Course Descriptions | Fall 2026
Course Descriptions | Fall 2026
This page provides course descriptions for the current semester or the next. See the main UT Curriculum page for a list of all undergraduate courses on the books (not all are offered at any one time). You can also view past-semester undergraduate and graduate courses.
Courses that satisfy VolCore requirements are identified in this way:
AH – Arts and Humanities
AAH – Applied Arts and Humanities
AOC – Applied Oral Communications
EI – Engaged Inquiries
GCI – Global Challenges – International
GCUS – Global Challenges – US
WC – Written Communication
Undergraduate Courses
ENGL 303 | American Cultures (AH)
Suspicious Minds, Spectral Evidence
MWF 1:50-2:40 | Brad Bannon
The inclination to suspect others of transgressing social, cultural, and moral norms, and/or of betraying their allegiances to “us,” has a rich tradition in American history and literature. In this course, we will consider texts in which suspicion functions as a central orientation: e.g., to unify individuals in solidarity against a common foe or divide them by cultivating an atmosphere of paranoia; to solve a crime or elude capture; to untangle and expose vast webs of corruption or “ever afterwards,” as Emerson puts it, to “suspect our instruments.” Authors will include Cotton Mather, Vincent Bugliosi, Robert Calef, Philip K. Dick, Stephen King, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, Shirley Jackson, Arthur Miller, and Nella Larsen, among others.
Requirements
Attendance, three short essays, five discussions, quizzes
ENGL 322 | Race, Gender, and Medicine
TR 9:45-11:00 | Danielle Procope Bell
How has the medical industrial complex treated people of color, women, and sexual minorities? We will learn about the history of medical racism and sexism starting with slavery and finish by consideration of present-day challenges to medical equity. We will emphasize issues such as unethical experimentation and gynecological and obstetric racism.
Requirements
Attendance, weekly in-class reading responses, final presentation, 3 cultural events.
ENGL 331 | Race and Ethnicity in American Literature (AH) (GCUS)
American Narratives: Desire and Difference
Online Asynchronous | Dionte Harris
This course explores multiple forms of desire, intimacy, longing, and world-building in 21st century American literary and cultural texts. We will consider race, gender, and sexuality not only as a category of analysis but also as a force that shapes how desire, difference, and belonging are imagined in literary texts. Topics include questions of racialized desire, queer desire, gendered expectations, feminist world-building, identity and the politics of belonging. This course invites us to think about how Black American literature reveals both the constraints placed on desire and the creative possibilities for imagining new forms of connection, identity, and community.
Requirements
Weekly response posts, short presentation, an analysis essay, and a research paper.
ENGL 332 | Women in American Literature (AH) (GCUS)
Men, Marriage, and Motherhood
TR 11:20-12:35 | La Vinia Jennings
English 332 examines selected novels written by American women in the twentieth century that treat diverse geographical regions, ethnicities, social classes, and cultures. Discussions will emphasize various institutions—patriarchy, marriage, family, and motherhood—and their impacts on female selfhood and identity.
Requirements
Attendance, two research papers, and quizzes.
MWF 9:10-10:00 | Robin Nicks
This course traces the development of literature by American women from Anne Bradstreet through current authors like Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Our focus will be on the ways that texts express developing views on gender roles, as well as the different approaches that each writer has in offering criticisms of her culture and engaging in political and social debates of her time. Authors may include Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Margaret Fuller, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Shirley Jackson, Louise Erdrich, Allison Bechdel, and others.
Requirements
Three literary analysis papers, semi-daily responses and close readings.
ENGL 333 | Black American Literature and Aesthetics (GCUS)
Banned Black Books
TR 9:45-11:00 | Katy Chiles
This course will survey the way that African-American authors have engaged with and contributed to the literary genres of sentimental and gothic fiction. We will investigate how writers approached the historical reality of slavery and depicted it in their work. How did writers communicate what it might feel like to be enslaved or descended from enslaved people? How did writers portray the many ways that slavery haunted and continues to haunt texts, people, and cultural imaginaries? We will possibly read work by Solomon Northup, Hannah Crafts, William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Saidiya Hartman, and Toni Morrison.
Requirements
Active participation, a presentation, informal writing assignments, two formal papers, and a final project.
ENGL 334 | Film and American Culture (GCUS)
T 9:45-12:35 & R 9:45-11:00 | Eleni Palis
This course considers American film as works of art, as historical documents, and as powerful forms of cultural expression. Students will explore American film history, especially the consolidation of and aesthetic norms solidified by “classical Hollywood cinema.” Along the way, we will study American cinema through a variety of lenses, including formalism, genre theory, auteur theory, and with attention to gender, race, class, and sexuality. As we move across time and across the country, students will explore the relationship between American cinema and the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American movies.
Requirements
Regular attendance and participation, weekly quizzes, two analytical papers, and two exams.
ENGL 336 | Caribbean Literature (AH) (GCI)
Online Asynchronous | Gichingiri Ndigirigi
This course offers a firm foundation in Caribbean Literature and fulfills both VolCore-GCI and AH requirements. GC-I requirements invite students to interrogate their location(s) in reading an interdependent world: what insights do we gain when we ask cultural questions of literary texts, and how does that expand our understanding of the meaning-making abilities of literature? The texts we will read also satisfy the AH standard of studying “culturally and historically significant works” that answer the central question: “What does it mean to be human?” We study the best Caribbean fiction and drama and the deployment of anarchic aesthetics influenced by the polyrhythms of Africa, Asia, Europe, and America. We will sample representative works by the prominent first-generation writers like V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott alongside a newer generation of writers who push the boundaries of modernism, life writing, and Western genre conventions more broadly. We cover a variety of literary genres and their Caribbean popular cultural intertexts including reggae, calypso, Soca, Carnival, and games like cricket that reflect transculturation. We read works set in the Caribbean itself and the secondary Caribbean diasporic spaces in the United States and Britain. By the end of the course, students should be able to competently analyze Caribbean texts using conventional literary tools—or explain aesthetic experiments in less conventional texts.
Requirements
Weekly discussion posts, two short reflection papers, two short quizzes, a mid-term, and a final exam.
ENGL 339 | Fantasy to Cyberspace (AH)
Children’s/Young Adult Literature
Online Asynchronous | Amy Billone
In this course, we fly from innocence to experience and back again in various genres ranging historically from fairy tales to the Golden Age of Children’s Literature to the most popular appearances of the young adult in literature and various other forms of media today. We will tackle the question of how to hold onto what we loved about being young as we move into more mature landscapes. The class moves forward chronologically from myths and fairy tales to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Secret Garden, Sherlock Holmes, Peter Pan, Narnia, The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, The Hunger Games, dystopian literature and media, and a number of other works of interest as we explore the transition from fantasy to cyberspace in the 21st century.
Requirements
Attendance, participation, final project, weekly quizzes, discussion posts, midterms and final exams.
ENGL 340 | Science Fiction and Fantasy (AH)
TR 9:45-11:00 | Mark Tabone
This course will explore literary, historical, and philosophical approaches to Science Fiction, paying special attention to the genre’s use of “fantastic” tropes and devices to speculate about humanity’s future as well as to critique the state of humanity in the present. As we examine various theoretical approaches to Science Fiction, we will read some of the most influential texts from the genre’s long history.
Requirements
Attendance, short response papers, 2 formal papers, final exam
Humans, Terraforming, and Nature
MWF 10:20-11:10 | Melinda Backer
This class will explore a diverse range of science fiction and fantasy fiction written in the 20th and 21st centuries that highlight human connections to place and nature. As we trace the connections between literature, nature, and ecocritical discourse, we will also explore how the historical development of science fiction and fantasy has reflected and reinforced human ambitions and goals in our present. Theoretical texts will span multiple disciplines and genres, including work by Ursula Heise, Donna Haraway, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Robert Bullard. Fictional texts will include work by N.K. Jemisin, Ursula Le Guin, and Kim Stanley Robinson, among others.
Requirements
Attendance, short response papers, a formal paper, a course project, and a final.
ENGL 345 | Graphic Novel and Comics (AH)
MWF 12:40-1:30 | Laura Hoffer
Is there a difference between comics and the graphic novel? If so, what is that difference? Using Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics as a springboard, this course offers students the opportunity to investigate the comics form and its appearance in various graphic novels. The class will cover the coining of the term “graphic novel” in 1964 and explore a variety of texts that engage topics such as race, gender, LGBTQ+ rights, disability, and, of course, superheroes, including Watchmen, Fun Home, and Monster.
Requirements
Attendance; close reading exercises; critical analysis essays; quizzes; two exams.
ENGL 355 | Rhetoric and Writing (WC)
Online Asynchronous | Robin Nicks
This course serves as an introduction to the rhetoric and writing concentration of the undergraduate major in English and covers both theory and practice, focusing on multiple modes and genres of writing. Students will learn rhetorical theory, discourse analysis, and social movement theory, among other theories and genres. The course requires extensive reading and writing, with review and revision at all stages of the writing process. Requirements include three major projects, regular discussion postings and semi-daily writing assignments. This course meets the requirements for and is listed as a “WC” (communicating through writing; writing intensive) course.
Requirements
Three major projects, regular discussion postings and semi-daily writing assignments.
MWF 12:40-1:30 | Hooman Saeli
This course provides students with a foundation in the theory of rhetoric, writing, and genre. Through readings, class discussions, student-led presentations, and major writing projects, the course explores contemporary theories of rhetoric and their relationships to writing and, subsequently, develops students’ discipline-specific knowledge of rhetoric and writing skills. We will consider ways in which rhetorical situations contribute to evidence-based, genre-specific, audience-focused, organized, and well-established arguments. Specifically, we will closely examine how writers construct their identities, engage audiences, and move readers to action through shared/conflict values. Major writing projects will involve students analyzing published writing from various critical perspectives as well as producing a variety of genres for rhetorical ends.
Requirements
3 group presentations, 4 HW assignments, 3 writing projects.
ENGL 357 | Honors: Rhetoric and Writing (WC)
Everything You Know about Rhetoric and Writing is Probably Wrong (or at Least Limited)
M Online Asynchronous & WF 10:20-11:10 | Jeff Ringer
This course invites students to question common assumptions about rhetoric and writing that persist in university contexts. Those assumptions center on what constitutes “good” writing and how writers should position themselves in their writing. We’ll first explore the possibility that all effective writing rests on narrative structures tied to how the human brain has evolved to process experiences in terms of time and cause/effect relationships. Students will read rhetorical theory toward that end, analyze their prior writing, and revise deeply to produce writing that audiences want to read. We’ll then consider the contested notion of ethos and pursue writing persuasively from the locations we inhabit as writers. The course culminates in a public project wherein students convey something they learned for an audience of their choosing grounded in their identities and experiences.
Requirements
Regular reading and writing; four major writing projects; discussion boards; attendance and participation.
ENGL 360 | Technical and Professional Writing (WC)
Online Asynchronous | Daniel Wallace
For students who need to sharpen their technical communication skills. Writing proposals, informative arguments, instructional guides, and infographics — via the framework of an email newsletter. In recent years, many writers have adopted the genre of the email mailing list as a way to share complex ideas with a curious public, and in this course, we will roleplay as if you have created a newsletter on a topic that fascinates you. You will create a series of interlocking technical documents (each aimed at a general, non-technical reader) that convey the depth of your interest and awareness of your chosen area.
Requirements
Papers, graded discussions, weekly homework assignments, and a final reflective project.
Digital Security, AI, and Nuclear Conflict
MWF 9:10-10:00 | Anne Snellen
Several hacks have occurred throughout the 12 Colonies. Though we have received no clear indication of culpability, some veterans of the Cylon Wars worry these hacks may precipitate a larger event, prompting the question, “have we adequately prepared for a full-scale Cylon attack?” To prepare, this class will create technical writing to disseminate to Colonial personnel in the wake of a Cylon attack. To aid in our research, we will study Battlestar Galactica as well as primary sources and other materials. If we are lucky enough to survive Cylon attack, focusing on human adoption of artificial intelligence technology is easily transferable to other disciplines. Those who study digital security, robotics, nuclear safety, political diplomacy and emergency preparedness often use killer robots as a generic stand-in for specific enemies or other disasters. Thus, the writing skills you learn in this class can be transferred to other non-Cylon contexts—should we survive.
Requirements
Large manual, reports, graphics and character/situation study, DBAs.
Online Asynchronous | Jeni Wallace
This course will introduce you to genres of professional and technical writing, such as SEO, digital content design, instructions, proposals, reports, and manuals. We will consider generic expectations, the rhetorical situation, design and layout, style and clarity, restrictions of the medium, and how all these elements interact as well as the changing nature and critical importance of the genre in the current context of machine learning.
MW 11:30-12:20 & Friday Online Asynchronous | Sean Morey
This course will use a streaming series, such as The Expanse, as a foundation for exploring technical and professional communication in the context of space exploration, political systems, and futuristic technologies. Students will analyze the show’s themes, technologies, and ethical dilemmas to develop skills in technical and professional writing, including creating reports, manuals, proposals, and policy documents. Through a combination of critical analysis and practical application, students will learn to communicate complex ideas clearly and effectively while considering the societal and ethical implications of space exploration and colonization.
Requirements
Attendance, technical and professional writing assignments such as manuals, reports, instructions, proposals, and other genres.
Game Design
MWF 10:20-11:10 | Jamal-Jared Alexander
Students are introduced to professional workplace writing, transitioning from writing for academic audiences to writing technical documents in the workplace. Throughout ENGL 360, students will design and write professional documents, synthesize and evaluate arguments on technology and society, and collaborate in teams to present technical information. Specifically, students will be introduced to game design by thinking and making critical choices while engaging in practice and design application. This is a practical course where students are provided with transferable skills in which they will design a board game (including packaging) in groups. Students will be taught about inclusive design for diverse audiences, exposing them to new and divergent perspectives that include all communities and body types.
Requirements
Major projects and attendance are required to succeed in this course.
ENGL 361 | Introduction to Publishing
MWF 11:30-12:20 | Katie Hannah
Coming soon!
Requirements
ENGL 363 | Writing Poetry (AAH) (EI)
MWF 10:20-11:10 | TBA
What makes poetry an enduring art form? How do contemporary poets continue to reinvent poetic traditions and connect with new readers? This class will explore these questions through close attention to the topics and techniques used by poets today, from American sonnets to visual poetics to prose poems and more. This is a workshop course, meaning our primary modes of work and study will be in-class writing practice and discussion of assigned readings. As a classroom community, we will read, discuss, draft, and revise collaboratively through guided prompts and peer critique in the interest of improving our craft and experimenting with form. Students will finish the semester with a portfolio of original poetry in a range of contemporary styles.
Requirements
Attendance, participation, periodic reading responses and short quizzes, drafting and revising of original poems, and a final portfolio.
TR 11:20-12:35 | Patrick Nome
In this course, emerging poets will explore the workings and mechanics of a poem, the very capaciousness of language and how to understand its entrance, extending but not limited to how voice, image, sound, space, silence, dialect etc. constitute the ‘multilayered psychologies of a poem’; how we, mortal beings, are shaped and challenged by our entry into the vast immortal world of poetry. Over the course of the semester, we will also explore the variousness of how poems work by taking a closer look at their forms, structures, syntax, lineation, modes of narrativization, movement, textual silences etc. As a workshop-based creative writing course, participation is vital.
Requirements
Students are required to complete discussion boards, writing exercises, peer workshops, presentations, and a final portfolio of revised poems.
ENGL 364 | Writing Fiction (AAH) (EI)
MWF 11:30-12:20 | Titus Chalk
Explore the imaginative work of writing short fiction, via a focus on the craft’s key aspects such as image, character, voice, setting and storytelling. Each week, we will read how major writers approach their work and study contemporary short stories, on the way to producing our own. Expect to learn not only elements of fiction writing, but also how to sharpen your critical toolkit via workshops of peers’ work.
Requirements
Reading, writing, revising, plus active participation.
TR 12:55-2:10 | Laura Hoffer
This fiction-writing workshop course invites you to learn more about the strategies employed by fiction writers, such as imagery, dialogue, point of view, and many others. You will have the opportunity to read and write in a variety of fiction genres, including short story, novella, and flash nonfiction. You will try your hand at a number of narrative approaches via short exercises, and you will craft one fully developed short story to share with the class in workshop. We will also focus on learning more about our own writing processes, and you will revise your workshopped story at the end of the term.
Requirements
Attendance; exercises; quizzes; one full-length short story; revision of short story; collaborative presentation.
ENGL 365 | Writing the Screenplay (AAH) (EI)
TR 12:55-2:10 | Chris Hebert
When it comes to movies, what dominates the headlines and the public imagination are the actors, the directors, the budgets and box-office earnings. Often lost in the visual spectacle of film is the fact that it begins with the written word. The characters, stories, and themes that loom so large on the screen first emerge on the page.
The goal of this class is twofold: first, to explore the structure and form of screenwriting through the reading and analysis of screenplays, both contemporary and classic. Then to turn that study into practice through a variety of exercises and through collaborative projects, which might include workshops, readings, and the group work of writers’ rooms. The major student project at the core of the class will be a treatment for a feature film with sample scenes. Previous coursework in creative writing and/or film is encouraged but not required.
Requirements
Attendance, treatment, scenes, exercises, responses, peer reviews.
TR 2:30-3:45 | Michael Knight
This class is designed to provide an introduction to the craft of writing screenplays. Students should leave this class with a basic understanding of the core elements of the form (dramatic structure, scene, imagery, visual storytelling, building characters and conflict and so on), the ability to recognize how those elements function in a feature length film and the ability to put those core elements into practice in screenplays of their own.
Requirements
ENGL 369 | Writing Creative Nonfiction (AAH) (EI)
MWF 12:40-1:30 | TBA
How can true stories offer a space for social connection and understanding? How do writers tell stories about their own lives that engage readers and change communities for the better? This class will explore these questions through an overview of creative nonfiction and attention to the many forms of the genre, from memoir to flash nonfiction to multimedia essays and more. This is a workshop course, meaning our primary modes of work and study will be in-class writing practice and discussion of assigned readings. As a classroom community, we will read, discuss, draft, and revise collaboratively through guided prompts and peer critique in the interest of improving our craft. Students will finish the semester with a portfolio showcasing their work in the course.
Requirements
Attendance, participation, periodic reading responses and short quizzes, drafting and revising of original work, and a final portfolio.
Online Asynchronous | Margaret Dean
‘The term “creative nonfiction” refers to essays that are grounded in fact but use tactics of creative writing to achieve their purposes. These creative tactics can include description, scenes, dialogue, and most importantly, a strong sense of voice. Units will include the history of creative nonfiction as a genre and the ethics of truth and lies in creative nonfiction.
Note: This section is reserved for non-English majors.
Requirements
Students will write one full-length essay, multiple short assignments, and many responses to peer essays and published work.
ENGL 371 | Foundations of the English Language (GCI)
TR 9:45-11:00 | Hooman Saeli
This course explores the complexities of contemporary English from a linguistic perspective. We will study how English works linguistically—from its phonology (system of sounds), the makeup of its words (morphology), to its syntax (grammatical structure), and how we use it in ongoing speech (discourse and pragmatics). We will cover how English varies, how it has changed, and how a linguistic understanding of English language makes us better consumers of the information in the world around us.
Requirements
10 homeworks, 2 writing assignments, 4 presentations, 2 exams.
ENGL 376 | Colloquium in Literature (WC)
MWF 12:40-1:30 | Martin Griffin
We often believe we are comfortably familiar with the principal categories and genres of literature—fiction, poetry, and drama—but sometimes it can be worth revisiting the basics. In this class, we will take a broad perspective, looking at the main genres and asking the key questions that surround the identification, reading, and critical analysis of literature. A novel or two, poetry (of various types), and one older and one modern/contemporary play will be on the menu, as well as a series of short critical and theoretical texts.
Requirements
Two short papers, an in-class mid-term, potentially one small presentation, and a final in-class exam.
ENGL 389 | Literature of the English Bible (AH)
MWF 10:20-11:10 | Randi Marie Addicott
Aside from its position as the sacred text of a major world religion, the Bible encompasses a wide variety of genres, including but not limited to poetry, folktales, ritual, and narratives ranging from apocalyptic to biographical. Analyzing these forms can reveal much about the cultures that produced them. Additionally, examining different translations can demonstrate how later cultures have shifted those narratives. Therefore, our perspective in this course will be historical and analytical rather than theological or devotional.
Requirements
Reading, journals, three writing projects.
ENGL 398 | Junior-Senior Honors Seminar (WC)
The Tempest and Its Travels
MWF 10:20-11:10 | Anthony Welch
On a faraway island lives a wizard with his daughter and a monster. One day, a shipwreck on their shores brings them face to face with an old enemy, and a revenge plot starts to unfold. So begins The Tempest (1611), one of Shakespeare’s most controversial plays. This seminar explores the play and its cultural afterlife. Endlessly reimagined on the theater stage, The Tempest has provoked fierce debate—is it a story about European colonialism? magic and the occult? gender and sexuality? the arts of the theater?—and it has spawned dozens of literary adaptations that contest its meaning and legacy. Approaching The Tempest from a range of critical perspectives, we’ll see how it has been read, quarreled over, and reworked over the last four centuries. Along the way, we’ll delve into the archives of research libraries and theater companies, explore digital resources such as MIT’s Global Shakespeare Project, and read some of the poems, novels, and films inspired by The Tempest, including H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), Suniti Namjoshi’s “Snapshots of Caliban” (1984), Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure (2018), and the groundbreaking science fiction film Forbidden Planet (1956).
Requirements
Response papers, research skills assignments, final research paper.
ENGL 404 | Shakespeare I: Early Plays
MWF 12:40-1:30 | Anthony Welch
This survey of Shakespeare’s early plays explores the first half of his career, culminating in Hamlet. We will read six plays, including romantic comedies (such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream), histories (such as Henry V), and early tragedies (such as Titus Andronicus). Together we will trace Shakespeare’s evolution as a playwright over the first decade of his professional life, as he learned how to capture the human experience—love and heartbreak, cruelty and tenderness, joy and despair, revenge and forgiveness—in bold new ways. You can expect to work closely with Shakespeare’s dramatic language, learn about Elizabethan acting and stagecraft, and get acquainted with the social world of early modern England. We will also sample a range of modern critical approaches to Shakespeare’s work, and we will glance at the plays’ rich performance history, both on the stage and on film.
Requirements
Active participation, weekly discussion board posts, three critical essays.
ENGL 421 | Modern British Novel
TR 12:55-2:10 | Lisi Schoenbach
This course explores the confluence of two powerful and overlapping legacies: that of the British empire and the British novel. As the British novel reinvented itself through radical innovations in form, style, and subject matter, it was continually forced to reckon with its own literary-historical, national, and political pasts. We’ll examine modern British novels that balance narrative innovation and established narrative traditions, that articulate new freedoms by affirming old conventions, and that imagine new social relations by remembering political histories of domination. Novels by Wilde, Forster, Ford, Woolf, Joyce, Conrad, Waugh, Isherwood, McEwan.
Requirements
Two papers, several short writing assignments, class participation, final exam.
ENGL 436 | Modern American Novel
Reading History, Race, and the Mind of the Writer
TR 2:30-3:45 | La Vinia Jennings
English 436 provides a critical introduction to prominent, twentieth-century, American novels written between 1920 and 1980 and their defining socio-political themes and stylistic elements. The class will identify, compare, and contrast the driving political, historical, cultural, and aesthetic forces at work in and between these selected works.
Requirements
Attendance, two papers, and quizzes.
ENGL 443 | Topics in Black Literature (EI)
Black Queer Studies
TR 2:30-3:45 | Dionte Harris
This course will survey the exciting field of Black queer critical thought. We will consider race, gender and sexuality as categories for critical and literary analysis while also taking into consideration how these categories provide the conditions of possibility for alternate ways of being in the world. We will not only learn about Black queer lives but also about creative possibilities and resources for our own being and writing. Topics of discussion include race, gender, and sexuality, black study, queer study, questions and theories of the Human, social death, bodily vulnerability, Black feminist and queer practices of world-making, Black life and aliveness.
Requirements
Active attendance, weekly response posts, short presentation, an analysis essay, and a research paper
ENGL 452 | Modern Drama (EI)
MW 10:20-11:10; F Asynchronous | Stan Garner
This course will explore the development of modern drama from the realist revolution of the late nineteenth century through the Second World War. In addition to studying important playwrights and plays, we will consider a range of issues that characterize this, one of the greatest, most innovative periods of dramatic art. Because plays are designed for the stage as well as the armchair, we will also consider the challenges and opportunities involved in reading dramatic texts. Playwrights will include Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Yeats, Synge, O’Neill, Glaspell, Treadwell, Pirandello, Lorca, Brecht, Williams, and dramatists of the French avant-garde and the Harlem Renaissance.
This course is offered in a hybrid format, with an asynchronous Spotlight activity replacing one of the three face-to-face meetings.
Requirements
Production analysis essay (15%), drama resource portfolio (15%), spotlight worksheets (15%), midterm and final examinations (30% [15% each]), attendance and participation (10%), Theatre Live worksheet (5%).
ENGL 461 | Global Communication for Science and Technology (GCI)
MWF 11:20-12:20 | Jamal-Jared Alexander
Given the global nature of contemporary workplaces, knowing how to communicate effectively with an international audience is even more important for technical & professional communicators. This course explores the importance of cultural humility by learning the communication practices/customs of people from different cultures and countries. Students will learn how to communicate with high-context and low-context cultures, and they’ll learn how media and marketing play a vital part in medical, business, and technical discourse. This course prepares students to make informed and effective decisions as technical communicators in a global work environment. Throughout ENGL 461, students will design, role-play, and write professional documents for international audiences, synthesize and curate how different cultures use technology, and collaborate in teams. Students will examine rhetoric as a global practice and develop rhetorical understanding and theorizing through considerations that include language, argumentation, community, political scenarios, scientific developments, global threats, and international dynamics.
Requirements
Major projects and attendance are required to be successful in this course.
ENGL 462 | Writing for Publication
Online asynchronous | Sean Morey
This course will explore publishing for academic audiences. Specifically, we will attempt to write an academic article for a specified journal by the end of the semester. As part of this writing process, we will experiment with how generative AI can assist us in the writing process
Requirements
A draft of an academic article, as well as scaffolded writing projects (such as abstracts, annotated bibliographies, literature reviews, etc.), and discussion posts; contract grading will be used for assessment.
ENGL 463 | Advanced Poetry Writing (EI)
MWF 10:20-11:10 | Natalie Graham
This course explores writing inspired by visual art and invites students to develop both creative and critical poetry writing skills. Students will learn to use writing not only to engage a dynamic art ecosystem, but also to interrogate history, place, and identity through craft. Class assignments will consider how art and art spaces influence poetic choices related to voice, tone, and persona. Students will practice modes of looking at and making art and draft poems that experiment with forms, technique, revision, and research-driven inquiry. Alongside writing, they will explore shared elements of art-making across media, (i.e., pacing, tone, arrangement, and symbol) learning how these principles shape both visual and literary work. By the end of the term, students will assemble a polished portfolio that demonstrates creative range, critical awareness, and an evolving command of poetic craft across modes of expression.
Requirements
Class participation, workshop engagement, poem drafts, class presentation, and final portfolio.
ENGL 464 | Advanced Fiction Writing (EI)
TR 4:05-5:20 | Chris Hebert
This class is for students with experience in fiction writing who are looking to deepen and sharpen their critical abilities and writing skills. Throughout the semester—through a combination of readings and workshops—we will be revisiting and reinforcing the core elements of fiction, such as concrete detail, character, conflict, plot, and scene. But we will move beyond them as well, exploring new techniques and new complexities, seeking to broaden our understanding of how fiction works and what it can do. Students should expect to put significant time and effort into their own and their classmates’ work.
Requirements
Students will write at least two works of fiction and one substantial revision, along with occasional exercises. There will also be regular assigned readings of stories and essays on writing craft.
ENGL 465 | Religious Rhetorics
MWF 1:50-2:40 | Jeff Ringer
Multiple voices in the mid-twentieth century sounded the death of religion in the face of rising secularity, yet in the early twenty-first century in the United States and elsewhere, it is clear that religion and spirituality persist, though in arguably changed forms. This course investigates the nature of “religious” rhetorics in the wake of the secularization thesis’s demise, and it does so by first asking students to grapple with what “religious” rhetorics might even mean in our twenty-first century, postsecular context. Students will then investigate vernacular religious creativity, or the ways in which diverse social contexts shape the faiths, beliefs, and practices of individuals and groups. Particular attention will be paid to the rhetorical possibilities and constraints that arise from such creativity. Final projects can take the form of a social movement analysis or of an interview-based qualitative investigation into a focused population.
Requirements
Two major projects, each with multiple drafts; extensive reading and writing; discussion boards; attendance and participation.
ENGL 471 | Sociolinguistics
TR 12:55-2:10 | Rima Elabdali
Sociolinguistics probes language as it is socially situated. In many ways, we wear our language like we wear our clothes. In what ways does our talk reflect who we are or want to be, in what ways does our language change depending on who we interact with, with what interactional goals in mind, and based on which linguistic repertoires that are available? We will read about the theories that inform our understanding of socially situated language, explore them by reading the work of others who have applied (and in many cases, been the origin of) these theories, and use our knowledge to draw conclusions about our own language and the language of those around us.
Requirements
Attendance, participation, multi-step research paper.
ENGL 480 | Fairy Tale, Legend, and Myth: Folk Narrative
Fairy Tales
Online Asynchronous | Amy Billone
In this course, we study early versions of fairy tales that span the globe, all of which are still immensely popular today. While we might associate fairy tales like “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin” and “Rapunzel” with famous Disney movies, we will study early versions of these stories that were not originally aimed to be told to child audiences. We will ask the question of what makes these fairy tales capable of transcending age in their expected audiences while also transcending time in terms of their popular appeal. Together we will look back on our own pasts to remember which fairy tales we knew when we were young and in which formats as we compare our past selves to our current and future selves while simultaneously understanding the complexity of an evolving global phenomenon.
Requirements
Attendance, participation, final project, weekly quizzes, discussion posts, midterms and final exams.
ENGL 483 | Special Topics in Literature
Horses in Literature
TR 11:20-12:35 | Nancy Henry
Horses have been essential to the development of human civilization across the globe. Even after the coming of railways, horse power remained essential to agriculture, warfare, and colonial expansion, as well as sporting and leisure activities. As their economic centrality waned with the coming of automobiles, horses took on a new life in the cultural imagination. This course will look at how horses are represented in literature, visual art, and film from the nineteenth century to the present. We will read works such as Eugene Sue’s The Godolphin Arabian (1847), Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet (1935), Nicolas Evans’ The Horse Whisperer (1995), and Geraldine Brooks’ Horse (2022). These works offer an opportunity to think about the history of literature and the contemporary scholarly field of Animal Studies as they intersect with questions of race, gender, economics, and class.
Requirements
Attendance, class participation, in-class writing, discussion posts, student presentations, and a substantial research paper.
ENGL 489 | Special Topics in Film
Adaptation, Archives, and Digital Remix Culture
T 12:55-2:10 and R 12:55-3:45 | Eleni Palis
Throughout film history, continual exchanges between film and other forms, especially literature, theater, and more recently, graphic novels and video games, have shaped film history; it is almost impossible to study film without an eye to adaptation. This course begins with well-worn questions about “textual fidelity” across literary-film adaptation and then expands to debates about remix practices, digital mixes, and mash-ups, the ethics of appropriation, videographic criticism, and adapting “archives.” For these archival questions, we will visit the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound (TAMIS) and consider access to and appropriation of small-gauge formats with 16mm film and projection.
Requirements
Grades are determined by attendance, weekly discussion posts, a short essay, a video essay, and a final research project.
ENGL 494 | Cultural Rhetorics (EI) (GCUS) (WC)
TR 2:30-3:45 | Lisa King
This course endeavors to think of rhetorics – all rhetorics – as culturally situated, and as practices that inform and construct our identities and communities. In this class, we will be reading about and examining rhetorics of race, ethnicity, cultures, gender, sexuality, class, abilities, etc. to understand rhetoric’s relationship to these constructions and how they constellate and relate to one another. We will explore categories of writing, texts, digital rhetorics, performance, popular culture, material rhetorics, visual rhetorics, and more. Our reading will cast a broad net, and provide you with opportunities to both expand rhetorical and cultural knowledge and dig into a rhetorical phenomenon of your choice for further research.
Requirements
Coursework will include class discussion, reading, regular discussion posts, three written projects (two with presentation components), and a final portfolio.
ENGL 499 | Careers for English Majors (AOC)
Online Asynchronous (1st Session) | Erin Smith
English majors bring strong writing, analytic, and communication skills to today’s job market. But translating what they studied in the English classroom into the language of careers and employment can be a tricky task.
This fully-online, asynchronous 1-credit class will help students understand how to approach jobs in diverse fields, market their skills through compelling application materials, and learn how to take the initiative in their job-seeking and career development. The interactive course will include opportunities for feedback, questions, and discussion. At the end of the course, students will have prepared various materials for the job market (resume, job letters, narratives)
Graduate Courses
ENGL 507 | Applied Criticism: The Rhetoric of Literary Forms
Is Form Just a Four-Letter Word?
MW 11:20-12:35 | Martin Griffin
Arguments about “form” and “formalism” have been going on for centuries and often repeat themselves over time. To that extent, in today’s environment “form” is often seen as interchangeable with “genre” while “formalism” appears more as an historical curiosity than anything. But we can never quite escape from the presence of form, which has implications for our lives ranging from the aesthetic to the political and back. In this course, we will glance at the history of modern thinking about form, beginning with the Russian Formalists, and examine how form is far more than merely a functional shaping in works ranging across genres, from Zadie Smith’s On Beauty to August Wilson’s play Jitney, and from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” to McEwan’s Enduring Love. One critical text we will follow closely will be Caroline Levine’s provocative study Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, which aims at reinvigorating the study of form(s) and rescuing it from condescension or marginalization. This course should hopefully be worthwhile for students coming into the program and seasoned veterans alike.
Requirements
Active participation in discussion, one or two seminar presentations, a two-page informal response paper after fall break, and a final research paper on a topic of individual interest.
ENGL 514 | Readings in Medieval Literature
Animals in Medieval Culture
MW 12:55-2:10 | Mary Dzon
Animals were not only enjoyable to depict in medieval literary and artistic works but good to think with. Medieval theologians, philosophers and encyclopedists wondered at the non-human creatures around them and pondered the ways in which human beings and animals might or actually did interact. Would animal companions follow their humans in the afterlife? Do animals have emotions like humans do? What is the purpose of pesky insects? Reading a variety of early Christian and medieval sources, students in this course will consider well-known and lesser-known works of medieval literature in a new light, while also being introduced to critical animal studies more broadly. We will read whole texts and a range of selections, including: the bestiary, the poetry of Marie de France, The Dialogue between the Body and the Worms, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Sir Gowther, Ywain and Gawain, werewolf tales, and several saints’ Lives. Previous experience reading Middle English is helpful but not required.
Requirements
A few presentations, an annotated bibliography, a term paper.
ENGL 531 | Readings in English Literature of the Restoration and 18th-Century
TR 11:20-12:35 | Misty Anderson
This course provides students with an overview of literature and culture from 1660-1789, framed by the shocking piece of theatre that launched this period, which happened not on a stage but on a scaffold with the execution of Charles I. We will explore the ways that writers, visual artists, and theatre makers mediated the meaning of Englishness, and then Britishness, after that experience of political trauma. Over the course of the semester, we will explore and push back against this period’s identity as the age of reason as well as of sensibility, as well as the dark Enlightenment within this age of empire and global violence. The contradictions that define the age are the inheritance of the American experiment. Our lived experience of those contradictions frames my approach to the forms of memory, performance, and temporality that make up the “long running eighteenth century.” The course presumes no prior knowledge of the period.
Requirements
ENGL 541 | Readings in English Literature of the 19th-Century II
TR 12:55-2:10 | Nancy Henry
This course will take a deep dive into major nineteenth-century British novels and short stories. We will look at the global contexts of British fiction, considering the implications of transatlantic and colonial economic networks for concepts such as realism, provincialism, supernaturalism, and social problem novels. We will use various critical lenses to foreground discussions about race, class, gender, animals, and the environment, among other topics. Primary texts will incorporate works on both the MA and PhD exam lists, including Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss.
Requirements
Attendance, discussion posts, student presentations, and a major research paper.
ENGL 580 | Fiction Writing
T 5:10-7:55 | Michael Knight
This class is devoted to the writing and discussion of literary fiction. Students should be capable of demonstrating an in-depth knowledge of the craft and techniques of writing fiction, and through serious engagement with revision, be capable of producing publishable work.
Requirements
ENGL 581 | Colloquium in Poetry Writing
Writing Rage
R 5:10-7:55 | Iliana Rocha
This graduate seminar and poetry workshop centers rage as a historically policed, gendered, and politicized affect in literature. We will examine how poets—particularly those writing from marginalized positions—have used rage to confront silencing, containment, and aesthetic expectation. Readings will trace how rage operates in relation to power, intimacy, violence, inheritance, and survival, with close attention to how it makes itself visible in poetic form through line, breath, image, syntax, and address. The course resists the idea that rage must be tempered or resolved. Instead, we explore how poets shape rage into structures that can hold contradiction, sustain pressure, and respond to systems of harm. Students will write new work that experiments with intensity, interruption, volatility, and control, and our workshop will function as a critical site of rigor, care, and risk. Ultimately, this course asks: What does rage make possible in poetry? What does it break, distort, or refuse?
Requirements
Attendance, class leadership, workshop, final project.
ENGL 586 | History of Rhetoric
Histories of Writing Studies
MW 11:20-12:35 | Tanita Saenkhum
“The past is past, but in a wonderful measure the past reveals the future,” said George Bradley McFarland, an American missionary and Emeritus Professor, Royal Medical College, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand
This course examines writing studies, an academic discipline rooted in the United States, from historical perspectives. We will read historical narratives/accounts/studies that sought to trace the development of writing studies and consider how what had happened in the past has continued to shape current writing research and practices. For example, we will read an intellectual history of composition studies, a short history of writing instruction in U.S. colleges and schools, a situated historical perspective of second language (L2) writing in composition studies, and rhetoric and composition historiography, among others. Given the interdisciplinary nature of writing studies, we will also cover related topics chosen by the members of this course. While we focus on writing education within U.S. higher education, we will also explore writing education in non-English-dominant contexts, where the teaching of writing is largely neglected. Additionally, we will study approaches to conducting historical research, considering methodologies for crafting historical narratives. For your semester project, you will conduct historical research on a topic of your choice, utilizing the methodologies discussed.
Requirements
Class participation and discussion; presentation + written summary of a refereed journal; critique of published historical work; semester project (e.g., project proposal, project preliminary draft, presentation, and project final draft)
ENGL 589 | Special Topics in Language
Decolonial Approaches to Language, Knowledge, and Education
TR 2:30-3:45 | Rima Elabdali
This course explores the present pivotal moment in linguistics and education where there is wide recognition that the history and disciplinary knowledge in both fields are deeply intertwined with colonial and postcolonial injustice and that a decolonial turn is a needed (if difficult) paradigm shift. We will study ideas about language, knowledge, and education emerging from Southern, Indigenous, and decolonial scholarship in Latin America, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East/North Africa, and analyze how these perspectives have been taken up by critical scholars in the Global North. We will read about ontological erasures and epistemic injustices and explore what it might mean to decolonize research, theory, and pedagogy. The seminar will guide students in composing a positionality statement, a central decolonizing practice that critically examines ontologies and positional voices/identities, and in developing a final project, which may take the form of an autoethnography, a decolonial reanalysis of existing data, and/or a critical literature review. The course is designed for students across fields who want to engage with the transformative potential of decolonial approaches and to imagine and enact decolonial practices that respond to the pressing questions of our time.
Requirements
Attendance, participation, positionality statement, final research paper.
ENGL 590 | Topics in Critical Theory
Theories of Modernity, Yesterday and Today
TR 9:45-11:00 | Lisi Schoenbach
This course will address modernity as a central problem not only for the modernist moment but for our own critical moment as well. We will consider modernity as a project (complete or incomplete), as a mode of experience, and as a rubric through which to reflect upon issues as diverse as capitalism, industrialization, race, sexuality, national identity, time, memory, and consciousness. Although we will spend time with some of the literary and artistic innovations most often associated with modernism, our definition of modernity as a political, economic, social, and cultural phenomenon will reach backward to the Enlightenment and forward to the present day. We will consider the ways in which this model of crisis, rupture, and transformation continues to shape our own critical moment. Readings from Du Bois, Woolf, Gilroy, Jameson, Freud, Baudelaire, Adorno, Habermas, and others.
Requirements
Conference paper, abstract, in class presentation, class participation.
ENGL 630 | Studies in Renaissance Literature
Shakespeare’s Playbooks
MW 2:30-3:45 | Heather Hirschfeld
This class will study Shakespeare’s “playbooks” is ways that resonate with the word’s multiple definitions: as an acting company’s marked-up script; as the published sources/models from which Shakespeare and others drew; as the tomes they placed in their plots; and as the early printed texts that record some version of their language for the stage. Our studies will be closely bound up with the material and ideological implications of canonization, authorization/authority/authorship, and editing/editions.
Requirements
Two short essay assignments, bibliography assignment, final research paper, attendance and participation.
ENGL 670 | Studies in 20th-Century Literature
The New York School
MW 9:45-11:00 | Ben Lee
A course on the New York School of poetry, meant to familiarize students with a remarkably innovative and influential group of twentieth-century American poets, including John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and Eileen Myles. We’ll use discussions of these poets to address larger questions about contemporary poetry and the writing of literary history. What assumptions do we make, for instance, when we gather poets together into movements or schools? What alternative readings of their poems do we discourage by doing so? We’ll read the four poets thought of as the “core group” of the New York School (Ashbery, O’Hara, Schuyler, and Koch); discuss friends and collaborators often (Guest) or occasionally (Baraka) associated with the group; and conclude with four key figures (Berrigan, Mayer, Notley, and Myles) from a second generation of New York School poets. Alongside discussions of the poems, we’ll survey the history of scholarship on the New York School, from its longstanding emphasis on avant-gardism, on New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, and on the poets’ engagement with music and painting, to its more recent attention race, gender and sexuality, affect, friendship, and political economy.
Requirements
Requirements include active participation, a presentation, a response essay, a bibliography, and a final seminar paper.
ENGL 671 | Studies in 20th-Century Literature
MW 12:55-2:10 | Stan Garner
This seminar is a study of post-1945 drama and how to write about it. We will read a number of canonical and not-so-canonical plays from this period in light of the theatrical, cultural, and ideological currents they represent, and we will pair each of these plays with scholarly essays that reflect a range of positions and critical approaches: cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, postcolonial theory, American studies, performance studies, and studies of race and ethnicity. Unlike courses that study general works of literary or dramatic theory, our focus will be on applied theory and criticism. In what ways can theory, historical/cultural contexts, performance perspectives, and other ways of thinking about texts be brought to bear on a play by Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, Suzan-Lori Parks, or Luis Alfaro? One of the goals of this course is that students refine their strategies for engaging productively in critical conversations about literary and performance-related issues.
Requirements
Seminar paper (40%), two seminar presentations and handouts (40% [20% each]), participation (20%).
ENGL 682 | Research Methods in Rhetoric, Writing and Linguistics
TR 9:45-11:00 | Brandee Easter
This seminar explores how RWL scholars work with and in archives. We will ask what counts as an archive, how materials are preserved and organized, and how researchers work with documents, records, and objects to develop arguments. Through reading, discussion, and independent archival research, we will consider the strengths and limitations of this approach. We’ll also discuss and practice strategies for archival research—finding materials, interpreting context, and navigating gaps and silences—while reflecting on the ethical and methodological choices that shape the stories archives help us to tell.
Requirements
Reading and discussion, responses, methodology analysis, research design project with presentation.