Spring 2026 Courses

(King'oo): This practicum will give you the opportunity to begin shaping your career in the discipline of English. Our primary objective will be to assist you in developing your publishing skills. To that end, each participant will transform a seminar paper or conference presentation into an article-length submission to a professional journal. But we will also read about and discuss the most important aspects of the theory and practice of “professing English” today, including negotiating the demands of the corporate university, attending conferences and networking, securing grants, writing dissertations and books, making your teaching matter, and explicating the value of the humanities to the public at large. Participants will be expected to contribute to writing workshops, complete several assignments on the way to producing a publishable article, and engage energetically (and positively) in class discussion.

(Semenza): We will delve deeply into John Milton’s Paradise Lost—both the epic poem and its 350-year-old reception history—with the aim of demonstrating the rewards of systematic close-reading, on the one hand, and the complex ways in which canonical works and authors are historically constructed, on the other.  We’ll also be reading enough of Milton’s other major poetry and prose to keep Paradise Lost in context.  Over the course of the semester, you’ll become familiar with the major British and American phases of Milton criticism and adaptation.  The course will end with a weeks-long analysis of Paradise Lost’s influence on modern literature and popular culture—for example, the fantasy writings of Philip Pullman and a small selection of “Miltonic” films.

I was tempted to cross-list this seminar under “Theory” because a large component of it involves reception studies.  Perhaps no literary sub-field better demonstrates the importance and impact of reception theory than Milton studies.  To demonstrate this fact, and to provide you with analytical and philosophical tools you will find useful in your own scholarship, I will organize readings in the following way: each week, our close-reading of Milton’s writings will be supplemented by additional readings in both criticism (which I’m defining as either explication or commentary) and reception (which obviously overlaps with the criticism quite a bit).  Whereas the critical readings will teach you about several of the larger debates in Milton studies—about God, about Satan, and about Eve and Milton’s female characters more generally—the reception readings should offer you a sense of the ways Paradise Lost has been read and appropriated since the seventeenth century.

The course fulfills the pre-1800 distribution requirement.

Assignments:

1)  Attendance, Preparation, and Spirited Participation                                   20%

2)  Oral Presentation                                                                                       15%

3)  100-Word and 250-Word Abstracts of Final Project                                      10%

4)  750-Word Proposal of Final Paper (+ comprehensive Bibliography)            15%

5)  Participation in Introduction Writing Workshop                                 10%

6)  Final Paper                                                                                       30%

(Kim): This seminar investigates twenty-first century American literary theory on writing about others. Literature is often imagined as a privileged lens into understanding the lives of others. Through the semester, we ask (1) how such a notion of literature (over others) has functioned in the US since the twentieth century—when the influx of otherness facilitated by globalization and racial capitalism has entered society at an unprecedented degree; and (2) why scholars turn to the perspectives of writers of color to chart conditions under which new norms, ideas, and alternative kinds of communities emerge. We seek to track the place of writers of color in American literature in the global age—and interrogate how and why we come to read what we read.

Some of the texts we will read include: Dorothy Hale, The Novel and the New Ethics (2020), Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy (2011), Kandace Chuh, The Difference Aesthetics Makes (2019), Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (2007), David Palumbo-Liu, Deliverance of Others (2012), Paula Moya, The Social Imperative (2015).

Requirements include: leading a guided discussion, short responses, explication de texte (midterm), and a final research paper.

(Coundouriotis): Decolonial analysis aims at deconstructing the institutions of knowledge perpetuated by colonialism to make room for the new and aim for the overcoming of coloniality. The emphasis on making and creating—of breaking through to something new and transformative to extend the thought process that begins with critique—renders decolonial practices distinct from historical and political analyses of colonialism that originate within mainstream institutions of knowledge. The flashpoints of the decolonize movement in South Africa, for example, are the Rhodes Must Fall protests (to remove the Cecil Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town in March 2015) and Fees Must Fall (beginning the following month, April 2015) to expand access to higher education. Decolonial thinking has spearheaded impressive creative efforts to erect new monuments in this country (for example, the installations at the Legacy Museum in Alabama). Applying this orientation of pushing critique forward, we will develop new strategies of reading.

How do elements of narrative such as plot, story, character, point of view, free indirect discourse, etc. contribute to developing decolonial reading methods? The course does not pose litmus tests on texts (does this text count as decolonial or not) but turns the question instead on the reader. How can we read differently? What types of questions should we be asking in a decolonial practice? Is there a role for formalism within decolonial thought? Where do questions of history and temporality, which are key to decolonial thought, fit in relation to questions of narrative?

The seminar will begin with attention to key concepts such as the differences between anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial thought. These are dynamic terms and there are many differing perspectives on them that organize them along a historical timeline or see them as synchronous, competing political projects. Our discussions will aim at starting a critical genealogy that connects the terms to each other and the ongoing project of decolonization.

The seminar will also examine theories of world literature that tie it to the historical imaginations of novels in Anglophone literature. This discussion on history, world-making, temporality, and political agency will extend our effort to develop decolonial readings.  We will read novels from the world literature canon framing each work according to a different narrative concept. Students will be encouraged to think about method and to read closely while developing a conceptual approach to reading world literature.

Assignments include: 2 oral presentations; a long research paper OR 2 shorter papers OR a final assessment in the form of a take-home essay exam.

(Pelizzon): This class is an imaginative exploration of ecologies and environments through poetry and narrative prose. We’ll be reading voraciously, writing daily, conversing in detail, and getting outdoors as much as possible. Our readings will prompt some key questions: How might attention to the natural world right outside our door become part of a daily writing practice? How can our work as writers make us more conscious co-habitants of our ecosystems? Can our imaginative writing deepen our understanding of local places and of those who lived here before us? What are some ways in which creative writing might help us approach environmental damage that feels too overwhelming to think about? We’ll study a variety of texts that prompt such questions and, in turn, provide possible models for our own original writings.

This is a process-oriented workshop. Rather than polishing a few perfect gem-like compositions, we’ll aim to write daily, imperfectly, generously, and experimentally as we try out different genres and techniques. Participants will compose four multi-stage creative projects. Participants will also keep a semester-long field log using a natural entity of their choice as the center for daily reflective/ observational/ historical/ speculative writerly “ramblings.” Over the course of the semester, we’ll divide our time between participant-led discussion of the readings, constructive critique of class members’ own prose and poetry, and in-class craft workshops designed to strengthen aspects of our creative writing craft.

(Burke): This seminar will consider Gothic writing in English from Ireland, Britain, and the Americas from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. The very first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), was produced by a writer and politician situated at the British Empire’s center of power. Otranto placed questions of excess, corruption, and legitimacy in a sinister continental setting. This seminar will begin with foundational texts by Walpole and Radcliffe before pivoting to subsequent Gothic novels from or about locations that the metropolitan center considered to be peripheral and/or exotic. Although they generally repeat foundational themes, such subsequent Gothic texts do not invariably endorse Otranto’s binary of Protestant, northern European rationality versus Catholic/non-Christian/non-British irrationality. A genre that evolved to emphasize “hesitancy over certainty, and which refuses to dissolve binaries such as living/dead, inside/outside, friend/enemy, desire/disgust” (Killeen), Gothic is eminently suited to grappling with the disorder, conflict, collusion, and hybridity intrinsic to colonization and Empire.

Locales considered in terms of setting or writers’ origins will run from Britain’s own peripheries (Brontë’s Yorkshire, du Maurier’s Cornwall, and Greig’s Scottish Borderlands) to its colonies/former colonies, both near (the Ireland of the settler-colonial Stoker, Le Fanu, and Bowen) and far (Brown’s “wild” Pennsylvania, the Caribbean of Marryat, D’arcy, and Walrond, and the Outback of Picnic at Hanging Rock).

In Gothic, such places are the location of non-conformist, residual “restless native,” and/or “gone rogue” settler-colonial populations. These sites hover between civilized and uncivilized, Christian and non-Christian, metropolitan and provincial, normative and queer, Established Church and non-conformism or Catholicism, Saxon and Celtic, white and off-white or Black. Given these emphases, students will have the opportunity to utilize major theories and foci of interpretation, from Marxism, feminism, gender, race, and psychoanalysis to postcolonial studies.

Assessment will involve a mixture of traditional and non-traditional writing projects and presentation formats, including the opportunity to present a practice conference paper.