Graduate Course Offerings
| Professor Barclay Barrios | Summer Term 2 (First Half) | Tues/Thurs, 4:45pm–7:55pm |
This course will provide a focused introduction to some of the major critical theories around sexuality and related topics. We will read Michel Foucault’s Introduction to the History of Sexuality as well as selected readings from other high profile thinkers and theorists in this area. Given the condensed summer schedule, we will focus primarily on foundational theories that inform much of the current critical debate while point to more contemporary work that would be worth investigation.
*Concentration: Rhetoric & Composition
Graduate Course Offerings
| Professor Timothy Miller | Monday, 4:00pm–6:50pm |
Science fiction studies boasts a long tradition of engaging with and contributing to contemporary literary theory. Fantasy studies, by contrast, has seen comparative neglect within the same range of theoretical approaches, despite the potentially broader remit of the fantastic itself. This course will introduce you to some of the major works of fantasy literature and fantasy theory from the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st, as we interrogate this history of neglect and begin to pursue our own theorizations of the fantastic. Is fantasy really “under-theorized”? Do certain bodies of critical theory work with fantasy particularly well, or especially reward expansion of their own traditional scope to include more fantastic texts? What can fantasy studies learn from theory, and theory learn from fantasy studies? Possible fantasy novelists to be considered include Ursula K. Le Guin, J. R. R. Tolkien, Nalo Hopkinson, China Miéville, and N. K. Jemisin. We will also be reading excerpts from the two most influential monographs theorizing genre fantasy itself, and, additionally, each student will deliver a class presentation on a chosen school or area of critical theory -- or perhaps major theorist -- that will speculate on some potential applications to fantasy studies.
| Professor Clarissa Chenovick | Wednesday, 4:00pm–6:50pm |
Eros and intellect are often made to seem like opposites. The idea that love and desire are “blind” or irrational is idiomatic, and the erotic has long been treated as a function of the body rather than the mind. The critical and literary texts in this course challenge these surface-level truisms. While critical works like Valerie Traub’s Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (2015) invite us to consider critically the possibility that sex could be a mode of thought as well as the subject of critical inquiry, influential works of feminism and queer studies such as Audre Lorde’s influential essay “The Uses of the Erotic” (1978) and Ela Pryzbylo’s recent Asexual Erotics (2019) challenge the conflation of the erotic with the sexual, offering new ways of thinking about both the sexual and the erotic and about the intersections of body, mind, and affect.
The literary texts in this course also challenge, provoke, and delight in the multiplicity of attitudes they take toward sexuality, eros, and intellect, ranging from the ways the love sonnets of Mary Wroth and William Shakespeare use metaphors as a means of understanding and creating erotic experience to the ways seventeenth-century devotional writers like John Donne and Richard Crashaw position their sometimes shocking imagery of erotic touch and union with God as an activity of the “understanding” that produces physiological sensation. Reading these critical and literary texts in tandem with one another, we will investigate some of the varieties of eros in early modern literary texts in order to expand our own ability to think critically about the ways that the categories of thought and sensation, body and intellect intersect both in our own present-day cultural and critical approaches to eros.
| Professor Carla María Thomas | Wednesday, 7:10pm–10:00pm |
This course will trace the development of the various Englishes from its emergence in what is now England during the Old English period (c. 650-1150) to today’s global Englishes. The course will be reverse chronological, starting with the most familiar contemporary Englishes, using Míša Hejná and George Walkden's Open Access textbook A History of English, and working our way back to Old English and Proto-Indo-European roots. The last few weeks of class will focus on student research interests, which may be more sociolinguistic than historical in nature, with student-chosen readings (essays or book chapters) and presentations that culminate in a final research paper of their choice. After this course, students will understand how our mouths literally produce consonant and vowel sounds, why we pronounce words the way we do, our strange grammatical quandaries (like what’s up with our use of “do”), a basic understanding of some premodern Englishes, and much more!
| Professor Andrew Furman | Tuesday, 7:10pm–10:00pm |
Henry David Thoreau was one of the most important writers and thinkers in 19th-century America. His essays, books, and now famous Journal laid the groundwork for the progressive intellectual movement of Transcendentalism, and also forged, in no small part, distinct elements of the American ethos we are still negotiating, various "-isms" such as individualism, idealism, abolitionism, environmentalism, pastoralism, and eco-centrism. Through examining a good portion of his nonfiction writings—most concertedly, the two books published during his lifetime, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854), his most famous essays, and ample selections from the lifelong project of his Journal—we will interrogate his unique contributions to America’s literary and intellectual culture, and explore the various ongoing controversies over his legacy.
| Professor Robert Adams | Thursday, 4pm–6:50pm |
In this course, we will be using ethical and metaphysical philosophy in an exploration of differing modes of modern fiction. The focus will be upon the fiction, with the philosophy (read in brief selections provided) as a conceptual background. We will begin with ancient (Plato) and contemporary (Bernardo Kastrup) philosophical representations of the infinite Good as an ultimate value and metaphysical reality, and then we will proceed to examine the modes and authors below. The last two weeks of the course will be reserved for conference-length presentations by all class members, each of which will lead to a final paper submission of 15-20 pages. There also will be brief, simple-answer reading quizzes at the beginning of each class session.
| Professor Alexander Slotkin | Friday, 4pm–6:50pm |
course catalog description below; extended description forthcoming
Review and discussion of recent scholarship in the teaching of composition, with an emphasis on practical applications in the classroom. Required for and restricted to graduate assistants teaching composition for the first time. May count toward the 24 credits of coursework required for the MA degree.
| Professor Sika Dagbovie-Mullins | |
| Professor Julia Mason | |
| Professor TBA |
course catalog description below; extended description forthcoming
For English Department teaching assistants, discussion and evaluation of materials and methods of undergraduate English instruction; participation in appropriate Departmental workshops and colloquia. May count as an elective beyond the 24 credits of coursework specified in the catalog.