Department of English

English for First-Years

Breadcrumb

English for First-Years

The Department of English offers several pathways for incoming students to deepen and strengthen their ability to think and write about literature and culture.

All of the introductory-level courses in English (the ENGL 0100s through the ENGL 0900s) are designed with first- and second-year students in mind.

Our offerings span a wide range of topics, and provide opportunities to think more deeply and to write more persuasively about literary works that are already exciting to you as well as those that you find intriguing and want to know more about. They may well get you to think about literature, and perhaps even the world, in new and transformative ways!

Literature Courses

There are two categories of English courses that you may find particularly useful in your first year at Brown: 

  • How Literature Matters (ENGL 0100, 0101) is the core course for the concentration. These are open-enrollment courses that focus on developing your ability to produce fine-tuned analyses of literary language, form and genre and also to grapple with the larger questions of how literature matters and how we might best understand and write about it.
  • The first-year seminars (ENGL 0150) have been specifically devised for incoming students; enrollment is capped at 19 and restricted to first-year students. Seminar faculty often serve as informal mentors for their students long after the class has ended.

Nonfiction Writing Courses

You might also consider taking one of our Nonfiction writing courses. These are part of the Nonfiction track, which is a popular option for English concentrators that enables them to focus on developing their writings skill in such genres as the academic essay, journalism, and creative nonfiction. Nonfiction writing courses suitable for first-year students are found at the introductory (ENGL 0900 and 0930) and intermediate levels (ENGL 1030 and 1050). All 1000-level nonfiction writing courses can be used as electives for the concentration in English (although only two can count toward the requirements for the regular concentration and three for the Nonfiction track).

Fall 2024 Course Offerings

ENGL 0100, 0101 How Literature Matters

  • ENGL 0100Y, Do The Right Thing (Parker)
  • ENGL 0101F, American Realism (Burrows)

ENGL 0150, 1015 How Literature Matters

  • ENGL 0151K, What Is Work? Race, Gender, and Sexuality at Work (Liu)

Other Below-1000 Level Courses

  • ENGL 0202B, What Monks Want: Asceticism and Austerity Across the Global Anglophone (Jain)
  • ENGL 0202C, Experiments in Asian and Asian Diaspora Literature and Culture (Kelly)
  • ENGL 0202D, Poetic Justice: Literature on Colonialism (Le)
  • ENGL 0300M, Gender in Medieval Literature (Min)
  • ENGL 0310A, Shakespeare (Scozzaro)
  • ENGL 0500P, The Examined Self: Lives of the Soul (Gould)
  • ENGL 0511D, Austen, Eliot, James (Parker)
  • ENGL 0700E, Postcolonial Literature (George)
  • ENGL 0710Z, American Literature and the Constitution (Nabers)
  • ENGL 0800T, Introduction to Black Literary Theory (Quashie)

ENGL 1000-level Courses

  • ENGL 1311G, Shakespeare, Love and Friendship (Kuzner)
  • ENGL 1361G, Tolkein and the Renaissance (Kuzner)
  • ENGL 1361S, Secual Contracts in Renaissance Drama (Scozzaro)
  • ENGL 1562C, The Pursuit of Happiness in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Gould/Rabb)
  • ENGL 1710K, Literature and the Problem of Poverty (Murray)
  • ENGL 1710P, The Literature and Culture of Black Power Reconsidered (Murray)
  • ENGL 1711N, Monsters in our Midst: The Plantation and the Woods in Trans-American Literature (Ramirez-D'Oleo)
  • ENGL 1711T, 1984: The Myth and the Moment (Reichman)
  • ENGL 1760E, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Reichman)
  • ENGL 1762D, Kubrick (Rambuss)
  • ENGL 1762K, Migration and Its Discontents: Asian American Literature and Culture (Liu)
  • ENGL 1762P, Lucille Clifton (Quashie)
  • ENGL 1901R, The Problem of Literary Study (Egan)

Spring 2025 Course Offerings

ENGL 0100, 0101 How Literature Matters

  • ENGL 0100A, How To Read A Poem (Rabb)
  • ENGL 0100U, Serial Fictions (Nabers)

ENGL 0150, First-Year Seminars

  • ENGL 0151G, The Middle Ages Goes to the Movies (Min)
  • ENGL 0151H, Literature and the Sea (Burrows)
  • ENGL 1051L, The Serial Imagination: Literature and Journalism in the 19th Century (McLaughlin)

Other Below-1000 Level Courses

  • ENGL 0202E, Memory and the Literary Imagination: Conceptions of Remembering from Shakespeare to the Present (Clawson)
  • ENGL 0202F, We the People: American Literatures of Community (Choi)
  • ENGL 0202G, Literatures of Racial Capitalism (Browne)
  • ENGL 0310A, Shakespeare (Kuzner)
  • ENGL 0310Q, Why Before 1700? Literature Before Literature (Egan)
  • ENGL 0700W, American Misfits: Short Story Collections of Displacement (Lafferty)
  • ENGL 0710V, Death and Dying in Black Literature (Quashie)
  • ENGL 0800V, Marxist Literary Theory (Parker)

ENGL 1000-level Courses

  • ENGL 1361L, Milton (Rambuss)
  • ENGL 1631R, Chaucer (Min)
  • ENGL 1512A, Freaks of Nature: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalists (Gould)
  • ENGL 1711S, James Baldwin (Abdur-Rahan)
  • ENGL 1762J, Books Behind Bars: African American Literature's Response to Mass Incarceration (Kizza-Brown)
  • ENGL 1762Q, Apartheid and the Literary Imagination (George)
  • ENGL 1762R, Transpacific Bodies and Materialities (Lafferty)

Additional Information

Concentration

In addition to the English concentration, we offer a concentration track in the practice of Nonfiction Writing.

The Honors Program

The Honors Program is for students who have been highly successful in their English concentration coursework and would like the opportunity to pursue an in-depth research project.