Spring 2019 Graduate Courses

This course is the payoff for having learned the grammar of Old English in Introduction to Old English (which is the prerequisite for the course unless you see me for permission)! You will continue to develop your skills in Old English reading and translation as you read shorter canonical texts...

In 1790, the planter-historian William Beckford claimed that Jamaica was “one of the richest jewels in the crown of Great Britain.” In the eighteenth century, slave-grown sugar was Britain’s most important colonial commodity, and Caribbean colonies, her most prized economic possessions, more valuable in gross economic terms than the Thirteen...

The Old English poem we call Beowulf has long been held as a kind of canonical “beginning” for English literature, though in more of a “prehistoric” sense than a foundational one. English departments liked to have an Anglo-Saxonist around to expose students to Old English as a way to inculcate...

The Victorian period was a time of tremendous poetic experiment. Browning and Tennyson are credited with inventing the dramatic monologue, and innovations in the verse novel and the epic by Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and William Morris rival the period’s prose novels. At the same time, Victorian poets revitalized standard...

Course Description: Both celebrated and maligned, the Bloomsbury Group is the best-known English artistic coterie of the twentieth century. This course will examine some of the works of the individuals who made up this charmed circle, such as prose writers Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Vita Sackville West, and Lytton...

Incest. Seduction. Suicide. Abandonment. Immolation. Cross-dressing. Revolution. For fun, toss in ventriloquism and hauntings. Welcome to the early American novel . Even such a simple welcome raises all sorts of questions: at what point does America become “America”? what role does literature play in that transformation? at what point does...

“Development”—and its myriad cognates, including “underdevelopment,” “uneven development,” “developing nations,” “human development index” and so forth—has been the central paradigm framing colonial and postcolonial geopolitical and economic structures over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The aim of this graduate course is twofold: first, we will trace the history and evolution...

Ralph Ellison may be the preeminent black American author of the twentieth century, though he published only one novel, 1952’s Invisible Man. Over a career that spanned more than half a century, Ellison published two essay collections, wrote dozens of articles, and delivered numerous speeches, but he never published the...

Introduces purposes, methods and techniques of professional scholarship in English. Provides an overview of the discipline, including traditional areas of research and recent developments. Teaches students how to use research, bibliographic, and reference tools to prepare papers for conferences and publication. Required of all MA students in English. MA-Lit Course...

Studies special topics that focus on a theme, genre, or theoretical issue not limited to a specific period or national tradition. Topics vary each semester. MA-Lit Course Designation: Elective, B (Technologies/Epistemologies)

This course tests the usefulness of assemblage theory, actor network theory, and similar approaches, for our understanding of international relations in the English Renaissance. Our primary focus will be on the work of a number of Renaissance literary authors who depict a variety of forms international interaction--dynastic conquest, colonial or...

Positioning itself at the crossroads of contemporary literature, geography, and new materialist philosophies, this course will explore how American millennial fictions map and navigate, construct and alter, inhabit and evacuate spacetime; and in tandem it will consider how theoretical texts on space and time (re)conceptualize these categories. In the wake...