Spring 2025 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 in class discussion.   

(Marsden): The year 1660 saw the restoration of Charles II to the throne and the plays of Shakespeare to the theater.  Yet the Shakespeare that was staged to audiences in the Restoration and eighteenth century did not necessarily take the same form that we know today:  King Lear had a happy ending; Romeo and Juliet appeared as both a comedy and as a tragedy; The Tempest was an opera featured a man who had never seen a woman, a lover for Ariel, and a mother for Caliban.  The eighteenth century was also the great age of bardolatry, when Shakespeare was revered as “the god of our idolatry” and the English Homer.  How and why could these seeming contradictions coexist? We will endeavor to answer this question by exploring the adaptation and reception of Shakespeare during the Restoration and eighteenth-century.  This was an age which saw the birth of criticism as well as the newspaper, of reviews of performances and responses to plays (including Rymer’s infamous dismissal of Othello as “the tragedy of the handkerchief”).  

 The course will also interrogate contemporary theories of adaptation, which are often used in consideration of contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare (often film adaptations). In what ways can these theories be applied to adaptations from a very different age – if they can. 

 Students would read a range of adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays (as well as responses to these adaptations), eighteenth-century critical approaches to Shakespeare and reviews of performances, as well as secondary works exploring theories of adaptation, both past and present.  Requirements: class presentations, five-eight page paper on the reception of one play, and final seminar project. This project will be worked out on an individual basis with the instructor. 

(Semenza): The course will explore the major theories of horror, especially since the time of Anne Radcliffe’s famous attempts to differentiate “horror” and “terror.” Each week, we’ll break down at least one primary literary or cinematic text (e.g., James’s The Turn of the Screw or Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and several theoretical/philosophical readings. Often criticized—sometimes even dismissed—as the lowliest of all forms, horror has in fact always been one of the most capacious, formally innovative, and ideologically complex literary and film genres. The passionate responses it inspires in audiences, from cult-like devotion to outright disgust, raise fascinating questions about why we love (or hate) to be frightened.  How do the things that most terrify us change over time or within different locales?  How do we draw ethical lines (personal, institutional, or national) about what we are willing to depict or watch on film? What do our individual and collective responses to horror say about us and the world in which we live? [Notes: This course explores graphic and oftentimes disturbing material; there is no way to enroll in the class and avoid such material. The course fulfills both the Theory and Post-1800 distribution requirements]   

(Mahoney): Derived from the Latin sublimis (“[on] high, lofty, elevated”), the sublime was first systematically described in the anonymous Greek treatise (traditionally attributed to Longinus), Peri hypsous, or On the Sublime, in the third century CE. Since its translation into English and French in the seventeenth century, this treatise and more comprehensively the category (philosophical, aesthetic, critical) of the sublime have had a significant, resounding effect on English, Continental, and American literature and criticism, from the eighteenth-century treatises of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant through to the post-structuralist writings of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-François Lyotard, and many others. Whether understood as the rhetorical distinction of a “high” style, as a designation for the general phenomenon of greatness in literature or nature, as a term of aesthetic approbation or the cornerstone of a formalist aesthetics, or as the name for an excess in language that prevents it from assuming any fixed form or meaning, the sublime is one of the most vexed, dynamic, and challenging terms in Western criticism.  

 This seminar proposes to analyze this term / category, beginning with Longinus and continuing into the twenty-first century, in order to better understand its significance in rhetorical, aesthetic, philosophical, and critical terms for English, American, and Continental literature and criticism. It will allow students to think about a crucial literary-critical concept, regardless of the nominal literary-historical period in which they may locate themselves and their work, and its implications for their own objects of study. It may appeal in particular to students interested in rhetoric, aesthetics, philosophy (and the history of ideas more generally), the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Post-Structuralism, twentieth-century criticism, and the history of criticism. 

 Major theoretical texts to be considered: 

 Longinus, On the Sublime 

John Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime (1747) 

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) 

Samuel Johnson, selected writings 

Immanuel Kant, “Critical Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime” (1784) 

Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1787; selections) 

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790; selections) 

Friedrich Schiller, “On the Sublime” (1793) 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, selections from Biographia Literaria and literary lectures (1810s) 

1. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics (Lectures on Fine Art), selections (pub. 1835)

Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (1976) 

Paul de Man, “Hegel on the Sublime” and “Kant’s Materialism” (1980s) 

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “La Verité sublime” (1986) 

Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, selections (trans 1987) 

Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” (trans 1989) 

Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Sublime Offering” (trans 1993) 

 Additional readings will be taken from critics such as Timothy Bahti, Ian Balfour, Peter de Bolla, Frances Ferguson, Rodolphe Gasché, Nicholas Halmi, Neil Hertz, Steven Knapp, Jeffrey Librett, Samuel Holt Monk, Slavoj Žižek, and others. 

 One further note: more nominally “literary” readings will take their bearings from the nominally “critical” writings listed above, and will be likely to include selections from, among others, Milton, Ossian, Walpole, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, P. B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron, Melville and others (TBD in relation as well to the interests of the enrolled students). 

 Likely requirements: weekly writing (500+ words, thesis driven), one seminar presentation, midterm conference paper (10 pp), and final seminar paper (7000 words) or some other final project (e.g. a DH project). There will also be opportunities for pedagogically-driven assignments designed to think about how graduate students might teach these materials. 

(Islam): This course is designed to introduce students to a) the archival turn in literary studies, particularly scholarship on the relationship between the archive and literary-cultural productions; b) theories of the archive; and wherever possible to c) engage students in hands-on research experience in the archives. 

Archives have been variously characterized as a reserve of information, a set of discourses, a mortuary, and an institution that obscures the conditions of its formation. This course is intended to introduce students to the study of the archive as theory and as praxis. To this end students will engage with scholarship that has critically reflected on the archive, its potentialities, and its limitations. Closely entangled with this inquiry is the study of the archival turn in literary studies, its intellectual investments, and its interrogation of the relationship between history, archives and literary fiction, especially the novel. Literary fictional readings for this class, transnational in its scope, will consist of Anglophone works from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. In addition to the study of literary and theoretical texts, this class will adopt a praxis-oriented approach to the study of archives. Students will have the opportunity to work with specific sets of materials held in the Archives and Special Collections at UConn, (and well as Special Collections at Yale University, depending on access), and consult with UConn archivist colleagues. 

(Morrison): Individuals from the past who are already familiar to us today have, in general, been well served by biography as a branch of literature based on historical, and especially archival, research. But what kinds of approaches might we employ to restore to the historical record those individuals who did not leave behind the resources on which biographers usually draw? This seminar introduces students to a controversial variant of biographical writing. Differing from fictional biography and historical fiction, speculative biography presents the version of the life that the writer believes is warranted by the combination of available facts and the imaginative possibility that such facts inspire. We will read and analyze several examples of speculative biography, including, perhaps, narratives about an eighteenth-century Cree woman in Canada; an ex-slave in the United States; a sixteenth-century French peasant; a currency lass in nineteenth-century Sydney; and an Icelandic servant sentenced to death in 1829. We will then work toward responsibly combining archival method and—what Natalie Zemon Davis calls—“informed imagination” to produce biographical vignettes that acknowledge the complexities of represented truth. The seminar will be useful to students working on a variety of historical periods or literatures whose interests include life writing, archival method, the tensions between fictionality and factuality, and creative practice.

(Vials): Scholars across the humanities and social sciences employ a whole critical vocabulary with origins in Marxism, and an examination of these origins is crucial not only to an informed lexicon but also to a comprehensive analysis of social structures.  The course aims to provide a historicized, materialist understanding of social class formations and a richer understanding of frequently used terms such as capitalism, hegemony, consumption, ideology, reification, globalization, neoliberalism, enclosure, finance, and commodity fetishism.  In so doing, it will familiarize students with major works of Marxist theory and cultural studies, tracing the historical trajectory of this discourse as well as selected methodological applications to twentieth and twenty-first century culture and history.  We will pay special attention to the intersections of Marxism with critical race studies, feminism, empire studies, and queer theory. 

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.

(Doran): Fridays 9:30 am – 10:45 am, 10:45 am – 12:00 pm, or 12:00 pm – 1:15 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.

(Booten): “Care,” along with its closely related counterpart “attention,” is a key concept in the study of digital media, which are routinely accused of carelessly soliciting and abusing our attention. At the same time, digital media may be too caring; everywhere, algorithms are paying close attention to us, surveilling our activities and inscriptions to model our behavior and predict our desires. This seminar will primarily serve as a broad introduction to how “care” (as well as, to a lesser extent, “attention” and its disquieting twin, “surveillance”) has been theorized in 20th- and 21st-century critical philosophy, particularly in relation to media—especially digital media. Adopting the approach of an experimental digital humanities lab, we will also explore ways to repurpose or rework digital media to care for our own minds—or at least to open new avenues for understanding and critiquing both the carelessness and the excessive attentiveness that characterize the contemporary digital milieu. Though this class has a contemporary/digital emphasis, many of the readings will address care in a broader sense (e.g., Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, Michel Foucault’s late lectures on the care of the self). Students working on other historical periods are welcome to apply theories of care to different contexts and/or regimes of media. Coursework will consist of a seminar paper, presentations on readings, and several hands-on activities.