernist painting and illustration, film, psychoanalysis, and literary theory.  The figure of Poe—melancholy dreamer, misunderstood genius, and...

01   MW4   CAC   12245   MURPHY   HH-A7 Theater has been a means for representing and challenging how a society sees itself since ancient times. “Dramatic literature” as a genre, though, is a modern invention. What, when you read a play, are you actually reading? This class introduces the study of drama in relation to theatrical production and literary criticism. Themes for discussion will include: style, audience, politics, print/production, and changing cultural attitudes towards theater and drama. We...

01  TTH5    CAC     12246   GLISERMAN   MU-111 Introduction to the Graphic Novel will explore how graphic novels are built and told. We will learn a conceptual vocabulary to discuss how the graphic novel achieves its objective of obtaining the reader’s attention and engagement. We will develop our understanding of graphic novels by way of a graphic introduction to comics—Understanding Comics. Our understanding will develop by examining a range of graphics—e.g., Persepolis, Maus, Fun Home, Ghost World,...

01    MTH1   CAC    12247     MANGHARAM   MU-204    

01  MW4   CAC   12249  TRUETT    MU-115 This course examines the cultural politics of reality television with a focus on how these wildly successful shows, often perceived as guilty pleasures, have in fact been responsible for mediating important conversations around issues of identity, particularly race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. This course will provide a survey of reality TV as simultaneously an artifact and an archive of pop culture and mainstream politics. We will start with the “first” reality...

01   TF3    CAC   12248  CARPENTER    MU-211 What does it mean to live a good life? What sorts of activities and lifestyles are most conducive to personal fulfillment? What is the value of community and friendship and connection to place? Such questions have assumed a new level of urgency in our contemporary moment, which is hardly surprising in the context of widespread ecological destruction, social inequality, and the myriad forms of economic exploitation occurring under late-stage capitalism; as...

01  MW4   12271 ROBOLIN MU-111 02 TTH4 12272 CHAKRAVARTI MU-113 03 MW7 12273 DUCKER SC-216 04 TF1   12274 GLASSMAN SC-101 05 MTH2    12275 GOLDSTONE HH- 07 TTH5   12276 MARSHALL MU-112 08 MW5   12277 OWENS MU-114 09 MTH3   12278 RANA MU-112 10 TF2   12279 SPELLMEYER SC-202 11 TF3    12280 SPELLMEYER MU-113 12  MTH2   12281 TELLO SC-120 This course provides an introduction to principal methods and materials in contemporary literary studies. In order to suggest some of the range of the field, ordinarily it includes close attention to works from at least two genres and two historical periods to be selected by the instructor. The course will introduce students to the meaning and use of key terms in literary studies. Its aim is teaching students to pay close attention to significant texts and develop...

01  TTH5   CAC  24142     KERNAN  SC-205 This course provides a broad survey of canonical African American plays and playwrights that shine light on a panorama of African American theatrical production spanning from (1858 to 2002). Issues addressed will include: the place of “plantation performances” in the development of minstrelsy and its mimetic inversions, the central role played by the pulpit (or African American Christianity) in determining the function of performance before and after Civil War,...

01   MW4  CAC  12260   OWENS  SC-220

01   MW6   CAC  12261     BROWN     HH-B2 Black Avant-Gardism   In this course we will read formally experimental novels and poems by writers of the African diaspora. We will consider how black writers have turned toward highly stylized, strange, and abstract literature to interrogate the relationships between modernity, blackness, gender, and sexuality. We will explore these relationships by asking: What is at stake in representing blackness in print cultures? How do we interpret race in highly abstract and...

Multiple Sections Students will examine how digital media has contributed to new modes of thinking about topics of social and cultural importance. Through assigned texts and selected videos, podcasts, and other examples of popular digital media we will be meditating on what creativity and communication means in the 21st century. Students will develop projects that utilize digital media in order to generate their own ideas around the question: what does it mean to be connected in the digital age?

01   W 2,3   CAC   11908  PEARLSTEIN  MU-003

01   F 2,3   CAC   11909   VOTIPKA  MU-001 02   M 2,3  CAC  11910  DUFFY   MU-003

01  TH 2,3   CAC   11921   HULME   MU-038

  Writing Grant Proposals is designed for students who hope to enter professional careers requiring knowledge of grant writing. The course will teach students the mechanics of proposal writing and the political and social aspects of "grantsmanship," as they develop their skills in identifying sources of grant funding, doing useful research to support their applications, and tailoring their proposals to specific audience interests. There will be several short writing assignments, an exam, and an...

  Students will refine their skills in presenting technical and scientific issues to various audiences while they critically examine social aspects of scientific information. The course examines new opportunities for covering science (especially on the Internet), the skills required to produce clear and understandable prose about technical subjects, important ethical and practical constraints that govern the reporting of scientific information, and the cultural place of science in our society...

01  TF2  CAC  12217  MESSINA   MU-112  &  02  TTH4  CAC  12218  MESSINA  HH-B6 Writing in the Professions: Exploring Careers in the Humanities will help you answer those questions for yourself and others. This course allows English majors and minors to explore a career field in depth, and learn vital skills regarding networking, interviewing, writing strong resumes and cover letters, and creating writing samples that may help land great internships and jobs. Not everyone has to major in STEM. It is...

  Interns will create the 12th Annual Undergraduate Research Writing Conference at Livingston Student Center. Interns will select papers, organize, publicize, and run the URWC the day of the event. They will act as respondents/advisors to student-presenters as they develop their work for multimedia presentations and serve as marketing experts, creating press releases for RU news media, designing promotional materials, building a social media presence, and helping to design the multi-page...

01   BY ARRANGEMENT   This Internship may be used toward a Technical or Professional Writing Certificate or completion of their major requirements in the English Department. All placements must be approved by the Internship Director, and approval will depend both on the general suitability of the career field in question or the specific tasks and projects that the placement will entail.  Contact Trisha Egbert for permission to add the course.

01   TTH4   CAC    12285   POWELL   SC-221 This class will explore the place and purpose of literary journals within the publishing world, examine contemporary literary journals—both print and online— and the responsibilities of the editor to writer and audience. We will begin by discussing the history and the current state of the publishing industry, including mainstream book publishing, independent presses, and literary magazines. We will attempt to answer questions like: What does “good writing” look like,...

01   MW4   CAC   12245   MURPHY   HH-A7 Theater has been a means for representing and challenging how a society sees itself since ancient times. “Dramatic literature” as a genre, though, is a modern invention. What, when you read a play, are you actually reading? This class introduces the study of drama in relation to theatrical production and literary criticism. Themes for discussion will include: style, audience, politics, print/production, and changing cultural attitudes towards theater and drama. We...

01  TTH4   CAC   12252    FULTON  MU-114 This course provides a survey of Shakespeare’s great plays written in the later half of the playwright's career. Written during the reign of James I, and as the playwright for the "King's Men," these plays explore a wide generic range. Attention will be given to Shakespeare’s context, reception and critical history, and especially to film and stage interpretation. Since plays are written to be performed rather than read in silence, we will spend some time in...

90    MW4   12254    BUCKLEY    ONLINE

01   By Arrangement    12265   Permission to add by Department Staff

01   MW5   CAC   23177   SENDUR   CA-A2         W 6,7    FILM SCREENING  MU-301 THIS COURSE SAME AS 175:210

01  TTH5    CAC   23192    BEROIZA     HH-B4       T 6,7       FILM SCREENING                ABE-1180   This course examines how feminist theories impact the study of cinema and how cinema impacts the study of feminist theories. Students draw on fifty years of scholarship from the landmark work on spectatorship and desire that launched feminist film theory in the 1970’s, to the queer, transgender, postcolonial, transnational, disability studies, and critical race theory approaches that have emerged since to analyze concepts of gender,...

01   MW7   CAC   12262  IBRIONKE  MU-111 African Cinema and Cultural Narratives: Film, Theory, and Society  This course introduces undergraduates to the rich and diverse world of African cinema, placing films in dialogue with cultural, historical, and theoretical contexts. Through screenings, critical readings, and discussions, students will explore how filmmakers across Africa negotiate issues of colonialism, identity, gender, and modernity, while reimagining Africa’s place in global media flows.  From...

01  MTH3  CAC    10372   CHOI    MU-11 This course same as 050:377:01 Crises and Debates in Asian American Literature and Culture This course offers an opportunity to read widely in the field of Asian American and diasporic literature. We will cover the foundational debates, central issues, and canonical literary texts that have grounded the study of Asian racial formation in the United States and established Asian American literature as a discipline. But we will also read lesser known or more recent...

01  MW6  CAC  12263   SOTO  HH-A3 Latinx Literatures Unbound  This course examines Latinx literary imaginaries beyond conventional geographies and timelines established by the U.S.-Mexico border in 1848. We will approach the study of Latinx literature and culture as a hemispheric project that includes but is not limited to the US-Mexico border and borderlands. Instead of engaging Latinidad according to a chronology or survey of traditional national or ethnic categories, our readings will abide by...

01  TTH5   CAC   12250     GRISSOM     MU-301 Where do the words you use every day come from? The English language has always been a dynamic mixture of influences, changing in response to social and political shifts in addition to linguistic processes. This course introduces students to a comprehensive history of the development of the English language, from its origins in Proto-Indo-European to its current form and diversity of dialects. Using methods of historical linguistics and linguistic description,...

01   MTH3   CAC   12251    NOVACICH   HH-B2 This course looks at a range of different forms of travel in the Middle Ages and investigates ways of thinking about the relationship between travel and narrative. We will examine pilgrimages such as those undertaken by Saint Brendan, Margery Kempe, and Dante; consider the exploration of “new” worlds and older ones as they are described in the sagas and in Mandeville’s Travels; study examples of the romance quest; and think about the relationship between...

01    TTH4    CAC   12256    SIEGEL   MU-115   The Victorian period was a time of astonishing change. The steamship, the subway, the sewer system, the telegraph, photography, and film: technology sped up the movement of people from place to place, brought manufacturing to levels never before seen in human history, and made new kinds of lives possible. Cities grew as countrysides emptied. Mass production and globalizing markets reshaped wealth, poverty, and political power. Social changes were accompanied by...

01  TTH5    CAC  12257   IANNINI    MU-204 An introduction to nineteenth-century American fiction through short stories (and a couple of novels) by writers including Melville, Poe, Stowe, Hawthorne, Wells Brown, Twain, Chesnutt, Wharton, and James. Grades will be based on class participation (speaking every class), regular in-class writings, and two 5-page essays.

01   W 4,5   CAC     12268    SIEGEL   MU-107 Charles Dickens This seminar is devoted to the careful study of major works by one of the world’s great novelists, an innovator who has shaped the work of writers and film makers since he first published. Hugely popular in his own day because of his humor, his humane sympathy, and his extraordinary imagination, Charles Dickens is one of that small number of authors who still commands interest from a broad reading public. This course will work its way through...

01     TTH4     CAC    12252     FULTON      MU-114 This course provides a survey of Shakespeare’s great plays written in the later half of the playwright's career. Written during the reign of James I, and as the playwright for the "King's Men," these plays explore a wide generic range. Attention will be given to Shakespeare’s context, reception and critical history, and especially to film and stage interpretation. Since plays are written to be performed rather than read in silence, we will spend some time in...

01    MW5   CAC   12253  LEVAO      HH-B3 Metaphysical Poetry The course will consider the exceptional qualities of “metaphysical poetry,” a constellation of Renaissance poems whose tendencies and obsessions have attracted both the admiration and perplexed antipathy of readers over the last four centuries. Metaphysical poems often put a high premium on surprise, complexity, the paradox of serious play, morbidity, intellectual passion, egotism, and pious humility, terms themselves susceptible to...

01  W3F4     CAC    12266   LEVAO    ABW-2100  Shakespeare’s dramas in all genres show a fascination with the doubling, mirroring, and twinning of characters, tendencies rooted in and cross-pollinated by philosophical, mythic, and poetic tradition and practice. Doubling represents some of the most important ways in which early-modern writers tested the limits of what historians sometimes call “Renaissance (or early-modern) Individualism,” serving as a pivotal image of antithetical impulses: a turning back...

90    MW4   12254    BUCKLEY    ONLINE

01   MTH   CAC   12255   ZITIN   MTH3   MU-208 This course introduces students to some influential works of fiction published in the 1700s, considering them as formative for the tradition of novel-writing in English. How did writers (and readers) from this era help shape what we mean when we talk about “the novel” today? How might we define its core features: plot, character, narration, setting? In what ways do these features of prose fiction register the historical context of the texts in which they...

01   MTH2   CAC  12267   SILVER  HC-S126 Rutgers's First Textbook For its first fifty years, the Rutgers University curriculum was designed around a single eighteenth-century book: Robert Dodsley's Preceptor: Containing a General Course of Education (1748, reprinted 1763).  The Preceptor contains 12 parts, each one written by a leading poet, scientist, philosopher, or intellectual luminary of its age.  Each part focuses on one topic, which could almost be the names of departments at our university,...

01  W3F4     CAC    12266   LEVAO    ABW-2100  Shakespeare’s dramas in all genres show a fascination with the doubling, mirroring, and twinning of characters, tendencies rooted in and cross-pollinated by philosophical, mythic, and poetic tradition and practice. Doubling represents some of the most important ways in which early-modern writers tested the limits of what historians sometimes call “Renaissance (or early-modern) Individualism,” serving as a pivotal image of antithetical impulses: a turning back...

01   W 4,5   CAC     12268    SIEGEL   MU-107 Charles Dickens This seminar is devoted to the careful study of major works by one of the world’s great novelists, an innovator who has shaped the work of writers and film makers since he first published. Hugely popular in his own day because of his humor, his humane sympathy, and his extraordinary imagination, Charles Dickens is one of that small number of authors who still commands interest from a broad reading public. This course will work its way through...

90     MW5   12269   BUCKLEY    ONLINE This seminar takes a close look at the origins and early development of melodrama, the genre that has for the last two centuries dominated popular and mass culture all across the world. Our focus will be the genre's hemispheric formation and rise on the 18th- and 19th-century stage, and will include close examinations of stage melodrama and its precedent forms in France, Great Britain, and the United States. It is recommended that students have prior coursework in...

01   TTH5   CAC   12287  GROGAN   MU-113  Queer Poetry This course focuses on queer poetry, focused predominantly but not exclusively on Anglo-American poetry of the twentieth century. Some of the questions we’ll be approaching include: what is a queer poetic tradition? What is queer about poetic form—in other words, what is a queer poetics? How is queerness embedded in ideas of the avant-garde or ‘experimental’ literature? We’ll approach questions of history and queer lineage; relationality, community,...

01   MTH2   CAC  12267   SILVER  HC-S126 Rutgers's First Textbook For its first fifty years, the Rutgers University curriculum was designed around a single eighteenth-century book: Robert Dodsley's Preceptor: Containing a General Course of Education (1748, reprinted 1763).  The Preceptor contains 12 parts, each one written by a leading poet, scientist, philosopher, or intellectual luminary of its age.  Each part focuses on one topic, which could almost be the names of departments at our university,...

01   TTH4   CAC  12282    CHOI   HH-A7  Literature and Translation: Poetics, Politics, Theory This class explores the theory, practice, and politics of literary translation. We will discuss various models and approaches to translation by engaging with foundational texts in translation studies alongside literary works that experiment with multiple languages or reflect on the complexities of living between two languages. We will consider questions such as: How important is fidelity to an original? What...

01   TTH4   CAC   12283   EXTRA   HH-B2 Feminist Lit Theory: Black Feminist Theoretical Frameworks & Interventions   In this course, we will explore black feminist literary theory through the work of a set of key writers and theorists including but not limited to Nella Larsen, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Barbara Christian, and Toni Morrison. Through these authors, we will address questions such as: What counts as black feminist literary theory? Who gets to write black feminist theory? What is the...

01   MW5     CAC   12284   FRASIER   MU-302 Medieval & Medievalism How have books been made and how does that change how we encounter literature? This course will explore answers to this question by immersing students in textual history and literary production of medieval and medievalism literature, written between 1000 and 1950. The Middle Ages is a period of radical technological development in the global west, especially in book making and genre development. In the post-medieval, the materiality of the...

01   TTH4     CAC  12285  POWELL  SC-221 In this class, we will explore the place and purpose of literary journals within the publishing world, examine contemporary literary journals—both print and online—and the responsibilities of the editor to writer and audience. We will begin by discussing the history and the current state of the publishing industry, including mainstream book publishing, independent presses, and literary magazines. We will attempt to answer questions like: What does “good writing” look...

01   MW6   CAC  12258   MURPHY  HH-A4 Radical Plays In the decades after the off-off-Broadway movement in the US and the end of stage censorship in the UK, experimental theater took on new social and political force. This class explores innovative drama written in English in an era defined by reactionary cultural politics. Focusing on radical plays of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, we will consider new forms of dramatic critique, from the socialist feminisms of Caryl Churchill and Maria Irene Fornes to...

01   MTH3   CAC    12259    RAMONI    HH-B3 Immigration Narratives In this course, students will read a sampling of American literature from 1900 to the present that addresses the topic of immigration. Over the course of the semester, we will read texts written by and about immigrants and their experiences. Our course selections will be diverse in both form (i.e. novels, poetry, creative nonfiction, literary theory, drama, and film) and perspective (we will read and view works written by/about immigrants of...