Department of English

Past Seminar Topics

In the first two years of graduate study, students are engaged in course work.

ENGL2210 | Proseminar | Ravit Reichman

ENGL2360K | The Renaissance and Modernity | Stephen Foley 

ENGL2360Q | Manuscript, Image, and the Middle English Text | Elizabeth Bryan 

ENGL2360R | Civil Wars, Restoration, and Early Georgian Literature | Melinda Rabb 

ENGL2360S | Alternative Miltons | Richard Rambuss 

ENGL2360U | Sacrifice | Richard Rambuss 

ENGL2360W | Reading Things: Early Modern Material Culture | Karen Newman

ENGL2360X | Hamlet: Appropriation, Mediation, Theory | Karen Newman

ENGL2360Y | Lyric and Ecstasy | Richard Rambuss

ENGL2360Z | Shakespeare: A Politics of Love | James Kuzner

ENGL2361A | Is There Renaissance Lyric? | Stephen Foley

ENGL2560E | Liberalism | Philip Gould 

ENGL2560X | The Rise of the Novel | Melinda Rabb 

ENGL2560Y | Romanticism and Cultural Property | William Keach 

ENGL2560Z | Global Early American Literature | James Egan 

ENGL2561A | Manifest Destinies: Liberalism + Expansion in American Literature, 1820-1920 | Deak Nabers 

ENGL2561B | Things Not Entirely Possessed: Romanticism and History | Jacques Khalip 

ENGL2561E | The Third Person: Narrating the Subject of Modern Literature | Stuart Burrows 

ENGL2561F | “This is what you were born for”: Optimism and Futurity | Jacques Khalip

ENGL2561G | On Late Style: James and His Contemporaries | Stuart Burrows

ENGL2561H | American Literature Without Borders | Philip Gould

ENGL2561J | Satire and Irony | Melinda Rabb

ENGL2561M | Psyche and Ethos in the Nineteenth-Century Novel | Amanda Anderson

ENGL2561N | Studying American Literature in the Digital Age | James Egan

ENGL2561O | The Romantic Detail | Jacques Khalip

ENGL2561P | Secret History | Melinda Rabb

ENGL2561Q | American Literature and Middle Class Labor | Deak Nabers

ENGL2561R | Transcendental and Real in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction | Ben Parker

ENGL2561S | Corporate Aesthetics | Deak Nabers

ENGL2760A | American Modernist Poetry and Poetics | Mutlu Blasing

ENGL2760B | City, Culture, and Literature in the Early Twentieth Century | Tamar Katz

ENGL2760M | Postcoloniality, Globalism, Diaspora | Olakunle George

ENGL2760P | The '50s in Color: Race, Empire, and U.S. Cold War Culture | Daniel Kim 

ENGL2760W | American Literature and the Visual Arts | Stuart Burrows

ENGL2760X | After Postmodernism: New Fictional Modes | Timothy Bewes

ENGL2760Y | American Orientalism and Asian American Literary Criticism | Daniel Kim

ENGL2760Z | African American Literature After 1965: Nationalism and Dissent | Rolland Murray

ENGL2761A | American Literature and the Cold War | Deak Nabers

ENGL2761B | Temporalities | Tamar Katz

ENGL2761C | Black Internationalism and Its Discontents | Rolland Murray

ENGL2761D | The Neoliberal Imagination | Deak Nabers

ENGL2761F | The Racial Lives of Affect | Daniel Kim

ENGL2761G | James Joyce and Literary Theory | Paul Armstrong

ENGL2761H | After Blackness: Framing Contemporary African American Literature | Rolland Murray

ENGL2761J | Identity and Agency | Ravit Reichman

ENGL2761K | Poetics of Liveliness: Materiality and Change in Modern and Contemporary Poetry | Ada Smailbegovíc

ENGL2761L | The Post-Slavery Imagination | Deak Nabers

ENGL2761M | Photographic Memory | Stuart Burrows

ENGL2761N | Theories of Affect: Poetics of Expression Through and Beyond Identity | Daniel Kim and Ada Smailbegović

ENGL2761P | Modernism and Theories of Space | Tamar Katz

ENGL2761Q | Blackness and Being: Studies in Black Literary and Cultural Criticism | Kevin Quashie

ENGL2900G | History and Form | Paul Armstrong

ENGL2900L | Literary Readings in Aesthetic Theory | Marc Redfield 

ENGL2900M | The Reading Effect and the Persistence of Form | Ellen Rooney

ENGL2900N | Ethical Turns in Psychoanalysis and Literature | Ravit Reichman

ENGL2900O | Narrative Theory | Paul Armstrong

ENGL2900P | The Plasticity of Form | Ellen Rooney

ENGL2900Q | Liberalism and Aesthetics | Amanda Anderson

ENGL2900R | Neuroaesthetics and Reading | Paul Armstrong

ENGL2900S | Deleuze, Rancière, Literature, Film: The Logic of Connection | Timothy Bewes

ENGL2900T | Freud and Lacan | Ravit Reichman

ENGL2900U | Forms of Reading in the Wake of the Humanities | Ellen Rooney

ENGL2900W | Perversions: Hitchcock, Kubrick, Lynch | Richard Rambuss

ENGL2900X | Postcolonial Theory | Leela Gandhi

ENGL2900Z | Postcoloniality and Globalism | Olakunle George

ENGL2901A | Freedom without Freedoms | James Kuzner

ENGL2901B | Literary Theory II: Post-Structuralism and the Problem of the Subject | Timothy Bewes and Marc Redfield

ENGL2901C | Pedestrian Theory: Walking, Working, Waking | Jacques Khalip and Bonnie Honig

ENGL2901D | War and the Politics of Cultural Memory | Ravit Reichman and Daniel Kim

ENGL2901E | Literary Phenomenology | Paul Armstrong

ENGL2901F | Around 1948: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Global Transformations | Leela Gandhi and Ariella Azoulay

ENGL2901G | Ultimate Dialogicality: Thinking with Bakhtin | Timothy Bewes

ENGL2901H | Genres of Critique | Ellen Rooney

ENGL2901J | Classical and Post-Classical Narratology | Paul Armstrong

ENGL2940 | Scholarly Writing for Journal Publication | Timothy Bewes

ENGL2950 | Seminar in Pedagogy and Composition Theory  | Jonathan Readey

Additional Information

Brown's doctoral program in English offers professional training in literary criticism, critical theory, intellectual history, and all aspects of research and pedagogy in the humanities. 
Brown's doctoral program in English offers professional training in literary criticism, critical theory, intellectual history, and all aspects of research and pedagogy in the humanities.
Throughout the year, the Department of English offers seminars that address a variety of timely academic topics meant to enhance students' professional development, as well as expose them to important elements of an academic career.