Spring 2027 Undergraduate English Courses

MB   TTH6   CAC   NAVARRO  SC-116 Bearing Witness: Testimony and the Limits of Language What does it mean to read literature as testimony? Writers have long turned to fiction to name injustice, preserve memory, and give voice to those who have been silenced. Yet testimony also reveals the edges of language: the moments when words fail, are suppressed, or are shaped by those in power. In this course, we read fiction alongside multimodal texts, paying close attention to voice, form, and silence. The...

MC   MTH1   CAC     KAFLE   SC-115 Global EnglishesEnglish has now become a global language. In this mini-course, we will discuss major contexts, concepts, and debates surrounding global spread of English. We will analyze how English language aids to global connections, while simultaneously being impacted by them. With the premise of local texts being able to have traces of the global flows, students will study various texts and genres, including images/memes/posts from the internet/social media as well...

MD     MTH1    LIV    15018    MENDONEZ    TIL-224 Studio Ghibli: Mythology, Storytelling, and Animation “The creation of a single world comes from a huge number of fragments and chaos.” Hayao Miyazaki Come explore the films of Hayao Miyazaki produced by Studio Ghibli and see what goes on behind the creation of their memorable characters and supernatural worlds. In this class, we will discuss the mythology and storytelling that bring to life a bathhouse for the spirits and a forest of gods and reflect on the...

MA   MTH3   CAC    CAPONEGRO   MU-303 The Mediated Word - Writing Lab  Looking to grow as a writer and communicator? Whether you are a storyteller with a project in mind, a STEM student looking to sharpen your communication skills, or simply curious about new ways to express ideas, this course is for you. Built around experiential learning, this mini-course invites you to explore communication through hands-on experimentation and creative collaborations. We will attend guest lectures and participate in various...

  Technologies of the Text: Materiality, Script, and Print in Early Modern EnglandHow did new technologies transform early modern English reading, performance, and literary identity? This course explores shifts in literary technology, including manuscript production with quill and ink, the explosion of theatrical performance, and new genres like paratext and broadside ephemera that arose with the printing press. Analyzing Shakespeare’s As You Like It, sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, and Wroth, printed...

01  TTH4   CAC   15020  WALLACE    CA-A5  

01   T 2,3   CAC      MONTEZ     MU-111  

01   TTH4   CAC    15022   SHOCKLEY    MU-115  

01  TTH5    CAC   15023   SPELLMEYER     FH-A2 Modern novels are society thinking out loud—and also in intimate privacy. They arrived on the scene about four centuries ago with a growing middle class that set out to reinvent everything—marriage, identity, politics, religion, and the arts. Older literary forms couldn’t compete. Novels created a mass audience larger than anything seen in the past because they were a new kind of “technology”: readers could visualize in their minds different routes leading to...

01   MW4   CAC   15024   GOLDSTONE    MU-301 Crime fiction has been the most popular of all fiction genres for the last hundred years. But why does anyone care which made-up person  killed which other made-up person? These stories explore the differencebetween the law and justice, between how things should be and how things are, between deviance and normality. These are serious subjects, but crime fiction is rarely serious literature: our study will also be a study of the boundaries between what is supposedly...

01   TTH5    CAC   15025     AIELLO     MU-111 Dark Medieval Fantasy and its Antecedents This course explores the thrilling intersection between contemporary fantasy novels that belong to a social-media subculture known as “Dark Medieval Fantasy,” and the real medieval literary texts and antecedents that give these novels their affective power. This subgenre – popularized on platforms like TikTok (i.e., #BookTok) – adapts and often corrects romanticized notions about the European Middle Ages. In so doing,...

01  TTH5    CAC     15026    EXTRA  FH-A4  

01   MW4   CAC   15027   SIEGEL  MU-115 From the wars of ancient Greece to the civil disobedience of America’s recent past, society has been shaped by the difficult challenge of reconciling contending values. Civilization and its Discontents is an introductory course on some of the most influential and most debated texts in Western culture. This class is based on our sense that it is still urgent for us to reflect together on forms of human expression that have shaped culture for centuries, whether drawn...

01  TTH6  CAC   15028   RUEDA-SABATER   FH-B2  Modes of Attention Was it always this hard to focus? This course takes a historical and experimental approach to the ways that different kinds of media solicit and shape our attention as readers, listeners, viewers, users, or players. It begins from the premise that perceived deficits of attention are not personal failings but effects of changes in everyday life and conditions of engaging with art. Together we’ll read about—and recreate—historical modes of attention...

01  MTH1   15054 STEPHENS MU-112 02 TTH7   15055 BOSKET SC-115 03 MW5   15056 GROGAN SC-214 04 TTH5   15057 HICKS SC-203 05 W3F4   15058 KIM MU-113 06 TF2   15059 LOVE SC-214 08 MW4   15060 MURPHY HH-B5 09 MTH3   15061 PINSKY SC-220 10 TTH4   15062 PORTORREAL SC-204 12 MW4   15063 ROBOLIN SC-207 90   15064 KING ONLINE 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 sophisticated spoken and...

01   TTH5   CAC  13251       WALLACE    HH-B2

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   14730   PEARLSTEIN  MU-003

01   F 2,3   CAC   14731  VOTIPKA  MU-001 02   M 2,3  CAC  14732 DUFFY   MU-003

01  TH 2,3   CAC   14744  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  MTH1   CAC  14989   MESSINA   SC-120 02  TTH4  CAC  14990    MESSINA    FH-B5 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 possible to...

  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   15070   POWELL   MU-204 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   T 2,3   CAC   15021   MONTEZ   MU-111  

90    TTH4   15029   BUCKLEY   ONLINE For thousands of years since Aristotle's foundational writing on the art of dramatic poetry, it has been assumed that the Western tradition has been dominated and defined by Tragedy and Comedy, the two complementary forms that together define the upper and lower realms of human existence.  In very recent years, however, and in consequence of a striking reappraisal and recovery of the history of popular drama and theatre, we have begun to realize that tragicomedy—the...

01  TTH4   CAC   15032   FULTON  HH-A6 This course surveys the plays written in the height of Shakespeare’s career, when he was the leading playwright for the King’s Men. We will study a broad range of genres, including comedies, tragedies, and Shakespearean Romance. Attention will be given to Shakespeare’s context, film and stage interpretation, and to the range of allusion in his plays. We will frequently study clips of filmed performances. Readings will include Othello, Measure for Measure, King...

90    TTH5     15035    BUCKLEY    ONLINE

01   By Arrangement    15048   Permission to add by Department Staff

01   T 4,5   CAC   15051  MURPHY    MU-302 Rehearsal and Performance This class puts literature on its feet. This semester, we will stage Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, Bertolt Brecht’s visionary anti-war play that about the behavior of everyday people in a totalitarian state. The class is both a rehearsal and a literature seminar: you will expand your skills as a critic, develop your ideas in writing, and test those ideas in performance. No prior theater experience needed. Fear and Misery is a...

01   TTH4   CAC   14169   RUEDA-SABATER  ABW-4140         W 6,7            FILM SCREENING   ABW-4140 Since its birth in the 1890s, cinema has been a worldwide art form. Innovations from many corners of the Earth have propelled film's development at every stage. This course surveys some of the key moments and movements from the first six decades of film history that happened far from the medium’s supposed center in California, offering a kaleidoscopic range of alternatives for what movies can be, and what they can do in the...

01   MW6   CAC   15043   ROBOLIN   HH-A2

01   TF3   25781     CAC     SWEET       SC-221 This course examines a range of literature and texts that provide a window into Native American cultures, histories, and worldviews. Spanning oral histories of creation stories to autobiographical writing in the twenty-first century, this course will analyze the diversity of Native American literature and its evolving relationship to Native American culture and identity. Students will engage with Native American philosophical, cultural, religious, and historical ideas...

01  TTH5  CAC    13262   ISAAC    FH-B2 This course same as 050:377:01    

90    TTH4   15029   BUCKLEY   ONLINE For thousands of years since Aristotle's foundational writing on the art of dramatic poetry, it has been assumed that the Western tradition has been dominated and defined by Tragedy and Comedy, the two complementary forms that together define the upper and lower realms of human existence.  In very recent years, however, and in consequence of a striking reappraisal and recovery of the history of popular drama and theatre, we have begun to realize that tragicomedy—the...

01       TTH5   CAC    15030      SCANLON     HH-A6   Geoffrey Chaucer was the first poet who wrote in English to be read continuously from his own time to the present, and, with the possible exception of William Shakespeare, the single most influential poet in the entire English-speaking tradition. This course will focus on his greatest work, the Canterbury Tales. We will explore this collection both for its significance within its own culture and for its continuing significance for ours. We will also consider a variety...

01   TTH4    CAC   15031   AIELLO   HH-A5 Trauma and Literature (Then & Now) Are loss and violence transhistorical? The word trauma comes from the Greek verb “titrōskein,” meaning “to wound,” which gave rise to the noun for the result of that act – the wound or “trōma” (“trauma”). While the physical wounding of the body is more in line with what the term meant in the premodern world, nowadays we mostly understand trauma to be a wound inflicted upon the mind. Indeed, there is general consensus that...

01  TTH5   CAC   15036   LEWIS   SC-216 Will rapidly evolving technology transform existing social relations and alter the very structure of society? Is the widening gap between the working class and the elite a problem to be combatted or a necessary, if not beneficial, fact of life? Should we mourn, protest, praise, or quietly accept industry’s gradual destruction of the natural world? These distinctly contemporary questions were anticipated and shaped by nineteenth-century novelists. In this course...

01   MW4  CAC   15037    LUCIANO  SC-206 19th  Century American Women Writers “I want to do something splendid…something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead….I think I shall write books.” The “favorite dream” of Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March, authorship, was pursued by large numbers of nineteenth-century women: they wrote for the sake of economic survival, to protest the social conditions that bound them, and to expand their sense of possibility. This class is devoted to literary...

01  TTH5  CAC    15038   MCGILL    HH-A5  This course will introduce students to some of the major American texts of the pre-Civil War period, focusing on poetry, essays, novels, and short fiction by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, and Harriet Brent Jacobs. The decades leading up to the Civil War were dynamic and fraught ones as rapid industrialization disrupted family norms, transformed the landscape, and spurred...

01     TTH4     CAC    15032    FULTON      HH-A6 This course surveys the plays written in the height of Shakespeare’s career, when he was the leading playwright for the King’s Men. We will study a broad range of genres, including comedies, tragedies, and Shakespearean Romance. Attention will be given to Shakespeare’s context, film and stage interpretation, and to the range of allusion in his plays. We will frequently study clips of filmed performances. Readings will include Othello, Measure for Measure, King...

01   MW4   CAC   15033   COIRO   HH-B6 Reading Milton’s poetry is an exhilarating and deeply thought-provoking experience. The core of Milton’s poetics is the insistence that we, the readers, must decide what is right and wrong at every juncture. In this class we will take on that challenge. Milton rivals Shakespeare as foundational to English, American and global anglophone literature and history. In your other classes and for years to come, you will discover many and uncanny echoes of Milton in other...

01   TTH6   CAC   15045   FULTON/ RENDSBURG  MH-115 THIS COURSE SAME AS  01:840:387:01 (15047), 01:563:326:01 (15046) Co-taught with Professor Gary Rendsburg in Jewish Studies; historical credit in Renaissance / early modern.Arguably the most consequential event to English literary history was the translation and printing of the English Bible during the Renaissance. This course, cross listed with Jewish Studies and Religion, is a close study of the Bible, with special attention to its arts of narrative...

01   MW5   CAC   15049    COIRO   HC-S126 The masque is a theatrical form that became enormously popular in the early seventeenth century. Performed at court and other elite spaces, masques entailed elaborate sets, gorgeous and provocative costumes, hours of dancing, and much consumption of alcohol and decadent food. While the masque itself staged extravagant praise of the monarch, each masque was motivated by a perceived disturbance: including emerging ideas about race, colonial encounters with India and the...

01   CAC   MTH3   15034    HAAS  SC-205 New Worlds, Future Visions: A Survey of Restoration & Early Eighteenth Century Literature In this course, we will explore a selection of Restoration and early-eighteenth century British poetry, prose, and drama, paying particular attention to how authors like Milton, Cavendish, Dryden, Behn, Pope, Congreve, Swift, and Haywood use literature to launch political and cultural critiques, constructing new worlds and using these worlds as a means of exploring...

90    TTH5   15035    BUCKLEY      ONLINE

01   TF3    CAC  15050   LUPTON   MU-113 Gender Trouble in the Eighteenth Century If you think of queer and trans experience as something that has come into focus recently, this is a seminar to challenge your assumptions. The texts we’ll read suggest that lived experiences of both sex and gender in the eighteenth century were complicated. They were also closely connected to the literary categories emerging in the period, of the novel, of life-writing, and of print circulation more generally. How did ideas...

01   MW5   CAC   15049    COIRO   HC-S126 The masque is a theatrical form that became enormously popular in the early seventeenth century. Performed at court and other elite spaces, masques entailed elaborate sets, gorgeous and provocative costumes, hours of dancing, and much consumption of alcohol and decadent food. While the masque itself staged extravagant praise of the monarch, each masque was motivated by a perceived disturbance: including emerging ideas about race, colonial encounters with India and the...

01   T 4,5   CAC   15051  MURPHY    MU-302 Rehearsal and Performance This class puts literature on its feet. This semester, we will stage Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, Bertolt Brecht’s visionary anti-war play that about the behavior of everyday people in a totalitarian state. The class is both a rehearsal and a literature seminar: you will expand your skills as a critic, develop your ideas in writing, and test those ideas in performance. No prior theater experience needed. Fear and Misery is a...

01   MTH2  CAC   15072  ZITIN   HC-S126

01   TF3    CAC  15050   LUPTON   MU-113 Gender Trouble in the Eighteenth Century If you think of queer and trans experience as something that has come into focus recently, this is a seminar to challenge your assumptions. The texts we’ll read suggest that lived experiences of both sex and gender in the eighteenth century were complicated. They were also closely connected to the literary categories emerging in the period, of the novel, of life-writing, and of print circulation more generally. How did ideas...

01   MTH3   CAC   15065   GOODLAD   ABE-4450  DATA AND CULTURE is the rubric for a 200-level introductory course devoted to understanding how and why it is that “data” came to be the substrate for most of the technologies now described under the rubric of “artificial intelligence” (AI)--including its social implications and ethical challenges. The recent advent of “generative AI,” the industry’s preferred term for a type of data-driven statistical modeling, typically deployed through conversational...

01    TF2   CAC   15066   LUPTON  SC-221 How Should a Person Be?  This is a course for anyone who has ever kept a diary, or a blog, or tried to write through essays or letters how they feel about their life. What is an examined life? What difference does it make to write about the things we do? How does narrating selfhood change what it is to be a person? What do the categories of public and private mean when it comes to different genres of life writing (diaries, blogs, autobiography, letters)? And how...

01   MW7   CAC   15067   JAGER   HH-A2 Existentialism This course will serve as an introduction to existentialism, a literary and philosophical movement that dominated postwar intellectual culture in the middle of the twentieth century, and—as we will see—continues to resonate in our own day. At its heart, existentialism asks that we attend to the remarkable fact of existence itself: we exist, we are here in this time and this place. What will be our response? Answering that question led the...

01  TF3   CAC   15068   LOVE  FH-A3 Literature and medicine share a special affinity, a preoccupation with matters of life and death, health and suffering, and the art and practice of knowing and healing. This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to examine the long-standing relationship between these two essential fields of human inquiry. We will consider a wide array of fictional and non-fictional texts to explore how our perception of illness and medicine has changed over time. We will...

01   MW4  CAC  15069   MONTEZ   SC-205 This course explores the relationship between textuality and visuality. What do we conjure visually in our minds when we read texts?  How have encounters with visual art inspired novelists, poets, and critics? How does the very notion of the visual exceed a literal dependence on eyesight? Through reading, writing, and creative projects, students in this course will consider how literature animates the visual imagination and how engagements with visual materials...

01   TTH4     CAC  15070   POWELL MU-204 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   MTH2  CAC   15072  ZITIN   HC-S126

01  MW4     CAC     15039   GROGAN     MU-204 Later 20th Century Poetry: Post-45 US Poetry This course surveys the varied and exciting landscape of American poetry written from the end of the Second World War until the present day. We'll read the major poetic movements of the second half of the twentieth century - the New York School; the Black Arts Movement; the so-called 'confessional' poets; L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry; and the many innovations in poetry that are happening today. Expect to read widely in...

01 MW5   CAC   15040   GOLDSTONE    FH-B5 This course tells two stories about the revolutionary period in twentieth-century literature in English beginning around 1890 and running to the start of the Second World War in 1945. The first storyis the story of the modernist breakthrough, when radical innovators transformed how the novel could be written: we will read writers likeJames Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner for their singular experiments in form and content. The second story is the story of...

01   MW5    CAC    15041   SIEGEL      SC-206  At the core of this course will be a thorough reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses, among the most important and most challenging works of literature published in the last century.  We will end with some of the stories of  Dubliners and also read Portrait of the Artist, but the key project will be to make our way through what is probably the most rewardingly difficult text of the twentieth century—and without question one of its most influential. Among the issues we...

01   T 4,5   CAC   15051  MURPHY    MU-302 Rehearsal and Performance This class puts literature on its feet. This semester, we will stage Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, Bertolt Brecht’s visionary anti-war play that about the behavior of everyday people in a totalitarian state. The class is both a rehearsal and a literature seminar: you will expand your skills as a critic, develop your ideas in writing, and test those ideas in performance. No prior theater experience needed. Fear and Misery is a...