Fall 2025 Courses

(Blansett/Doran): [3 credits] Scholarship in the fields of writing studies, composition, and rhetoric often raises questions about how texts are made and the roles we play in teaching others to create texts. In response, compositionists have formulated a variety of theories for the assumptions, methods, and practices we rely on in the classroom. In ENGL 5100, we will engage with the theories, histories, research, and practices that inform our own First-Year Writing Program at UConn. Specifically, we will explore theories related to our writing program's approach to reading and writing, cognition and creativity, teaching and learning, language and meaning-making. We will build a greater understanding of the contexts that shape and are affected by our practices of teaching writing.
In addition to being introduced to the theoretical approaches to writing and teaching writing, you will also be introduced to current methodologies used by composition researchers to undertake a research project on teaching, learning, and writing (Scholarship of Teaching & Learning [SoTL]). Your classroom-based research will culminate in a project that contributes to our understanding of how undergraduate students learn to write and compose. You will share what you have learned in the classroom in a brief teaching presentation. The research will also provide the groundwork upon which you develop a course inquiry and assignment architecture in preparation for teaching your own version of UConn's FYW course. Work includes weekly written engagements with assigned readings, a teaching-focused research project, and a description of the course inquiry and assignment architecture.

(Fisher): Fridays 12:30 pm – 1:45 pm, 1:45 am – 3:00 pm, or 3:00 pm – 4:15 pm, depending on your schedule [1 Credit] The Practicum in the Teaching of Writing is designed for graduate students teaching First-Year Writing at the University of Connecticut for the first time. Teaching Practicum is designed to help you implement the theories of teaching and writing introduced in ENGL 5100, serving as a bridge between your learning and your students’ experiences. We will work weekly on developing active-learning strategies, class activity plans, and other instructional materials that you will use immediately in your classes. Practicum also provides a sustained forum for reflecting on and assessing your own teaching in the context of the program. It is a deliberate teaching community where instructors regularly share experiences and learn from one another.

(Codr): Loneliness has been a key term in social scientific research and public health arenas for the better part of our young century. Culminating in a 2023 advisory on an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” commissioned by then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, the rise of loneliness as an optic for examining society and culture today has been remarkable not because it is new, but because loneliness and the conditions of solitude or solitariness with which it is usually (though not always) associated has been a central feature of narrative representation since, at least, The Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s Odyssey.

In this seminar we will explore the long and deep history of loneliness in the West, paying particular attention to literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, which witnessed 1) the ascent of the individual as the operative unit of liberalism, 2) the centering of solitude as a spiritual condition in the literatures of Protestantism, 3) the emergence of the literature of the castaway colonist, 4) the emergence of a literature recording the experience of forced servitude and escape, and 5) the rise of a celebratory (or at least appreciative) attitude towards loneliness in the literature of Romanticism. As we explore these various loneliness formations our eyes will constantly be on the question of how the humanities can be used to shed light on both the current loneliness crisis as well as the current discourse surrounding loneliness, in which it is pathology, rather than pathos, and public health rather than art, that dictates the terms we use to think about being alone.

Authors and texts to be covered include the following: Primary works of literature: Robinson Crusoe (Defoe, 1719), Ashton’s Memorial (castaway narrative, 1726), The Female American (Winkfield, 1767), The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Equiano, 1789), The History of Mary Prince (Prince, 1833), Reveries of a Solitary Walker (Rousseau, 1776), and Frankenstein (Shelley, 1818) as well as selected poems by writers such as Anne Finch, Thomas Gray, and William Wordsworth. Important contextualizing texts may include: Two Treatises of Government (Locke), The Social Contract (Rousseau), theological works on devotion, privacy, and solitariness, and Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. A variety of contemporary and theoretical works on loneliness and individualism will accompany these major readings.

Requirements for this course include one public-facing piece of writing on a topic relating to loneliness, leadership of a guided discussion of one or two course texts, and a research paper treating loneliness in one of the course texts or in a text or tradition of the student’s choosing.

(Smith): Tuesdays, 9:00-11:30 - This seminar investigates the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a moment of cultural and historical border-crossing — a moment that crystallizes ideas and debates that both look back to the social changes that marked the Victorian period and carry forward into modernism. In particular, we will examine some of this period’s richest conversations in science, art, industrialization, race, class, and gender. Our readings will consider theories of degeneration, sexology, racial science, and psychical research; examine movements in literature and culture such as decadence and aestheticism, the New Woman, and “slum” literature; and interrogate anxieties surrounding empire and national identity. Through a range of genres (including novels, short stories, essays, poetry, art, and photography) we’ll dissect how authors and artists responded to, reinforced, and challenged the rapidly shifting cultural climate at the end of the nineteenth century.

While much of our material will focus on British literature and culture, the seminar necessitates wrangling with three methodological concerns. First, we'll consider the challenges and advantages of transatlantic and transimperial texts and scholarship. A number of the authors, intellectual movements, and cultural shifts we will trace are enriched by considering the movement of ideas, people, and creative works between England and the United States and throughout the British empire. How do we engage in such work as scholars who, often, specialize geographically as well as chronologically? What strategies can we use as thinkers and researchers to approach such work? Also, as the title of the seminar implies, we’ll be considering questions of periodization. How do we understand liminal moments such as the fin-de-siècle, both in our scholarship and in our profession? And lastly, the seminar will provide you with opportunities to consider the relationship between canonical and lesser known texts, the ethical and political machinery behind such designations, and how to navigate different assignations of literary value and relevance as researchers, writers, and teachers.

In addition to weekly reading and active engagement in seminar, you'll complete a series of self-designed writing projects of different lengths and purposes. I’ll offer suggestions of potential assignments — some that lead to writing a “traditional” seinar paper and others focused public-facing scholarship, pedagogical materials, or archival studies.

Our primary reading list might include the following, but it will change and adapt in response to student interests and as I further develop the syllabus.

• Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science (1882)
• Olive Schreiner, Story of an African Farm (1883), paired with visual representations of empire
• Joris-Karl Huysmans, A Rebours (1884)
• Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop (1888)
• Oscar Wilde, Salome (1893), with Aubrey Beardsley illustrations
• Lafcadio Hearn, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894) and Okakura Kakuzo, selections from Ideals of the East (1903) and The Awakening of Japan (1904), paired with J. M. W. Whistler
• G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895)
• Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago (1896), paired with “street urchin” and “street Arab” print and visual materials
• Richard Marsh, The Beetle (1897)
• Henry James, What Maisie Knew (1897), paired with Child Study materials
• Paramaswaram Pillai, excerpts from London and Paris through Indian Spectacles (1897) and Behramji Malabari, The Indian Eye on English Life (1893), paired with images from the City of London Asylum archive
• Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901), paired with excerpts from Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys (1899)
• Selections of WWI poetry, prose, paintings, and photography
• Short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George Egerton, Vernon Lee, Constance Fenimore Woolson, L. T. Meade, Victoria Cross, Radclyffe Hall, and E. Nesbit
• Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, eds., The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History (2000)
• Lisa Rodensky (ed.), Decadent Poetry from Wilde to Naidu (2007)

(Williams): This course will examine the literary, cultural, and political debates that structured the Harlem Renaissance by centering it as an aesthetic and political movement marked by queer subjectivities, practices, and epistemologies. While the Harlem Renaissance launched several famous queer artists including the writers Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Richard Bruce Nugent and the musicians Ma Rainey and Gladys Bentley, the movement has, until rather recently, been regarded chiefly for its formative influence on Black nationalist and Black arts movements, to the exclusion of recognizing its contributions to explorations and expressions of gender and sexuality.

Exploring the Harlem Renaissance and its complex literary and political histories enacts the challenge of historical and literary periodization; highlights the complexity of archival work; foregrounds the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class; and illuminates the role of LGBTQIA experiences, theories, and practices in shaping Africana, U.S. and transnational aesthetics and politics.

Artists to be studied will include some of the following: Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Richard Bruce Nugent, Nella Larsen, Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Angelina Weld Grimké, Gladys Bentley, Nora Holt, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin. Theorists to be studied will include Farah Griffin, C. Riley Snorton, Mason Stokes, Deborah McDowell, Dwight McBride, Judith Butler, Sharon Holland and Rod Ferguson. We will also supplement our readings with select documentaries and films.

The methodological approaches of the course will be drawn from literary theory, queer theory, queer of color critique, archival theory, biography, historiography, and cultural criticism. Assignments will include short responses, an oral group presentation, a seminar, conference-style paper (at midterm and with an opportunity to revise), and a final, researched paper or project.

(Jeon): The field of Second Language (L2) writing aims at exploring the nature of multilingual students’ (students who use English as a Second or Foreign Language) engagement with writing practices in school and out-of-school contexts. With the increasing number of multilingual students in U.S. higher education, the University of Connecticut (UConn) is not exceptional given that many international undergraduate and graduate students join diverse programs every academic year. With that trend, Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) also released statement on Second Language Writing and Multilingual Writers, and one of the statements explicitly emphasizes the importance of offering “teacher preparation based on evidence-based scholarship and best practices for multilingual writers in the forms of graduate courses, faculty workshops, relevant conference travel, and when possible, require such coursework or other similar preparation for instructors working with writers in a higher-education context” (CCCC Statement on Second Language Writing and Multilingual Writers). However, at UConn, opportunities to delve into the field of L2 writing are “very” limited. Despite graduate teaching assistants’ requests for the course of multilingual writing pedagogy and the increasing enrollment of international and multilingual students in First-Year Writing (FYW) courses, the current graduate programs—both within the English department and beyond—offer “no” courses focused on L2 writing. 

Responding to the lack of opportunities to learn the field of L2 writing, students in this course will explore various topics in L2 writing (i.e. task representation, reading-writing connections, assessment, pedagogy etc.) from research and teaching perspectives since the two go hand in hand in the L2 context. That is, L2 writing research is generally conducted with an eye toward implications for instruction and takes place in instructional settings. At the end of this course, students will be able to achieve the following learning objectives: 

1. Students will be able to obtain expertise in L2 writing instruction that they can use in their working contexts with multilingual students. 
2. Students will be able to identify a range of potential research topics in L2 writing that they can further develop for their dissertation or independent research projects.
3. From a methodological perspective, students will be able to design qualitative research in a structured and systematic manner.

(Winter): This course introduces students to new approaches in current scholarship on nineteenth-century British literature, migration, liberal imperialism, and transatlantic literatures (United States and Jamaica). One prominent frame for understanding the long nineteenth century and its processes of modernization has been the rise of institutions, whether governmental, economic, legal, educational, corporate, scientific, or religious, alongside the disciplines that rationalized them and the professions that organized them. Critics’ and historians’ focus on institutions and disciplines has often been coordinated through the overarching categories of society and culture, understood as complex wholes or systems. But the long nineteenth century, as viewed through recent scholarship on migration and liberal imperial governance, also gives evidence of many extra-institutional, temporary, and spontaneous associations and movements that were unaffiliated or only loosely affiliated with institutions and official policies. Two salient examples can be found in the emergence of a mass global Anglophone reading audience and nascent decolonial movements across the British Empire. Our goal will be to identify forms of citizenship, belonging, and affiliation with or resistance to institutions that do not comfortably fit older conceptual models based in the opposition between the individual and society; or mappings according to social class, nationality, or political party; or dichotomies such as inclusion versus exclusion; or frequently used psychological terms such as sympathy or detachment. Catalyzers for affiliation or disaffiliation with institutions within a dynamic industrializing process and a growing empire might include kinship networks; feminism; philanthropic and humanitarian endeavors; migration; urban or rural enclaves; public health movements; religious beliefs; political reform or activism, including struggles for women’s rights and decolonial movements; consumerism; occupational training and professional associations; etc. In addition, as parameters for our investigation, we will track the profound dissonances and uneven distribution of citizenship alongside the uneven disposition of property rights by gender, race, class, and under conditions of imperial rule in settler colonial and administered territories. White European migrants and settlers became citizens of British settler colonies, while Indigenous populations were rarely granted full rights of citizenship. The course will focus on a series of novels that articulate these new forms of belonging, citizenship, or resistance in relation to developing disciplines, including property law and legal reform, anthropology, religion, psychology, sociology, medicine, humanitarianism, political economy, and education. Readings will include canonical as well as lesser-read novels and recent scholarship that engages literary history with the imperial histories of the modern disciplines and professions. 

Possible reading list with associated disciplines or politics:

William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794) (radical politics, government reform)

Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (1800) (land law and rent, Irish political history)

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847) (property law, medicine, psychology)

Frank J. Webb, The Garies and Their Friends (1857) (transnational abolitionism)

Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857) (nursing, humanitarianism)

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860) (religion, political economy)

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861) (migration, settler colonies, criminal law, sociology)

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds (1871) (anthropology)

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895) (education, reform of women’s property and divorce)

Claude McKay, Romance in Marseille (1930s) (disability, transnational labor, the international business corporation, LGBTQ literature)

1. K. Narayan, The English Teacher (1945) (education, imperial citizenship)

 Each of the novels will be paired with secondary readings on related disciplinary histories and/or the histories of the professions, and with new critical scholarship published in the past ten years focusing on the associated discipline and its relationship to imperial governance and its contestation. Students will choose a disciplinary history and major text or set of texts to research and then lead the class session once during the semester and develop a related seminar paper or a set of shorter assignments (pedagogy-related assignment, two shorter papers). Readings will be assigned together with excerpts from some recent literary critical, historical, and cultural studies, including: Tanya Agathocleous, Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere; Katherine Judith Anderson, Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain; Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire; Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (2022); Pamela Gilbert, Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History; Simon Joyce, LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives (2022); Josephine McDonagh, Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815-1876; Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology, the Novel, and Sexual Modernity; Zachary Samalin, The Masses are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust; Daniel M. Stout, Corporate Romanticism: Liberalism, Justice, and the Novel. These readings will also expose students to a variety of methodologies, including medical humanities; law and literature; migration studies and literature of the settler colonies; affect studies; postcolonial studies; queer theory; feminist and gender studies.

This course could be taken for pre-1800 credit and could appeal to students interested in Romanticism, Victorian studies, American-British-Caribbean literary relations, novel studies, as well as students with interests in decolonial pedagogies or the relationship of literature to British liberal imperialism. The course would prepare students for teaching a modern British literature survey.

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.

(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.

(Deans): Writing minors, writing studies electives, and first-year writing programs that take a “writing about writing” approach are on the rise in English Departments, so having experience with them is a real plus when seeking faculty positions. This seminar will introduce you to key terms, texts, and theories in writing studies while inviting you to apply those to course design and pedagogy. Our governing questions: If you were asked to teach an undergraduate Introduction to Writing Studies course, what would you need to know beyond what you’ve encountered in ENGL 5100/Theory and Teaching of Writing?  And how could you then translate that knowledge into designing either a 2000-level general education writing studies course or a writing-about-writing FYW course? We will read histories of literacy and general education; foundational texts in rhetoric, composition, genre, style, identity, and writing across the curriculum; and recent work at the intersection of AI and writing. As we consider pedagogy across multiple modalities--in-person, online, synchronous, asynchronous--we will consult instructional designers from UConn’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (affording some sense of what that career path looks like). We’ll also take a peek into aspects of faculty life that rarely surface in seminars, such as the practical politics of getting courses approved, recent trends in general education and their effects on English departments, and the research opportunities possible for those invested in teaching.

(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.