Fall 2025 Courses Revealed!
Fall 2025 Course Descriptions
ENG 8000 What’s Hot? Introduction to Theory Across
the Discipline of English
Dr. Michael Dowdy
CRN 27943
Tuesday 5:20-7:20 pm
This course will be run as a seminar in which each week, a different graduate faculty member will introduce you to a body of theory that is particularly important within current discussions in their field of specialization. What are some of the major theoretical approaches in medieval studies today? Early modern studies? What about 19th-century American literature and British literature? Modernism? Postcolonial Studies? Irish Studies? Contemporary literature? This class is an attempt to bring you immediately into dialogue with a wide variety of theories that are shaping literary study today. The course is intended to be a lively opportunity to meet most of the English faculty members who teach at the graduate level and to engage in dialogue about and analysis of the contemporary state of literary theory. Assignments will include biweekly journals and a final 15-page seminar paper.
ENG 8260 Gender, Race, and
Sexuality in Shakespeare and Milton
Dr. Lauren Shohet
CRN 27947
Wednesday 7:30-9:30 pm
This course explores how gender, sexuality, and race
are constructed and deconstructed in plays and poetry (as well as some
political treatises, sermons, recipes, and midwives’ manuals) of the English
Renaissance. Our central texts will be Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice,
Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Othello, and The Tempest,
plus Milton’s Paradise Lost. We’ll contextualize these with readings in
other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources, present-day criticism, and
post-Renaissance adaptations of our primary texts. How do early-modern
articulations of what become foundational categories of our modern-day
experience shape subsequent versions of these categories? What’s familiar,
alien, appealing, appalling about them? What can we recover, what can we never
know, what can we use, what do we misunderstand when we examine these
traditions? Readings and informal assignments will give students opportunities
to test out different theoretical models and contemporary critical tools;
substantial final papers will revisit and expand on this earlier work.
*This course fulfills the pre-1800 British/Irish
literature requirement
ENG 9730-001 The Art of Translation
Dr. Adrienne Perry
CRN 27951
Monday 5:20-7:20 pm
The so-called language
barrier is permeable.
Differences in language
signal larger differences in perception, culture, worldview, and mode of
expression. Capital marshals difference as barrier.
Language can be used to
divide and conquer, and yet it can also be used to unite, to resist domination,
to construct more humane and delightful realities.
—Antena, from A Manifesto for Interpretation as Instigation
There are well over
6,000 languages spoken around the globe, many of them in our own communities.
Reading and writing across languages opens us up to that world. Translation and
interpretation, whether undertaken by us or others, is the art that makes this
movement and its resulting encounters possible. “The Art of Translation” is a
graduate seminar focusing on these encounters through the study of translation
theory, translation practices, and the reading of literature in translation. As
part of this focus, we will consider some of the issues undergirding
contemporary and modern theories of translation. The course will ask a few
basic questions. 1) What is translation? 2) What role does the translator play
in translation? 3) As readers and writers, how can we use the practice of
translation to rethink our relationship to language and, by proxy, power? As
such, this course is also interested in the relationship between translation,
language, ethics, and justice. Assignments include one class discussion facilitation,
translation and creative writing exercises, as well as a final project.
Required readings may
include: 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, Eliot Weinberger; “Thick
Translation,” Kwame Appiah; The Translator’s Invisibility, Lawrence
Venuti; Sphinx, by Anne Garréta, translated by Emma Ramadan; The Passion According to G.H., by
Clarice Lispector, translated by Idra Novey; and All the Garbage of the
World Unite! by Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi.
ENG 9730-002 Writing Indigeneity
& Indigenous Writing
Dr. Kimberly Takahata
CRN 27952
Wednesday 5:20-7:20 pm
This course examines how
literature of the Anglophone colonies sought to clarify what it means to be
Indigenous, especially in relationship to colonization. Troubling the divide between
Indigenous stories and colonial writing, we will explore the bounds of
authorship and textual legibility. Reading reports, natural histories,
speeches, autobiographies, and poems, we will pay attention to two primary
threads: one, how settlers used writing to codify the category of indigeneity
as a tool of colonial power; and two, how Indigenous persons’ acts of
sovereignty continue to mark colonial texts or use writing to refuse limited
definitions of indigeneity. Our secondary readings will introduce students to
the field of Indigenous Studies and address on-going debates about
methodological approaches to colonial texts of the long eighteenth-century
Atlantic World.
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ENG 9730-003 What is
Poetry?
Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh
CRN 27953
Thursday 5:20-7:20 pm
“I, too, dislike it.” That is how Marianne Moore
begins “Poetry,” a poem that then attempts to define the thing it claims to
dislike—a distaste that it assumes (“I, too, dislike it”) you share.
This course will, in some sense, follow Moore’s
strategy: We’ll begin by confronting our resistance to poetry head-on, asking
where such a distaste comes from, and then teasing out the implicit
understandings (of poetry, language, our selves) that activate these forms of
skepticism. Is there something called “poetic language” that is fundamentally
different from “ordinary language”? Where does the idea that poetry, more than
any other form of literature, is centrally concerned with (and representative
of) consciousness come from? What kinds of poetry does such an idea allow, and
what kinds of poetry does it marginalize or obscure? How does poetry uniquely
configure its relationship to time? In what ways does poetry resemble or borrow
from other literary modes or genres (narrative, dramatic), and in what ways
does it hold itself apart as distinct? These are some of the questions that
will animate our discussions. We’ll pursue them through readings in lyric
theory and, of course, in poems.
ENG 8090: Thesis Direction
CRN 27944
Direction of writing of the thesis, focused research on a narrowly
defined question, under supervision of an individual instructor.
ENG 8092: Field Examination
CRN 27945
A broader exploration of a theme or area of literature than a thesis.
The examination comprises a comprehensive statement essay and an oral exam
component.
ENG 9031: Independent Study
CRN 27948
A special project pursued under the direction of an individual
professor.
ENG 9080: Thesis Continuation
CRN 27950
ENG 8093:
Field Exam Continuation
CRN 27946
ENG 9035
Dr. Evan Radcliffe
CRN 27949
Professional Research Option
(PRO)
This option for second-year graduate students is a three-credit
independent study in which students identify one or a cluster of jobs or
professions in which an advanced degree in literature is of benefit. In the
course of the semester, students will research the career options of interest,
identifying one or two fields as the focus of their work. They must generate a
research paper that explores the history and future prospects of the field of
interest, as well as current information about the requirements of the work,
geographical information about centers of activity for the profession, and
desirable employers. This research should include at least two meetings with
professionals who work in the field. The paper must also analyze how advanced
study of literature serves to enhance the students' desirability in the
profession in question. As part of their final project, students must develop a
cover letter outlining the ways their particular training makes them suitable
to work in this field. Students will make their research available to other
students in the program by uploading part of their final project onto a special
section of the Graduate English Program blog. Potential fields of research
include the following:
E-Book Industry Teaching
Public relations Rare
book broker
Advertising Web
design
College admissions Journalism
University administration Testing
industry
Arts administration Tutoring
industry
Library science Technical
writing
ENG 9800
CRN 27954
Internship in Teaching English
Second-year graduate students have the option to serve as an intern for a graduate faculty member in an undergraduate English course (or students who have completed nine credits may apply for special consideration). Interns will attend all class sessions, confer at least once with each student on their written work, lead two or three class sessions under the supervision of the faculty member, and complete a final project that is either (1) a substantial critical essay concerning the subject matter of the course or (2) a research project concerning trends and issues within college-level pedagogy. The aim of the program is to provide students with teaching and classroom experience. Students may apply to serve as interns by consulting with a faculty member who is teaching in an area of interest, and, if the faculty member is amenable, submitting a one-two page statement, outlining how this course addresses their larger intellectual goals, and what they hope to accomplish as an intern.