2000-Level Course Descriptions

FALL 2025 | FALL WINTER 2025-26 | WINTER 2026

ENGL-2102-001 | Intro Creative Writing | S. Pool
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

ENGL-2102-002 | Intro Creative Writing | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

ENGL-2102-003 | Intro Creative Writing | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

ENGL-2102-770 | Intro Creative Writing | TBA
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

ENGL-2113-001 | Picture Books for Children | H. Snell
Course Delivery: IN PERSON AND ONLINE

ENGL-2203-001 | Seventeenth Century | K. Sinanan
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

ENGL-2220-001 | English Literature and Culture 700 - 1660 | B. Christopher
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

ENGL-2603-760 | Short Fiction | TBA
Course Delivery: ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS

ENGL-2613-001 | Fantasy Fiction | P. Melville
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course analyzes literary works within the fantasy genre in light of feminist, postcolonial, Marxist, and other cultural theories. While it considers the history of the fantasy genre and the “fantastic” as a literary mode, the course focuses primarily on the poetics and politics of “world-building,” a term that refers to fantasy’s production of imaginary “secondary” worlds whose historical, geographical, ontological, and cultural realities substantially differ from the world(s) inhabited by fantasy’s various readerships. The course covers a range of contemporary fantasy texts from different subgenres, including epic fantasy, urban fantasy, fairytale fantasy, and fantasy for young people. Though it is subject to change, the reading list will likely include (in reading order): N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Seanan McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway, Cassandra Clare's City of Bones, Alix E. Harrow's A Spindle Splintered, and Rebecca Roanhorse's Black Sun.

ENGL-2740-001 | African Literature and Culture | C. Anyaduba
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

ENGL-2922-001 | Topics in Women Writers: From Sublime Vistas to Hideous Progeny: Women, Science, and Literature | K. Ready
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course focuses on a topic in the field of women writers which varies from year to year. The topic area may be defined by genre; historical period; literary and cultural movement; or local, national, or global communities.

The topic for this section (subtitled “From Sublime Vistas to Hideous Progeny: Women, Science, and Literature”) is women, science, and literature. Historically, science has been a field dominated by men, in which context nature sometimes has been imagined as a woman to be dominated and exploited. At the same time, women, as much as men, have been excited by the possibilities opened up by scientific study and the ways in which science and the technological innovations it inspires might make positive changes in the world, and have imagined non-hierarchal and non-exploitative relationships between science and nature. In this course, we will look at how women writers from the Scientific Revolution to the early twentieth-first century have imaginatively responded to developments in science and technology, thinking about questions connected not only to science and gender, but also to the relationship between the humanities and the sciences, now often regarded as separate and even opposed fields of study, although they were not always thought of in this way.

ENGL-2981-001 | History of the Book | Z. Izydorczyk
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

FALL/WINTER 2025-26

ENGL-2003-770 | Field of Children’s Literature | TBA
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

ENGL-2114-001 | Fairy Tales and Culture | C. Tosenberger
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

In this course we will study fairy tales, focusing not only on collected source material, but on literature written specifically for children based on these borrowed forms. We will trace the history of fairy tales from their origins in oral narrative to their impact on contemporary culture today. Students read and write critically about these tales and engage in comparisons on multiple fronts, exploring major themes and characteristics of these tales as well as the social and psychological aspects of them. The goal is to enrich our appreciation of these tales by strengthening our critical understanding of them as well as to gain insight as to how these tales function in our selves and our society.

ENGL-2142-001 | Field of Literary and Textual Studies: Things of Beauty, Solitary Poets, and Dead Authors: A History of Ideas about Art | K. Ready
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This particular section of Field of Literary and Textual Studies (subtitled “Things of Beauty, Solitary Poets, and Dead Authors: A History of Ideas about Art”) will explore a variety of questions related to art, including literature, drawing on both literature (poetry, drama, and fiction) and criticism that has addressed the purpose and meaning of art, the requirements for great art, and the relationship between different kinds of art, as well as questions around genius, creativity, and artistry and authorship. Course materials will range from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the twenty-first century, encompassing such intellectual and aesthetic movements as Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Aestheticism, Decadence, Modernism, and Postmodernism, with some attention paid to other critical developments such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, and gender, race, and queer politics.

ENGL-2145-001 | Field of Cultural Studies | B. Cornellier
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

This course is an introductory survey of cultural studies. The course starts with a historical genealogy of the field of cultural studies in post-war Britain. It first introduces students to the field’s particular critical focus on questions related to social class, mass culture, and everyday life as sites where power is negotiated, reproduced, and contested. The course then examines how cultural studies expanded beyond the British context, and how it offers new ways to critically examine a constantly shifting cultural field in which issues of class, race, gender, and sexuality constantly intersect. The course includes readings in theory and criticism and the study of cultural forms and practices, such as literature, film, television, visual and performing arts, popular music, print and digital media, as well as the institutions that shape them. Issues covered may include: capitalism, mass culture, and popular culture; subjectivity, identity, and agency; ethnicity and race; imperialism, postcolonialism, and settler colonialism; diaspora and globalization; gender, sexuality, and intersectionality; audiences and reception; digital media culture; and the politics of representation.

ENGL-2741-001 | Asian North American Literature and Culture | J. Wills
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

WINTER 2026

ENGL-2102-004 | Intro Creative Writing | J. Wills
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

ENGL-2102-005 | Intro Creative Writing | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

ENGL-2102-771 | Intro Creative Writing | TBA
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

ENGL-2603-770 | Short Fiction | TBA
Course Delivery: ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

ENGL-2802-001 | Syntax | TBA
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

ENGL-2806-001 | Semantics | H. Tran
Course Delivery: IN PERSON

ENGL-2922-002| Topics in Women Writers | C. Lypka
Course Delivery: IN PERSON