Spring 2026 Undergraduate English Courses

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,...