Course Descriptions | Spring 2027
Course Descriptions | Spring 2027
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 301 | British Culture to 1660 (AH) (GCI)
Early Modern Witches & Devils
TR 2:30-3:45 | Samantha Murphy
Witches, devils, kings, scholars, peasants. Torture, magic, sex, treason, God. Sensational literature, plays, trial records, demonologies. These are a few of the things to expect in Early Modern Witches & Devils. This course will explore literary representations and cultural beliefs surrounding witchcraft in early modern England and Scotland. We will examine questions like: How did science and witch beliefs intersect? How about gender roles in witchcraft? When does witchcraft become treason? What did early modern scholars have to say about witchcraft? Over the course of the semester we will read plays, demonologies, trial accounts, news pamphlets, medical opinions, and selected contemporary criticism to explore the shape of Scottish and English witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Requirements
Requirements may include participation, reading responses, an analysis essay, and final exam.
ENGL 321 | Introduction to Old English (GCI)
Swords, Sagas, & Syntax
TR 9:45-11:00 | Scott MacKenzie
Before Shakespeare, before Chaucer, English looked like a different language and in this course, you’ll learn to read it. Introduction to Old English immerses you in Anglo-Saxon language, literature, and culture through engagement with texts that shaped English identity: heroic epic, elegy, riddle, and chronicle. Beowulf anchors the semester, read alongside biblical narrative, wisdom literature, and elegiac exile poems like The Wanderer and The Seafarer. You’ll build steadily from pronouns and verb classes to translation of poetry and prose, mastering a language that is recognizably English yet strikingly foreign. Along the way, we’ll explore the world behind the words: kings, warriors, feuds, and the culture that fans of The Last Kingdom, Lord of the Rings, and Vikings will recognize — but here you’ll read it in the original. Expect steady practice and regular feedback along the way. No prior language study required, just curiosity about where English, and English literature, began.
Requirements
Quizzes, two exams and one 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 impact on female selfhood and identity.
Requirements
Two research papers, frequent quizzes, participation in discussion format, and attendance.
Women’s Voices
Online Asynchronous | Robin Nicks
ENGL 332 examines American literature by women across historical periods, with particular attention to the ways writers engage questions of gender, identity, power, race, family, labor, community, cultural belonging, and authority. Across the semester, we will read writers whose lives, audiences, cultural positions, and literary forms differ substantially. Rather than treating “women’s writing” as a single tradition or assuming that there is one representative women’s voice, we will ask how writers participate in, revise, challenge, and sometimes reject the literary and cultural traditions they inherit. This course is fully asynchronous. There are no required class meetings.
Requirements
Weekly discussions, response papers/close readings, and three major papers.
ENGL 333 | Black American Literature and Aesthetics (AH) (GCUS)
Black Utopias
MWF 12:40-1:30 | Dionte Harris
This course explores how 20th and 21st century African American literary and cultural productions imagine alternative worlds and forms of life through utopian possibility and dystopian critique. We will consider how these writers and artists conceive of speculative futures, forms of kinship, and collective life, with particular attention to how race, gender, and sexuality shape ideas of freedom and liberation. Throughout the course, we will ask what it means to imagine life otherwise, whose lives these imagined worlds make possible, and whose lives they leave out. Possible texts include Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, and Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer.
Requirements
Active participation, weekly response posts, a presentation, and two analytical essays.
ENGL 334 | Film and American Culture (GCUS)
M 11:30-1:30, WF 11:30-12:20 | 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 and regulation of Hollywood as an industry 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
Grades are determined by attendance, comprehension checks, two analytical papers, and two exams.
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 4:05-5:20 | Melinda Backer
Requirements
MWF 10:20-11:10 | 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.
ENGL 342 | Literature and Medicine (AH)
Online Asynchronous | Stan Garner
This fully-online popular course examines literary representations of illness, medical care, and biotechnology through the study of fiction, drama, poetry, essays, nonfiction, and film. It asks the following questions: How have writers represented and given meaning to illness and health? How are these states and experiences invested with social meanings? How has literature clarified the stakes of biomedical ethical debates? Finally, how have writers responded to pandemics and other public health crises throughout history? This course will be valuable to English majors who want a powerful new way of thinking about literature and creative writing, students contemplating careers in medicine and health, and students with other plans who are interested in the human body and the stories we tell about it.
Requirements
Weekly Spotlight worksheets, weekly quizzes, illness or disability paper, midterm and final exams.
ENGL 355 | Rhetoric and Writing (WC)
Rhetoric, Community, and Public Life
Online Asynchronous | Robin Nicks
This course serves as an introduction to rhetoric and writing studies, focusing on rhetorical analysis, discourse, public writing, digital rhetoric, and writing as a process. Students will examine how communities represent themselves publicly, how outsiders construct narratives about communities, and how rhetoric circulates across digital and public platforms.
Throughout the semester, students will analyze rhetorical artifacts, engage with rhetorical theory, conduct research, and compose in multiple genres. The course emphasizes drafting, revision, peer review, rhetorical awareness, and reflective writing.
This course meets the requirements for and is listed as a “WC” (Communicating through Writing; Writing Intensive) course.
Requirements
Weekly discussion boards, pre-writing and research activities, proposals, and three major papers.
TR 2:30-3:45 | Tanita Saenkhum
This course, which is writing-intensive, provides students with a foundation in the theory of rhetoric and writing. Through readings, class discussions, and major writing projects, the course explores contemporary theories of rhetoric and their relationship to writing. The goal is to enhance students’ understanding of rhetorical concepts, writing skills, and communication across academic, professional, and personal contexts. We will consider ways in which rhetorical situations contribute to strong, audience-focused, organized, and well-established arguments. Specifically, we will closely examine how writers construct their texts, 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
In-class assignments, three major writing projects, final reflection, and attendance & participation.
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 for both academic and professional audiences. 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
Attendance, 3 papers, 3 class presentations, 3 peer reviews, one final presentation, discussion posts.
ENGL 359 | Peer Tutoring in Writing: Theory and Practice (EI)
MW 3:00-3:50, Friday Asynchronous | Michael Sutherlin
This course provides an introduction to theories and methods of providing effective feedback to student writers. It includes direct experience tutoring students in a writing center setting.
ENGL 360 | Technical and Professional Writing (WC)
Online Asynchronous | Daniel Wallace
This is a course dedicated to teaching you all about the essentials of technical and professional writing (proposals, instructional guides, essays, and more). Each assignment you write in this course will serve as a component in an imaginary writing project: the creation of an imaginary email newsletter on a topic you find fascinating. This will be a regularly weekly newsletter on a complex topic you enjoy writing about — and which other people can subscribe to.
Requirements
Major papers, graded discussions, and short homework assignments.
Digital Security, AI, and Nuclear Conflict
TR 11:20-12:35 | 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, instructions, charts, and character/situation study.
MWF 11:30-12:20 | Hooman Saeli
In this class, students develop rhetorical strategies for clear communications and for working in teams. They also hone critical thinking skills by analyzing the content, channels, genres, and audiences of their technical and professional communications. Students complete various projects, including genres such as process descriptions, application materials, proposals, and major reports. Additionally, they work in teams strengthening their collaboration and document creation skills.
Requirements
Attendance, 3 papers, 3 class presentations, 3 peer reviews, one final presentation, discussion posts.
ENGL 361 | Introduction to Publishing
TR 11:20-12:35 | Katie Hannah
ENGL 361 surveys all aspects of the publishing ecosystem, introducing major sectors such as trade, scholarly, and textbooks. Students will explore publishing career paths and learn the field’s core functions and workflows. The course also examines key professional issues, including management, law, copyright, permissions, and finance, as well as current trends and challenges in the industry.
Requirements
Course readings, résumé and cover letter, publishing portfolio
ENGL 363 | Writing Poetry (AAH) (EI)
MWF 12:40-1:30 | Iliana Rocha
In a world increasingly saturated by AI and skepticism toward the humanities, poetry is our most radical act of human attention. This course provides focused instruction on the craft of poetry—exploring tone, metaphor, syntax, diction, and the line not just as literary devices, but as vital tools of consciousness. The aims of 363 are simple: to cultivate fiercely curious readers, build confidence in your own creative voice, develop a vocabulary to critically engage with both your literary predecessors and your peers, and practice active literary citizenship. To take risks! Writing poetry is not a superfluous pastime—it is an instinctive, irreplaceable human response to being alive in the world. Forget the algorithms. Now more than ever, we need spaces entirely dedicated to real, flawed, brilliant human thought.
Requirements
Attendance, annotations, class leadership, poetry workshop, portfolio
TR 9:45-11:00 | Natalie Graham
In this course emerging writers practice to recognize and develop essential poetic elements such as tone, voice, imagery, diction, forms, and sound. Over the course of the semester, students will develop curiosity and confidence to use poetry to engage the world around them while developing the vocabulary and critical tools necessary to analyze literary texts—including their own work. This course also introduces students to the modern publishing industry, providing insights into how new poets navigate publication opportunities. As a workshop-based creative writing course, participation is vital.
Requirements
Students are required to complete discussion boards, writing exercises, peer workshops, recitations, and a final portfolio of revised poems.
ENGL 364 | Writing Fiction (AAH) (EI)
MWF 9:10-10:00 | Elizabeth Gentry
This class invites students to learn the craft of short fiction with the goal of becoming better readers and writers of fiction. We will analyze the core elements of published short stories, practice our own writing through low-stakes exercises, produce a short story to share with the class, and revise the story based upon peer and instructor feedback. We’ll read published fiction as well as instructive nonfiction about the elements of fiction and the writing process.
Requirements
Attendance, quizzes, peer feedback, one short story, one revised short story.
TR 11:20-12:35 | Michael Knight
This class is designed to provide an introduction to the craft of writing literary fiction with a focus on the short story. Students should leave this class with a basic understanding of core elements of the short story form (character, plot, structure, point of view, setting, language, imagery and so on), the ability to recognize how those elements function in published fiction and the ability to put those core elements into practice in fiction of their own.
Requirements
Attendance, class participation, fiction writing exercises, reading responses, original fiction.
ENGL 365 | Writing the Screenplay (AAH) (EI)
MWF 1:50-2:40 | Jeff Amos
In Writing the Screenplay, we will examine and practice the art of screenwriting. We will analyze film scripts and the movies made from them to interrogate what makes a cinematic story work, considering structure, character development, tension, dramatic action, visual storytelling, and other craft techniques and concerns. Along the way, we’ll unpack larger questions about the purpose of storytelling in our culture and the world.
By the end of the semester, you should have a foundational understanding of what makes a high-quality screenplay, a familiarity with the craft choices that screenwriters make, and the materials to complete a feature-length screenplay of your own.
Requirements
Attendance, script responses, writing exercises, a treatment, and one act of a feature length screenplay.
TR 11:20-12:35 | Abhay Shetty
Students will be introduced to the art and craft of writing screenplays. By focusing on screenplays – conventional and experimental/innovative – we will aim to understand the fundamentals of a screenplay, what makes it different from other forms of narratives, and how the difference can be consciously applied/developed in creative ways to create a strong feature-length screenplay.
Requirements
Attendance, participation, reading responses, writing exercises, and a screenplay.
ENGL 369 | Writing Creative Nonfiction (AAH) (EI)
TR 12:55-2:10 | Laura Hoffer
Along the rich spectrum of creative nonfiction, you will find literary journalism and object essays and travel essays and memoir and flash nonfiction and so much more. This course will introduce you to many of those genres and familiarize you with the vocabulary and techniques employed by creative nonfiction writers. You will investigate a wide range of published material in this course, including a book on the craft of writing creative nonfiction and creative work by established and emerging writers such as Roxane Gay and John Lee Clark. This semester, we’ll also pay particular attention to the personal writing process and consider the many ways an essay can develop from the pre-writing stage through revisions, giving you the opportunity to discover more about your own individual writing process.
Requirements
Attendance; short exercises; two longer essays (memoir or personal story and a travel essay); peer workshops; responses to classmates’ drafts; reading reflection quizzes; and a final portfolio with one revised essay.
ENGL 370 | Multimedia Storytelling (EI)
MWF 10:20-11:10 | Brandee Easter
This course explores the expressive and creative possibilities of digital media. In addition to reading scholarship in media history and theory, we will read (and play) stories across media, including video games, hypertext fiction, and code poetry
Requirements
Attendance and participation, short writing assignments, two exams, final project.
ENGL 372 | The Structure of Modern English
American Englishes
MWF 1:50-2:40 | Rima Elabdali
What does it mean to speak “American English”? This course examines the diverse varieties of English spoken across the United States, with particular attention to Appalachian English, African American English, and Chicano English. Students will explore how English varies across regions and communities and have opportunities to work with community members and organizations in the region to examine how language is connected to identity, place, culture, and social inequality.
Requirements
Attendance and Participation; Course Journal; Final Project.
ENGL 389 | Literature of the English Bible (AH)
Online Asynchronous | Randi Marie Addicott
Aside from its position as the sacred text of major world religions, 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
Journals, Discussion Boards, two papers, and annotated bibliography/ synthesis.
ENGL 406 | Shakespeare’s Contemporaries: Renaissance Drama (EI)
Playing the Globe in Shakespeare’s Time
TR 12:55-2:10 | Heather Hirschfeld
This class picks up where Shakespeare classes leave off: with the provocative, passionate, sometimes decadent plays written by the dramatists (including Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Webster and Elizabeth Cary) whose work was essential to the flourishing of English Renaissance stage. The course introduces students to a variety of playwrights and plays of the early modern period and the continuity of their themes and conventions. We focus on the development of London as a theatrical community, paying special attention to the emotional effects and business demands of playing as well the representation on stage of the kinds of political social, and economic issues that still concern us today. Our goal is to understand the early modern theater as a total enterprise–as an entertainment industry and culture that involved more than just words on the page.
Requirements
Attendance, two short essays, including a biography, one mapping assignment, one exam, one final paper.
ENGL 409 | Shakespeare’s Contemporaries: Renaissance Poetry and Prose
Renaissance Epic: Spenser and Milton
TR 11:20-12:35 | Anthony Welch
What is an epic? Why did this ancient art form so enthrall (and torment) the poets of Renaissance Europe? And why does the epic still fascinate us today? We will tackle those questions by studying the two greatest epic poems in the English language: Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). One is a fantasy story about elvish knights, ladies, and monsters; the other portrays Satan’s rebellion and the fall of Adam and Eve. Both are bold, magnificent, and strange. We’ll see how these troubled masterpieces grapple with their literary predecessors, ponder national and religious identity, explore gender, sexuality, and the natural world, and struggle with the ethics of heroic violence.
Requirements
Active participation, weekly discussion board posts, brief in-class written responses, and two essays.
ENGL 411 | Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century British Literature
TR 9:45-11:00 | Misty Anderson
What do we have in common with eighteenth-century Britain? How about coffee houses, shopping malls, political satire, fad diets, novels, baby booms, stock market crashes, newspapers, two-party politics, crime shows, gender crises, and obsessive mail checking? In this course, we will investigate the social history of British culture from 1660-1740 through literary, legal, and theatrical writing. As the great social experiment of this era, America and Americans are the inheritors of this historical moment, and we need to be good students of it in order to understand the origins of some of our most basic “self-evident” truths. We will perform our own experiments in archival visits and meetings in a coffee house most Fridays of the semester. Authors covered will include Behn, Rochester, Hobbes, Wycherley, Defoe, Centlivre, Swift, and Pope
Requirements
Assignments include regular short written responses to readings, a midterm, a final project, and regular, robust class participation.
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
Two research papers, frequent quizzes, participation in a discussion format, and attendance.
ENGL 443 | Topics in Black Literature (EI)
Early Black Writing Now: The Antebellum Black Atlantic
MWF 11:30-12:20 | Katy Chiles
Why does the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African slave trade continue to impact contemporary American literature and culture? How did early African-Americans describe the slave trade and life in the Americas? This course will begin to answer these questions and more. We will consider how texts written by black authors are part of what we call the “Black Atlantic”: a transnational cultural space produced by travel across the Atlantic Ocean—to and from Africa, the Caribbean, the United States, and Great Britain. We will examine how these writings explore the “impossible” place of many of these writers who, although living in a certain country, were not considered “citizens” before the law. From the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, texts might include first-person narratives by Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, and Frederick Douglass; Phillis Wheatley’s poetry; and Martin Delany’s Blake.
Requirements
Active participation, a presentation, informal writing assignments, a close reading paper, an annotated bibliography and abstract, and a final paper.
ENGL 455 | Persuasive Writing (WC)
MWF 12:40-1:30 | Brandee Easter
This class is designed to prompt critical thinking and writing about how communication and persuasion are constructed, both consciously and unconsciously. In this writing intensive course, we will draw on rhetorical theory to explore how—particularly in these times of sharply partisan political debate, manipulated information, and algorithmic information siloing— persuasion can be understood.
Requirements
Attendance and participation, short writing assignments, quizzes, two exams, two writing projects.
ENGL 463 | Advanced Poetry Writing (EI)
The Prose Poem and Other Hybrid Forms
MWF 11:30-12:20 | Iliana Rocha
As poet Beckian Fritz Goldberg writes, the prose poem is not a mere “blend” or “compromise” between prose and poetry, but an independent “creature” with its own distinct relationship to time and space. This course offers focused instruction on these unidentifiable, genre-defying “creatures.” We will explore texts that combine the strategies and gestures of prose—fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and flash—with those of poetry, like Goldberg’s Egypt from Space, Bhanu Kapil’s Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, and Rigoberto González’s Autobiography of My Hungers, among others. Through close reading, we will investigate the literary usefulness (and limitations) of genre categorization. Because rigid lines of demarcation can restrict writerly expansion and imagination, students will compose directly within these interstices—strengthening a cross-genre practice and pushing the boundaries of what a poem is and what it does.
Requirements
Attendance, annotations, class leadership, poetry workshop, portfolio
ENGL 464 | Advanced Fiction Writing (EI)
TR 2:30-3:45 | Michael Knight
This course is designed as a continuation of ENG 364. We will be focused on workshopping your original fiction with the goal of applying the lessons of craft learned in 364 and enhancing your knowledge of style and technique through the workshop experience. The idea here is to give you the kind of time and freedom to write whatever fires your imaginations. I want you to make use of this semester to explore your talent, discover your power as a writer, and pursue the kind of fiction that excites you most.
Requirements
Attendance, class participation, reading responses, original fiction.
ENGL 465 | Religious Rhetorics
TR 9:45-11:00 | 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 466 | Writing, Layout, and Production of Technical Documents
Visual Communication Design
TR 9:45-11:00 | Jamal-Jared Alexander
This is a service-learning course that will provide you with a solid foundation of knowledge about visual communication design to enable you to make and defend design decisions when creating documents for professional contexts. You will engage in iterative design. You will learn about the human visual system and how the human body perceives visual information. You will learn about sketching, typography, color, and graphics. You will have multiple opportunities to apply your skills within complex, real-world contexts by working in teams to develop a set of documents for a client and by pitching a new design for a window film.
Requirements
Attendance, Team/Client Projects
ENGL 469 | Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing
Writing the Creative Life
How do we capture the excitement and struggle of living a creative life in works of nonfiction? What techniques do writers use to turn rumor, diary, myth and memory into engaging, innovative works of memoir, documentary, and biography? This class will explore these questions through close attention to form and style in works that capture the lives of artists, musicians, performers, and writers. Students will gain experience researching and writing creatively about their own lives as well as the lives of others. This is a workshop course, meaning our primary modes of work and study will be in-class writing practice, discussion of assigned readings, and workshops focused on student writing. As a classroom community, we will read, discuss, draft, and revise 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, journals, creative essays, peer critique, final portfolio.
ENGL 470 | Special Topics in Rhetoric
Making Sense of Language
TR 2:30-3:45| Thorsten Huth
This special topics/capstone seminar directly links rhetoric, writing, and linguistics by examining how people think, talk, and argue about language: what it is, how it works, and what it does. Rather than treating accounts of language as neutral descriptions, we read them as persuasive writing shaped by definitions, metaphors, evidence, and style; in short, we read them as choices that steer research agendas and public debate.
To that end, we track major frameworks that cast language as structure (grammar), thought (embodied meaning and metaphor), and action (social interaction and coordination), and we end with Generative AI, which reframes language as prediction from data and reopens questions about meaning, authorship, and understanding. Because ideas about language get used to justify real-world decisions (about education, “proper” English, accent bias, policing speech, media narratives, and now AI), this course gives students tools to evaluate those claims and respond to them.
Students practice spotting weak evidence, loaded definitions, and persuasive tricks, and ultimately learn to make stronger arguments of their own. As a capstone for the English major, the seminar also emphasizes advanced research and writing skills, including finding
Requirements
Participation, inquiry papers/unit papers, a presentation, and capstone research paper.
ENGL 474 | Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (EI)
TR 12:55-2:10 | Tanita Saenkhum
This course, which is reading and discussion based, provides an introduction to some of the major basic theories, key concepts, and issues surrounding teaching English as a second/foreign language in different contexts and settings. We will consider various topics related to English language teaching, including first and second language acquisition, learner variables in language learning, and traditional and innovative approaches to language teaching. Through readings, class discussions, and assignments (e.g., teaching observation and teaching demonstration), students will be able to design English language lessons that address the learner needs and institutional context, among others. The course aims to develop students’ knowledge about English language teaching and to prepare them to work with linguistically and culturally diverse English language learners.
Requirements
Discussion questions, teaching observation, mini-research project, teaching demonstration (including lesson plan, teaching reflection, and peer feedback), and attendance & participation.
ENGL 475 | The Big Ears Festival
MWF 11:30-12:20 | Urmila Seshagiri
NEW COURSE NUMBER! Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival is an eclectic, brilliant, and inspiring gathering of musicians and performing artists from around the world. The New York Times calls it “one of the world’s greatest music bashes.” Now in its 14th year, Big Ears takes place in downtown Knoxville and offers festivalgoers 200 concerts, workshops, film screenings, poetry readings, and other performances by artists including Mavis Staples, Wednesday, Roseanne Cash, SML, the Kronos Quartet, Tomeka Reid, Bill Frisell, and many, many others. Intimate solo concerts, bands in large venues, open-air jam sessions on Market Square, talks by scholars of jazz history: Big Ears is an immersive celebration of art, language, music, and creative collaboration. This course will take a deep dive into the careers of multiple 2027 Big Ears artists prior to the April 1-4 Festival. We will spend 4 days attending Big Ears. Students will then write final papers and give presentations about the artist(s) of their choosing. Thanks to a generous donation from the Big Ears Festival, each enrolled student will receive a free pass to the Festival (a $500 value). In addition to regular class attendance during the semester, students are responsible for their own transport to downtown Knoxville for Festival events and must be available to attend concerts on all four days of the Festival, Thursday-Sunday, April 1-4. Enrollment for this course is by application; please fill out this Google Form by Oct. 25.
Requirements
All students MUST commit to attending all four days of Big Ears 2027 (April 1-4) and attending a MINIMUM of 12 events. Required work: group presentation, 3 short response papers, Playlist Project, final paper and presentation.
ENGL 476 | Second Language Acquisition
MWF 3:00-3:50 | Rima Elabdali
This course introduces students to the field of second language acquisition (SLA) or, in other words, the learning of more than one language. The course provides students with a broad overview of theoretical underpinnings, empirical research base, and history of the field. Through readings, discussions, and collaborative research projects, we will explore cognitive, linguistic, sociocultural, and critical research perspectives on second language acquisition, examine typical language learning outcomes and processes, and consider how cognitive factors (e.g., age, aptitude) and dimensions of human difference (e.g., race, socioeconomic status) affect these outcomes and processes.
Requirements
Attendance and Participation; Course Journal; Final Project.
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
New Fantasy Literature: AI and LitRPG
TR 12:55-2:10 | Amy Elias
What happens when literary genres merge with game genres? What questions does speculative literature raise about AI outside of space travel narratives? What is the difference between plot in a traditional novel and plot in LitRPG? Is a novel written by AI really a novel? This class combines narrative theory and literary criticism with readings in LitRPG and speculative literature to address questions about genre and authorship in an age of AI. This is NOT a class about video games, and it does NOT address how video games work in narrative terms. This is a class about novels and short stories–ones that raise ethical and social questions about digital life, that mimic game environments, and/or that are merging speculative literature (Fantasy, SF) with concerns about digital technologies in new and important ways.
Requirements
Midterm and final exams, class participation (reading responses, quizzes, attendance), course project, and webinar attendance at campus lecture by Ted Chiang.
ENGL 492 | Off-Campus Study: Drama in New York
First Session | Misty Anderson
New York Drama is one of UT’s longest-running 3-credit off campus courses. Students see the best of Broadway and off-Broadway theatre through an immersive experience in NYC January 1-9. We stay together at the Hotel Edison during the New York portion of the course. Plays already booked include Much Ado with Tom Hiddleston; Inter Alia with Rosamond Pike, Other Desert Cities with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Allison Janney, and Ed Harris, and the new Dolly musical. We will see a total of eight plays. While in New York, students attend class daily and see shows at night, with ample time for museums and independent sightseeing. Once we return to Knoxville, we will have seminar meetings and tutorials in January and early February.
Questions? Contact Misty Anderson (manderson@utk.edu)
Requirements
Journals are due January 15, and a final 8-10 page research paper is due Feb. 15. There is a course fee of $1993 to cover the cost of lodging, tickets, a farewell meal, and luggage storage. There are 6 scholarships (partial and full) for this course, applications due October 1. A deposit of $750 is due October 10; later additions will be considered on a space available basis.
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. Students will draft and edit a new resume, tailor a cover letter for a job or internship, and practice Zoom interviews.
Requirements
Resume, cover letter, interview, LinkedIn page, and online discussion boards
NOTE: This course is reserved for English majors/minors ONLY.
Graduate Courses
ENGL 505 | Composition Pedagogy
MW 11:20-12:35 | Lisa King
English 505, Teaching First Year Composition, provides students with a foundation in the theory and practice of teaching writing. The class will offer regular opportunities to engage with key scholarship about writing instruction and to participate in hands-on, problem-oriented learning. We will read widely about various aspects of writing pedagogy, grapple with ways to apply our knowledge in the classroom, and hone our abilities to investigate teaching challenges. Students will leave 505 with a general understanding of contemporary writing pedagogy and rhetorical theory, particularly as it applies to UTK’s first-year composition program.
Requirements
Attendance, discussion posts, teaching philosophy, qualitative research report with presentation, teaching and reflecting presentation, multimodal public argument, academic argument unit map and materials, teaching presentation, teaching portfolio.
TR 12:55-2:10 | Jeff Ringer
English 505, Teaching First Year Composition, provides students with a foundation in the theory and practice of teaching writing. The class will offer regular opportunities to engage with key scholarship about writing instruction and to participate in hands-on, problem-oriented learning. We will read widely about various aspects of writing pedagogy, grapple with ways to apply our knowledge in the classroom, and hone our abilities to investigate teaching challenges. Students will leave 505 with a general understanding of contemporary writing pedagogy and rhetorical theory, particularly as it applies to UTK’s first-year composition program. Students will also have the opportunity to craft their thinking about teaching writing into a teaching philosophy, a genre that benefits students on the job market.
Requirements
Requirements include extensive reading and discussion, weekly responses or mini projects, a teaching philosophy, and a teaching portfolio
ENGL 551 | Readings in American Literature
The Regional Impulse in American Fiction, 1870-1940
TR 4:05-5:20 | Bill Hardwig
In his 1894 collection of essays Crumbling Idols, Hamlin Garland delivered a passionate defense of regional writing, stating “local color in a novel means that it has such quality of texture and back-ground that it could not have been written in any other place or by any one else than a native.” While Garland and many of his contemporaries understood regional writing, with its focus on local distinctiveness, to be inextricably connected to a democratic national identity, such was not always the case. In fact, regional writing has often been seen as isolationist, working against national or global forms of cosmopolitanism. This class will focus on the end of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, and we will look at how the literature of “place” reveals the tensions between the local and the national, between the native and the foreign, between the rural and the urban, the regional and the cosmopolitan. We will both situate the readings within larger literary and social contexts and explore the ways in which the authors seek to create original and distinctive regional perspectives.
Tentative Texts: Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio; Abraham Cahan, Yekl and The Imported Bridegroom; Willa Cather, My Antonia (1918); Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition; Kate Chopin, Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie; William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Sarah Orne Jewett, Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories; Nella Larsen, Quicksand; Jean Toomer, Cane; Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson; Edith Wharton, Summer
Requirements
Attendance, two essays, presentation.
ENGL 590 | Topics in Critical Theory
Modern Characters
MW 12:55-2:10 | Urmila Seshagiri
The literary revolutions of the early 20th century produced new, often startling, theories of character in fiction. This seminar considers the wide-ranging discourses and questions that inform literary character: aesthetics, political theory, psychology, ethics. We will study theories of character by Anglo-European writers such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Sigmund Freud, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Walter Benjamin, and we will read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Forster’s A Passage to India, and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Readings by contemporary theorists of character and personhood such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Giorgio Agamben, Alex Woloch, Nancy Armstrong, and others will frame our reading of experimental novels by Toni Morrison, Ian McEwan, J. M. Coetzee, and Jhumpa Lahiri.
Requirements
Regular attendance, weekly reading responses, in-class presentation, final seminar paper (12-15 pp).
ENGL 592 | Off-Campus Study
First Session | Misty Anderson
New York Drama is one of UT’s longest-running 3-credit off campus courses. Students see the best of Broadway and off-Broadway theatre through an immersive experience in NYC January 1-9. We stay together at the Hotel Edison during the New York portion of the course. Plays already booked include Much Ado with Tom Hiddleston; Inter Alia with Rosamond Pike, Other Desert Cities with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Allison Janney, and Ed Harris, and the new Dolly musical. We will see a total of eight plays. While in New York, students attend class daily and see shows at night, with ample time for museums and independent sightseeing. Once we return to Knoxville, we will have seminar meetings and tutorials in January and early February.
Questions? Contact Misty Anderson (manderson@utk.edu)
Requirements
Journals are due January 15, and a final 8-10 page research paper is due Feb. 15. There is a course fee of $1993 to cover the cost of lodging, tickets, a farewell meal, and luggage storage. There are 6 scholarships (partial and full) for this course, applications due October 1. A deposit of $750 is due October 10; later additions will be considered on a space available basis.
ENGL 595 | Digital Humanities
MW 9:45-11:00 | Hilary Havens
This course is an overview of the tools and theory of Digital Humanities and is the foundation course of UT’s graduate certificate program in Digital Humanities. Topics include AI-assisted coding; digitization and textual encoding; computational literary studies and visualization; metadata and data cleaning; GIS and spatial inquiries; social media analysis; and digital storytelling. Students will create a DH final project related to their research interests. Towards the end of the semester, students will learn how to promote their newly-acquired DH skills on the academic and non-academic job markets. In the spirit of DH, all of the class readings are open-access or available through the UT libraries page, although students will be encouraged to purchase a one-month subscription to Claude Pro ($20) during the final weeks of the semester.
Requirements
Attendance, Participation, Professionalization opportunity, Three short reflection papers, Digital project review, Final project.
ENGL 631 | Studies in Renaissance Literature
Renaissance Epic: Spenser and Milton
TR 2:30-3:45 | Anthony Welch
An epic poem, wrote John Dryden in 1697, is “the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform.” Why did this ancient literary form loom so large in early modern Britain? This course examines the era’s greatest epics—Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and Paradise Regained (1671)—with an occasional glance at their contemporaries’ epic writings and commentaries. Our goal is to explore how these authors transformed their classical and medieval literary models to craft a distinctly early modern art form: audacious, grandiloquent, yet also deeply skeptical of its own heroic ideals and unsure whether to honor or defy the literary past. We will also ask how Spenser and Milton grappled with epic poetry’s social and political ideology: its aristocratic elitism, its concern with national and religious identity, its gender dynamics, its portrayal of heroic violence, and its troubled history as a tool of colonial empire building.
Requirements
Active class participation; an oral presentation; a critical summary of an article or book chapter; an annotated bibliography; and a final research paper.
ENGL 651 | Studies in Victorian Literature
Victorian Studies/Animal Studies
TR 9:45-11:00 | Nancy Henry
Animal Studies is a thriving interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Within literary studies, it aims to center representations of animals within the context of historically specific material conditions and ideological beliefs. This course focuses on animals during the nineteenth century in Britain when industrialization was turning them into commodities at the same time awareness was growing about the need to alleviate suffering. We will read classic works such as Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate and more recent work at the intersection of Animal Studies and Victorian Studies. While we will focus on animals and questions like the relationship between breeds and human categories such as race and class, the course will also serve as an introduction to major Victorian literary works that appear on various exam lists. Readings will include Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
Requirements
In-class presentations, two research papers.
ENGL 680 | Advanced Studies in Rhetoric, Writing and Linguistics
Tackling the Job Market Course
TR 11:20-12:35 | Jamal-Jared Alexander
Preparing for the job market (practitioner and academic) can be tricky. ENGL 680 provides students with practical tools to craft effective and competitive job portfolios. By exploring topics that include insider tips and techniques for tackling the job market, students will leave this course well-equipped to develop and write a series of documents, interview using their authentic voice, and create a professional digital platform.
Requirements
Attendance, Dossier Documents
ENGL 686 | Studies in Creative Writing
Obsession
T 5:10-7:55 | Rochelle Hurt
What do you do when you can’t stop writing about one mountain, or the color blue, or professional wrestling? In this class, we’ll explore how writers channel their obsessions into book-length works of poetry, nonfiction, and hybrid forms, weaving together researched and personal material. Students will be encouraged to work with one or two of their specific obsessions throughout the semester, researching and reworking their ideas into various series and sequences through process-based prompts. Class time will be split between discussion of readings and workshop. Students may write in any genre, but our readings will primarily represent poetry and creative nonfiction. Students will finish the semester with a cohesive portfolio of work.
Requirements
Attendance; workshop poems, essays, or hybrid work; peer critique; final portfolio.
The Art of Revision
W 5:10-7:55 | Chris Hebert
Ask any writer and they will tell you that the bulk of the work that goes into any piece of writing actually comes via re-writing. Of course, we all know this, at least intellectually, but what it means in practice is another matter. Revision, like many aspects of writing process, is often hidden from us. When we read a published novel or story, we see only the outcome, not the struggle that went into producing it. In this class our goal is to demystify and concretize the revision process. We will be reading about the craft of revision and examining and comparing unpublished and published drafts of various works of fiction and using them as a means of understanding how to approach the revision process ourselves.
This graduate-level class is for highly advanced fiction writers only. Permission of the instructed required for enrollment.
Requirements
Students will be generating their own original and revised fiction, which will be shared and discussed via workshop.
ENGL 694 | Studies in Film
Hollywood: History, Industry, Archives
MW 2:30-4:30 | Eleni Palis
This course interrogates the industry, the cultural category, and the aesthetic and political meanings of “Hollywood,” broadly conceived. This course balances chronological histories of filmmaking in California and the studio system, both classical and contemporary, with up-to-date perspectives, methodologies, and film theories of American cinema under the umbrella of “Hollywood.” Students will master analytical, historical, technological, and aesthetic film fluencies, allowing them to craft persuasive, publishable film scholarship. We will proceed through film theoretical perspectives on Hollywood cinema, from psychoanalysis and semiotics to feminist film theory, critical race theory in film, genre theory, auteur theory, and star studies. We will also spend time in the film archive, interrogating the politics of memory that shape what “Hollywood” means.
Requirements
Course grades are determined by regular attendance and participation, leading one discussion, weekly responses to films and readings, one shot breakdown, one archival project, and a final film research paper.