Current Course Offerings

Fall 2025

Don’t see the course you’re interested in listed? Email the professor and ask for more information, or to see the syllabus from the last time they taught the course.

CMLT 200 (see also Prof. Smith's section of ENGL 203)

 

CMRD 101

 

ENGL 101-01: Topics in Literature: London Classrooms

Bill Harrison

CRN 22285

MF 230-410

Welles 134

Lit: London Classrooms 

This course will review 20th-century British literature concerned with the London classroom before and after the decolonial movement.  We may review works by James Hilton (Goodbye, Mr. Chips, which is not set in the city), E.R. Braithwaite (To Sir with Love), Beryl Gilroy (Black Teacher), and B.S. Johnson (Albert Angelo), among others.

ENGL 111: Literature, Medicine, and Racism

Dr. Beth McCoy

In this course, we'll place great emphasis on *process* as indicated by my constant highlighting of -ing: thinkING, conversING, considerING, reflectING as necessary preconditions for medical school, law school, activism, beING human. In this particular 100-level course, you'll work within frameworks that will enable you to understand the world as it has been and is and to imagine the world as it could be. You'll receive guidance and feedback so that you can take control of your own learning and thinkING. You'll explore fiction, poetry, and scholarship examining_both how racism, science, and medicine have long flowed together and how human beings and institutions operating in good faith have sought to remedy that flow. As we read works by authors ranging from Toni Morrison to Octavia Butler, we'll place great emphasis on *process*: thinkING, conversING, considerING, feelING, and reflectING as necessary preconditions for medical school, literary study, law school, activism, and beING human. You'll get to talk with each other in large groups and small groups. You'll get to write anonymously. You'll get to write publicly. You'll get to write collaboratively as well as independently._ Above all, you will be thinkING. (DPP; CAI; HUMA)

ENGL 113-01: Contemporary Global Challenges in Literature and Culture: Post-Empire Literary London

Bill Harrison

CRN 22416

WF 1030-1210

Newton 206  

Lit:Post-EmpireLiteraryLondon 

 

This course will review mid-century British literature concerned with London's decolonial evolution from the center of empire to a capital city among many.  We may read works by Sajjad Zaheer, Sam Selvon, Colin MacInnes, and others.  

ENGL 114: Sustainability and Literature: Native Lands

Dr. Caroline Woidat

TR 12:30-2:10

Our class will examine cultural biases informing concepts of the individual and climate change by focusing upon perspectives of Native American women. We will interrogate the relationship between sustainability and literature with attention to the role of stories in maintaining oppressive systems of power as well as their potential to contribute to reparation. Readings will introduce students to various genres of literature, legacies of settler colonialism, and Indigenous ecologies, in and beyond the Genesee Valley region.

ENGl 201-01 (Beltz-Hosek)

This workshop is designed to further the study and practice of creative writing. My assumption is that you are here as burgeoning writers and that you are hungry to extend your knowledge and experience of poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction writing; indeed, that you are serious about the commitment that any self-respecting art form demands. Most of our time will be spent discussing the creative pieces you bring in each week, but you are also expected to read extensively in each genre with an ambitious critical lens.

 

Required Texts: 

1.     Burroway, Janet. Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft. 4th ed., Longman 

            Publishers, 2014.

2.     Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird. Anchor Books, 1995. 

ENGL201-02 (Donaldson)

 

ENGL 203-01: Reader and Text: Politics (Doggett)

M/W 2:30 - 4:10 

Newton 206

CRN 18087

This is an introductory course in literary analysis for English majors, one that’s designed to provide you with a foundation in literary studies before you move on to upper division courses. The title, poetics, refers to theories about the study of literature and literary forms. Thus, much of our class will be focused on theoretical discussions about literature and literary criticism. The title also refers to our subject—poetry. Throughout the semester, we will continually practice poetry analysis, with the assumption that if you can master the very difficult art of poetry criticism, you will have a solid base for other forms of literary analysis. On a more general level, we will frequently devote time to discussing the English major: Why do we study literature? What sorts of works usually count as literature? How has the English major changed over the last century?

ENGL 203-02: Reader and Text: African Literary Criticism (Nwabara)

T/R 2:30-4:10pm

Welles 134

CRN 18088 

The course examine theory, concepts, and narratives by African writers primarily from various parts of Africa (e.g. Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal), but also from the Americas (e.g. USA, Caribbean) to critically interrogate methods of assessing and analyzing texts (e.g. novels, poetry, short stories, plays, film) by and about marginalized peoples, particularly Africans post 1960. More specifically, the course engages African perspectives on (post)colonialism, feminism/womanism, sexuality, migration, and identity formation to provide space for students to consider and articulate how these contexts, theories, and lived experiences support, deepen, as well as complicate global studies of English.

ENGL 203-03 (Smith)

This course explores how a knowledge of Translation Studies and Comparative Literature, including questions of form, history, globalization, culture, and the aesthetic, can help us develop a working vocabulary for analyzing texts and relating texts to contexts; to understand theoretical questions that inform all critical conversations about textual meaning and value; and to participate competently, as writers, in the ongoing conversation about texts and theory that constitutes English/literature as a field of study. We’ll encounter texts written in multiple languages, in multiple kinds of English, in languages other than English, and we’ll practice reading across and translating from diverse literary cultures. R.F. Kuang’s Babel will be our core text, supplemented by readings from Edgar Garcia, Aja Couchois Duncan, Rebecca Walkowitz, Sayaka Murata, Jorge Luis Borges, Nathalie Khankan, Craig Santos Perez, and more.

ENGL 288: Ecowriting

This course focuses on creative writing approaches to sustainability and science communication, exploring subgenres including climate fiction, ecopoetry, nature writing, ecofabulism, and the eco-essay. We'll explore how such writings are not just about or inspired by nature but motivated by ecologies, environments and structures of power. As the world reckons with the rapidly accelerating effects of man-made climate change, we'll explore how creative writers can offer ways to act towards a more just, equitable, and anti-racist society as they document the ecological and imagine new roles for human experience within the ecological. We'll reflect on our own places in efforts to re-balance the world through both anti-racist and sustainable practices. We’ll explore the optimism and possibility offered by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s What If We Get It Right? and think about the relationship between creativity and action in our own writing and the work of others such as Allegra Hyde, Emrys Donaldson, Joshua Whitehead, Joan Kane, and Tracy K. Smith

ENGL 301: Advanced Poetry Writing: The Shape of Gratitude (Beltz-Hosek)

“Gratitude is a scattered homeless love” —Anna Kamieńska

A delicious meal. A good book. A kind word from a stranger. A peaceful walk in the woods or by the water. A warm hug from a friend. What do these things have in common? They are, as poet Caroline Mellor writes, “the minutiae of the sacred ordinary.” 

Often, it is small, everyday moments in life that we take most for granted, but it is these same small, everyday moments that truly count. As we face unprecedented and uncertain times, the act of noticing and appreciating simple beauties inherent in humanity and nature, which are so easy to overlook or ignore, can be an antidote to the world’s negativity. Poems of gratitude explore a wide range of subjects from what you’d expect (family, friends, and experiences that give life joy and meaning) to irreverent, unsentimental, even humorous messages and ideas. Like Naomi Shihab Nye, who begins her poem, “Gratitude List,” with the evocative line: “Thank you for insulting me.” Not only can practicing gratitude fuel the imagination and enhance creativity, studies suggest it improves mental and physical health, too.

In this advanced poetry workshop, the bulk of our time will be spent discussing original poems you bring in each week, but we will also read contemporary published works centered around gratitude, appreciation, and connection. By considering how writers express thanks and praise through various styles and forms, students will strengthen their skills and deepen their awareness of poetry.

Required Texts:

1. Ross Gay's Catalog of Unabashed Gratitute

2. Mary Oliver's A Thousand Mornings

ENGL 302: Advanced Fiction Workshop: Setting

Prof. Emrys Donaldson

During the first half of the semester, we will explore setting as a story engine through analysis and discussion of recent short fiction by Abby Mei Otis, Yohinca Delgado, and Nic Anstett, alongside other contemporary published writers. We will consider movement through landscape in the journey narrative, worldbuilding in nonrealist fiction, and characterization through bespoke psychogeographies. During the second half of the semester, we will leap into action and practice, both individually and collectively, rendering vivid settings of our own through process writing and peer workshops.

ENGL 318: Contemporary Black British Literature and Culture

Prof. Maria Helena Lima

T R 10:30-12:10

While Black in the U.S. refers mostly to peoples of African descent—whatever their countries of origin—in Britain it has become a political category grounded on shared ex-colonial origins and/or social marginalization.  The writers on our syllabus have embraced “Blackness” as a process of becoming, when their “otherness” creates a conscious coalition, a self-consciously constructed space, where identity is inscribed by political kinship and not by any “natural” identification. 

Unlike writers of the first wave of post-colonial migrants to Britain, such as Sam Selvon, who have lived some of the contradictions of being Black and British, a younger generation finds itself much less conflicted as it attempts to (re)create identities within more global paradigms.  We will notice less of an attempt by contemporary writers (through their characters or speakers) to self-define in the 21st century.  “Black Britishness” is important but hardly at the forefront of their consciousness, except in moments of self-assertion or direct confrontation.  Unlike the literature of the previous century, which was primarily concerned with exposing the injustices levelled against their ancestors, 21st -century writers are more concerned with the business of everyday living and succeeding.

Our course is only an introduction to Black British literature, film, and culture from 1948 to the present. These cultural and literary texts will be reviewed in relation to larger socio-historical contexts.

Required Texts:

(1)   James Procter, Ed. Writing Black Britain, 1948-1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (U of Manchester Press, 2000). ISBN# 071905382x

(2)   Jacob Ross, Ed. Closure: Contemporary Black British Short Stories (Peepal Tree, 2016). ISBN# 9781845232887

(3)  Jackie Kay. Trumpet.  Random House, Inc., 1998.

(4) All readings in the COURSE PACKET.

ENGL 329: American Visions: Filming the Seventies

Ken Cooper

MW 10:30-12:10

In his historical fantasia The Velvet Goldmine (1998), director Todd Haynes tells us that “Histories, like ancient ruins, are the fictions of empires. While everything forgotten hangs in dark dreams of the past, ever threatening to return.” It would be hard to imagine a decade less threatening than the 1970s but that is the premise of this cultural studies course, which proposes that its popular iconography—smiley faces, polyester, disco, cheesy pop music, and so on—functions as a kind of historical ellipsis. Aside from a few acknowledged political events like Watergate or the Iran hostage crisis, it seems to be a decade when nothing happened, remembered mostly in terms of its popular culture. With the advantage of hindsight, though, it becomes possible to reinterpret Seventies cheese in relation to truly revolutionary events, arguably the unleashing of our own strange days. And if the manifestation of some New Age requires that we forget the circumstances of its creation, all those historical roads not taken, then the Seventies will contain many “dark dreams of the past” worth revisiting. Accordingly, the films to be screened this semester will be approached via a critical parallax view: as important artistic works of the 1970s, and as a means of day-dreaming contemporary culture. What happens when you take the Seventies seriously? 

ENGL 366-01: Connections in Early Literature: The First Millennium of British Literature (Drake)

LITERATURE INTERTWINES INEXTRICABLY WITH HISTORY. This is a course that charts the history of early British literature in its cultural context. 

Now, “English” literature starts with Caedmon. The earliest English poet was supposedly an illiterate cowherd taught by an angel to compose verse. From there literature in England continued through what historians call the Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) and Middle English periods and headed into the Early Modern Period–we will stop in the early seventeenth century.

 But what is British literature? We could start with geography. British literature comes from the British Isles, which consist principally of two large islands: Great Britain (home of three countries: England, Scotland, and Wales) and Ireland. So we will read  works from several British “countries” from numerous genres popular in the Middle Ages and the early modern period:elegies, dream visions, allegories, frame tales, fables, morality plays, Skeltonics (what??), and sonnets. 

This course will also give us chances for performances. Besides reading aloud and acting out dramatic scenes, everyone will have two months to memorize and recite a literary passage. A theater student will be joining us for some mini-workshops on memorization techniques and expression. We will conclude the semester with presentations based on the research essay each person will write about aspects of their recitation text. 

ENGL 366-02: Connections in Early Literature: Close Reading (Paku) (EARLY)

We will focus primarily on close readings of works written prior to 1700. Most of the readings are poetry, with examples also of pre-novels and of early English drama.

ENGL 426/8

 

ENGL 439: American Ways: Women, Spirits, and Ghosts (Modern)

Dr. Caroline Woidat

TR 8:30-10:10 

Our class will explore the 19th-century Spiritualist movement centering women’s interactions with departed souls—most famously but not exclusively as mediums conducting seances—and its relationship to abolition, the Civil War, feminism, religious thought, and American utopianism. Readings include genres representing communication with spirits and transcendent experiences of death, such as Spiritualist novels, consolation literature, elegiac poetry, and ghost stories. Students will engage with literary criticism and primary sources that illuminate the ways women writers have used these traditions to protest social injustices, advocate for liberation, and envision reparation.

ENGL 443-01: Gender and Sexuality in Literature: African Sexuality in Literature and Film

Dr. Olaocha Nwabara

T 4:30-7:50pm

CRN 22422

In this course students join in the growing discourse of African/Black Gender and Sexuality studies, especially considering ancient and contemporary notions of sexuality, being, and becoming. This course contributes complex and robust narratives of African sexuality that engages African culture, spirituality, knowledge and art as the center of their understanding of self and purpose. The course uses contemporary narratives (i.e. literature, film, music) to reveal the ways that Black and African queer individuals and communities continue to practice ancient notions of African sexuality. Some titles may include Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta, Rafiki by Wanuri Kahiu, and Dirty Computer by Janelle Monae. This challenges students to expand their understanding of the diverse LGBTQ community globally, and incorporate African ways of knowing into their everyday discussion of self identity or allyship towards normalizing the humanity of the community. Further still, students will learn how to empower self and others towards achieving purpose by understanding how purpose has historically been determined for African and Black peoples with diverse sexual and gendered identities.

ENGL 458: Major Authors: Louisa May Alcott

Alice Rutkowski

MW 12:30-2:10

Known primarily now as a "children's writer" and as the author of Little Women, Alcott wrote in a range of genres over her whole life as a professional author: yes, children's literature, but also antislavery works, sensational short stories published pseudonymously and anonymously and works about women's rights and working women. Many of her works also have significant queer and/or trans themes. We'll look at the full range of her career and consider if applying contemporary queer theory lenses is an appropriate critical practice.

ENGL 466: Topics in Early Literature: Old English Literature and Language

Graham Drake

T 4.30-7.50PM

 

Connections in Early Literature: Old English Literature and Language [Early]; can also count for the Medieval Studies Minor (non-English majors can seek a waiver for ENGL 203 requirement)

 

Prof. Graham Drake

T 4:30pm - 7:50pm

 

Old English literature is where English literature starts—a whole millennium before a modern English playwright named Shakespeare. This course will combine Old English literature and language: poetry that includes shorter works such as The Seafarer and Judith, and of course the epic poem Beowulf. Prose works will feature historical writing by Bede and the collaborative Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Old English translations of Latin texts.

 

Those texts come to us as double translations—from Latin to Old English to modern English—reminding us that most of us do not read original versions of these earlier English texts. Old English is a highly inflected language that looks more like German than the English we (think we) know. To get closer to that language, this course will include an introduction to basic Old English grammar and translation of introductory texts; we will normally spend approximately an hour of each class meeting studying the language.

 

Finally, we will also consider how Old English literature and culture are undergoing reassessment. For instance, what is the meaning of the very term “Anglo-Saxon,” and should scholarly practice retire it? Or, as we conclude the course with the recent novel The Mere Wife, what happens when we reconsider the Beowulf legend from a “monster’s” point of view?  This part of the scholarly and cultural conversation will provide a transformative view of traditional Old English writing.

ENGL 467: Topics in Modern Literature (MOD): C18 Literary Disability Studies

Gillian Paku

This version of ENGL 467 surveys several major authors and works of the British long, literary eighteenth-century in light of authors with disabilities (Milton’s blindness, Pope’s “deformity,” Johnson’s Tourette syndrome) and texts that include disabled characters, but we will think also about the aesthetics of “ugliness,” about “defect” as a metaphor for gendered, racial, and national difference, and about the implications of intellectual disability and mental health in the period of the Enlightenment, when human rights were (as they largely continue to be) defined by rationality. The course includes a service-learning project and self-reflective writing as well as literary analysis and research. It counts for the English Department’s /MOD requirement and toward the Sociomedical Sciences major.

FMST 100

 

PASC 105

 

PASC 106

 

WRTG 105: Risk, Reward, and Rent-Paying

Dr. Beth McCoy 

Guided by our course epigraph "If we're not your animals, if these are adult things, accept the risk. There is risk, Gatoi, in dealing with a partner," we'll read Octavia Butler's famous short story "Bloodchild" and apply that story to thinkING about learning how to do new things, finding one's stake in a complicated institution, and reflecting upon the complexities of educational risks, rewards, and what Butler calls "rent-paying." We'll place great emphasis on *process* as indicated by my constant highlighting of -ing: thinkING, conversING, considerING, reflectING as necessary preconditions for medical school, law school, activism, beING human. You'll work within frameworks that will enable you to understand the world as it has been and is and to imagine the world as it could be. You'll receive guidance and feedback so that you can take control of your own learning and thinkING. You'll get to talk with each other in large groups and small groups. You'll get to write anonymously. You'll get to write publicly. You'll get to write collaboratively as well as independently. Above all, you will be thinkING.

WRTG 105/12: The Haitian Diaspora

Prof. Maria Helena Lima 

As the first nation in the Americas to both abolish slavery and declare its independence from a European power, Haiti has been paying the price for such audacity since.  Both history and natural disasters would have been enough to stifle the creativity of a people, but Haitians have continued to create at home and across the diaspora, despite the horrors that have driven many away from their homeland.  Some of these tragedies (the cholera epidemic, for example) have been man-made and could have been avoided.  Understanding the situation in Haiti now is even more challenging.  Many Haitian writers across the diaspora have resorted to the noir genre to represent such realities –we will explore some of their choices.

This course is a writing seminar designed to give you many opportunities to practice your critical thinking, argumentative and writing skills.  We will read each other's writing, collaborate on presentations, and revise our work to almost perfection.  With this class, I hope, we'll see writing as both work and play, understanding that if language creates reality, whose language prevails makes all the difference in the world.  Yes, we are talking about power--about writing to persuade more often than not. 

Required Texts: Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. “They Say/I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. [ISBN# 9780393933611]

Edwidge Danticat, Ed. the butterfly’s way: Voices from the Haitian Diaspora in the United States. [ISBN# 9781569472187]

Edwidge Danticat, Ed. Haiti Noir [#978-1-936070-65-7] 

WRTG 406: Writing Center Theory and Practice

Claire Jackson, MW 4:30-6:10

 

WRTG 406 prepares students to work with writers from diverse backgrounds and disciplines and to develop their own writing practices and habits. We will learn about composition theory and writing pedagogy, tutoring strategies, and current topics in writing center studies, such as linguistic justice, anti-racism, wellness and care, and inclusion. In addition to observing and practicing tutoring sessions, students will complete a semester-long research project that positively impacts the Writing Learning Center. Required of new tutors in the Writing Learning Center; may also be of interest to Adolescent Education majors. Fulfills the IAL requirement. Instructor permission required.