Department of English
Requirement Descriptions
How Literature Matters
*All courses numbered ENGL 0100 and ENGL 0101 count towards the How Literature Matters concentration requirement*
Addressing topics about which professors are especially passionate, these introductory courses aim to deepen and refine students’ understanding of how literature matters: aesthetically, ethically, historically and politically. Students not only engage with larger questions about literature’s significance, exploring the particular kinds of insights and thinking it is especially suited for conveying, they also gain a deeper awareness of the critical methods we use to understand and analyze it, engaging with matters of form, genre and media. Finally, these courses help students develop their skills as close, careful readers of literary form and language.
Pre-1700: Medieval and Renaissance Literatures
These courses, which center on Medieval and Renaissance literary works, cast light on periods that can come across to us as both familiar and strange. They focus our attention on how literatures from these periods depict concepts such as aesthetics, romance, gender, sexuality, race, power and politics in ways that are like and unlike how we tend to think of them today—on how pre-modern or early modern works can both defamiliarize the categories of experience and identity we tend to take for granted and also suggest something of their origins. Several courses under this rubric will also engage with recent literary and filmic adaptations of works from these eras, exploring how many such works continue to function as vibrant and at times ambivalent inspirations for the literary imaginings of later periods.
Current and Past Courses
This is a provisional list of courses. A final list will be available before pre-registration.
*Denotes new course
Fall 2025
- ENGL 1310A, Firing the Canon: Early Modern Women's Writing (Rabb)
- ENGL 1311P, Medieval Drama (Min)
Spring 2026
- ENGL 0300P, Dreams (Min)
This is a provisional list of courses. A final list will be available before pre-registration.
*Denotes new course
Fall 2024
- ENGL 0300M, Medieval Gender (Min)
- ENGL 0310A, Shakespeare (Scozzar)
- ENGL 1311G, Shakespeare, Love and Friendship (Kuzner)
- ENGL 1361G, Tolkein and the Renaissance (Kuzner)
- ENGL 1361S, Sexual Contracts in Renaissance Drama (Scozzaro)*
Spring 2025
- ENGL 0151G, The Middle Ages Goes to the Movies (Min)
- ENGL 0310A, Shakespeare (Kuzner)
- ENGL 0310Q, Why Before 1700? Literature Before Literature (Egan)
- ENGL 1361L, Milton (Rambuss)
- ENGL 1361R, Chaucer (Min)
*This is a provisional list of courses. A final list will be available before pre-registration.
Fall 2023
- ENGL 0100P, Love Stories (Kuzner)
- ENGL 0300P, Dreams (Min)
- ENGL 0310A, Shakespeare (Scozzaro)
- ENGL 1310H, Origins of American Literature (Egan)
- ENGL 1311N, England and the Renaissance (Foley)
- ENGL 1361P. Shakespeare's Girls (Scozzaro)
- ENGL 1561K, Restoration and 18th century Drama (Rabb)
Spring 2024
- ENGL 0310A, Shakespeare (Foley)
- ENGL 1311P, Medieval Drama (Min)
- ENGL 1361A, Fantasies of Milton (Kuzner)
- ENGL 1361N, Evil Plays: Shakespeare (Rambuss)
Post-1700: Literatures of Modernity
*All courses numbered ENGL 0500/0510/1510/1560 and ENGL 0700/0710/1710/1760 count towards the Post-1700 concentration requirement*
These courses explore the many strands of writing in English that have emerged from the eighteenth century through the present, shaping the contemporary world. These literatures reflect on political, economic, and intellectual history, from the idea of the nation and the structures of capital through the rise and dissolution of empire and the emergence of postcolonial states, including the forms of race, gender and sexuality that cut across them. Courses also examine how aesthetic works can shape and critique their moment: they look at genres like the novel and short story, poetry, drama, essays, and new, hybrid forms that have arisen with expanding digital media; they also take up a multitude of literary movements whose influences remain with us today, including Romanticism, realism, naturalism, modernism, and post-modernism.
Literatures of the Color Line
In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois famously proclaimed in The Souls of Black Folk that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” Courses in this category explore the complex ways in which literary texts have addressed American histories of race, ethnicity, and empire. They may do so from the vantage point of ideas about difference and hierarchy that predate the modern conception of race and by engaging with earlier histories of conflict and contact. These courses explore issues of intersectionality as well, highlighting how race operates in relation to other structures of difference such as gender, sexuality and class.
Current and Past Courses
This is a provisional list of courses. A final list will be available before pre-registration.
*Denotes new course
Fall 2025
- ENGL 0100V, Inventing Asian American Literature (Kim)
- ENGL 0510F, Literature of the American Renaissance (Nabers)
- ENGL 0710B, African American Literature and the Legacies of Slavery (Murray)
- ENGL 0710X, Black Poetics (Quashie)
- ENGL 1710J, Modern African Literature (George)
- ENGL 1711L, Contemporary Black Women's Literature (Abdur-Rahman)
- ENGL 1760Y, Toni Morrison (Quashie)
- ENGL 1762X Asian American Avant-Gardes (Liu)*
Spring 2026
- ENGL 0101A, Independence and Modern Literature (Katz/George)
- ENGL 0150Y, Brontës and Brontëism (Parker)
- ENGL 0710Q, American Literature in the Era of Segregation (Murray)
- ENGL 1711E, African American Literature After 1975 (Murray)
- ENGL 1761J, Bad, Mad, and Sad: Misbehaving Femmes in Literature (Ramirez-D'Oleo)
- ENGL 1762W, Extravagant Texts (Kim)*
- ENGL 1910F, Working Fictions: Race, Gender, and Sexuality at Work (Liu)*
This is a provisional list of courses. A final list will be available before pre-registration.
*Denotes new course
Fall 2024
- ENGL 0700E, Postcolonial Literature (George)
- ENGL 0800T, Intro to Black Literary Theory (Quashie)*
- ENGL 1710K, Literature and the Problem of Poverty (Murray)
- ENGL 1710P, Literature and the Culture of Black Power Reconsidered (Murray)
- ENGL 1711N, Monsters in Our Midst: The Plantation and the Woods in Literature of the Americas (Ramirez-D'Oleo)
- ENGL 1762K, Migration and Its Discontents: Asian American Literature and Culture (Liu)*
- ENGL 1762P, Lucille Clifton (Quashie)*
Spring 2025
- ENGL 0700E, Postcolonial Literature (George)
- ENGL 0710V, Death and Dying in Black Literature (Quashie)
- ENGL 1711S, James Baldwin (Abdur-Rahman)
- ENGL 1762F, Apartheid and the Literary Imagination (George)*
*This is a provisional list of courses. A final list will be available before pre-registration.
Fall 2023
- ENGL 0710X, Black Poetics (Quashie)
- ENGL 0800S, Blackness in Critical Thought (Ramirez-D'Oleo)
- ENGL 1310H, Origins of American Literature (Egan)
- ENGL 1511A, American Literature and the Civil War (Nabers)
- ENGL 1760Y, Toni Morrison (Quashie)
- ENGL 1761J, Bad, Mad, and Sad: Literatures of Misbehaving Women (Ramirez-D'Oleo)
Spring 2024
- ENGL 0710V, Death and Dying in Black Literature (Quashie)
- ENGL 1710I, Harlem Renaissance: The Politics of Culture (Murray)
- ENGL 1710O, Radical Pasts, Radical Futures: Literature and the Left (Murray)
Literary Theory and Cultural Critique
The late-twentieth century saw a revolution in literary studies in the U.S. and elsewhere as critics turned their attention to the historical nature of our categories of knowledge and the social and economic relations underlying the study and practice of literature. This “turn to theory” was influenced by earlier developments in linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, political and social theory, and social movements challenging structures such as patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, economic inequality, and race and gender discrimination. More recently, literary theory has been influential on scholarship dealing with the environmental crisis, the systems of racialized criminalization and incarceration (especially in the United States), the continuing formation (and deformation) of race, gender, and sexual identities, and the experience of imperialism in many forms across the globe. The avenues of critical inquiry opened up over the last century or so have brought an increased awareness of the implication of literature in the operations of power and ideology, but also a sense of the potential for literary presentation to challenge and displace such operations.
Introductory Courses in Theory and Method (ENGL 0800) explore the field of theoretical approaches to literature either directly, taking as a primary focus a set of theoretical questions or debates, or indirectly, by examining a compelling question of social and political significance through works of literature and literary theory. Courses may meet once, twice, or three times a week, and may be taught in either limited or unlimited enrollment formats.
Current and Past Courses
This is a provisional list of courses. A final list will be available before pre-registration.
*Denotes new course
Fall 2024
- ENGL 0101B, Earth Poetics: Literature and Climate Change (Smailbegovic)
- ENGL 0710B, African American Literature and the Legacies of Slavery (Murray)
- ENGL 1140A, Intellectual Pleasures (Stanley)
Spring 2025
- ENGL 0800R, Reading Practices (Rooney)
- ENGL 0800T, Intro to Black Literary Theory (Quashie)
- ENGL 1910T, Practices of Autofiction (Bewes)
This is a provisional list of courses. A final list will be available before pre-registration.
*Denotes new course
Fall 2024
- ENGL 0800T, Intro to Black Literary Theory (Quashie)*
- ENGL 1030J, Editing Theory and Practice (Hipchen)*
- ENGL 1140A, Intellectual Pleasures (Stanley)
- ENGL 1361R, Sexual Contracts in Renaissance Drama (Scozzaro)*
- ENGL 1901R, The Problem of Literary Study (Egan)*
Spring 2025
- ENGL 0800V, Marxist Literary Theory (Parker)*
- ENGL 1190Z, The Art of Craft (Ward)
- ENGL 1762D, Kubrick (Rambuss)
*This is a provisional list of courses. A final list will be available before pre-registration.
Fall 2023
- ENGL 0800S, Blackness in Critical Thought (Ramirez-D'Oleo)
- ENGL 1310H, Origins of American Literature (Egan)
- ENGL 1760M, The Miracle of Cinema (Burrows)
- ENGL 17861D, Hollywood and American Modernism from FDR to JFK (Nabers)
Spring 2024
- ENGL 1140A, Intellectual Pleasures (Stanley)
- ENGL 1190Z, The Art of Craft (Ward)
- ENGL 1361N, Evil Plays: Shakespeare and Contemporaries (Rambuss)
- ENGL 1711P, 'We have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze': Contemporary Writing Not by Men (Bewes)