Graduate Courses

To see a complete list of courses offered and their descriptions, visit the online course catalog.

For current course schedule information and registration, visit SIS.

Column one has the course number and section. Other columns show the course title, days offered, instructor's name, room number, if the course is cross-referenced with another program, and a option to view additional course information in a pop-up window.

Proseminar
AS.060.602 (01)

This course is intended to train students in skills required by the discipline, help prepare them for a range of futures, and integrate them into the university community.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Graduate
  • Days/Times: Th 1:00PM - 4:00PM
  • Instructor: Miller, Andrew
  • Room: Gilman 130D
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 8/8
  • PosTag(s): n/a

The Sentimental Imagination
AS.060.623 (01)

This course will explore the literature of sentimentality and theorizations of the sentimental from the eighteenth century to our own moment. A major focus will be the flexibility of the designator “sentimental” (is all writing sentimental?) and relations between sentimentality and related forms and terms (melodrama, excess, affect).

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Graduate
  • Days/Times: T 1:00PM - 4:00PM
  • Instructor: Mao, Douglas
  • Room: Gilman 130D
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 8/8
  • PosTag(s): n/a

All That Jazz: African American Literature and Music, Origins through the 1950s
AS.060.630 (01)

This course examines fiction writing, memoir, poetry, and film that usefully encounters African American writings on jazz music in conversation with the recordings of selected jazz musicians. Beginning with writers who explore the late 19th experience of urban black musical cultures roughly designated “ragtime,” the course will offer a deep engagement with the representations of the “blues” and “swing” music of the long New Negro Movement between 1915 and 1940. The final section of the course considers the post-war novelists and memoirists who charted the emergence of the “Be bop” jazz musician as tragic hero, countermanding New Negro representations of jazz musician and vocalist as entertainers par excellence.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Graduate
  • Days/Times: W 1:00PM - 4:00PM
  • Instructor: Jackson, Lawrence P
  • Room: Gilman 130D
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 8/8
  • PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

Bodies on Stage in Early Modern Drama
AS.060.659 (01)

This course analyzes the staging of the human body, up to and including that body’s capacity to fragment, die, transform, and merge with its surroundings, across a range of early modern drama, from anonymous playwrights, Udall, Lyly, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, Webster, Marston, Massinger, Heminge and others. Concurrently, we shall read and respond to relevant texts on theater and embodiment in primary philosophy, literary criticism, and recent early modern literary scholarship, with a particular focus on animality, race, gender and disability. What is dramatic form? What does the imagined or projected integrity of literary form have to do with normative expectations about the integrity of the human body? How do forms of bodily difference inflect, challenge or complicate the stability of those norms? Possible secondary authors include Aristotle, Nicholas Abraham, Gail Kern Paster, Lynn Enterline, Karen Raber, Eoin Price, Noemie Ndiaye, Andy Kesson, Katherine Schaap Williams, Ian Smith, and Aaron Kunin.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Graduate
  • Days/Times: F 1:00PM - 4:00PM
  • Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
  • Room: Gilman 130D
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 8/8
  • PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

Literature and Political Geography
AS.060.687 (01)

Across the Western literary tradition that forms the inheritance of the European literary renaissance, classical voyages of discovery, settlement, or return had long furnished the stuff of major literary genre of epic, with the Biblical figure of Exodus prizing movement into promised territory, wandering and arrival. Yet how is space also an assumption of polity that must be invented, a biopolitics, a zoopolitics, and a mediation of flow? We take these questions of space to understand the pre-history of European modernity around the making of enclosed space(s), exploring the fierce debate in early modernity about the political organization of space, the borders or walls that shield or exclude (as in the city, the nation, the home, the prison, the church, the plantation), and to consider concepts of border and flow. We will focus on English works by Milton, Bradstreet, and Cavendish, and sharpen these questions with critical thinkers Foucault, Derrida, Latour, Sassen, Soja, and Stoler, among others. The class welcomes students whose interests lie primarily in national literatures other than English, who may write their final papers on primary texts and literatures not discussed in class, but that must engage the theoretical texts assigned for the seminar.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Graduate
  • Days/Times: M 1:00PM - 4:00PM
  • Instructor: Achinstein, Sharon
  • Room: Gilman 130D
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 8/8
  • PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

Independent Study
AS.060.800 (01)

This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.

  • Credits: 5.00 - 10.00
  • Level: Graduate Independent Academic Work
  • Days/Times:
  • Instructor: Miller, Andrew
  • Room:  
  • Status: Approval Required
  • Seats Available: 5/5
  • PosTag(s): n/a

Teaching Assistant
AS.060.822 (01)

For English PhD students in their second year. This indicates they are actively participating as a TA as required by the program.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Graduate Independent Academic Work
  • Days/Times:
  • Instructor: Miller, Andrew
  • Room:  
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 10/10
  • PosTag(s): n/a

Fifth-Year Teaching
AS.060.855 (01)

For English PhD candidates in their fifth year. This indicates they are actively teaching a course as required by the program.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Graduate Independent Academic Work
  • Days/Times:
  • Instructor: Miller, Andrew
  • Room:  
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 5/5
  • PosTag(s): n/a

Fifth-Year Service
AS.060.857 (01)

For English PhD candidates in their fifth year. This indicates they are actively performing an administrative/service role with the program/department or university that precludes any teaching responsibilities.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Graduate Independent Academic Work
  • Days/Times:
  • Instructor: Miller, Andrew
  • Room:  
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 5/5
  • PosTag(s): n/a

Individual Work
AS.060.893 (01)

This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.

  • Credits: 3.00 - 9.00
  • Level: Graduate Independent Academic Work
  • Days/Times:
  • Instructor: Thompson, Mark C
  • Room:  
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 40/40
  • PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Reading
AS.060.894 (01)

This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students to focus on their field of study. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.

  • Credits: 3.00 - 9.00
  • Level: Graduate Independent Academic Work
  • Days/Times:
  • Instructor: Thompson, Mark C
  • Room:  
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 10/10
  • PosTag(s): n/a

Representing the Holocaust: Theory and Practice
AS.211.633 (01)

Theories of aesthetics and representation addressing the Holocaust have been characterized by assertions of the unrepresentability of this genocide. From a maximal position cautioning against representing the Holocaust or denying its very possibility to moderate positions underlining the ethical and aesthetic challenges and problems of the endeavor, these theories have dominated discussion of the subject for decades and have lead to the formation of a canon of Holocaust literature that confirms the salience of these theoretical approaches. Beyond this canon, however, things look quite different. From writing in the ghettos and concentration camps to a proliferation of literature in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, works in a range of languages — but especially in Yiddish — have not only raised a different set of ethical and aesthetic questions about representing the Holocaust, but have arguably bypassed or even negated the broader theoretical consensus. This course will survey both “sides” of the debate, ranging over an array of theoretical approaches to and literary representations of the Holocaust. The objective of the course is to find where the two approaches meet and to account for their divergences.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Graduate
  • Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 3:30PM
  • Instructor: Spinner, Samuel Jacob
  • Room: Gilman 443
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 15/15
  • PosTag(s): n/a

Literary Geographies: Landscape, Place and Space in Literature
AS.213.608 (01)

This graduate-level course will explore the material topographies of literature, both real and imagined, engaging the landscapes, geographies, and environments of literary works both as a vital dimension of the text and as contributions to 'cultural ecology'. We will explore how topography may be engaged not as mere background or setting for literary situations, but as a dynamic and vital dimension thereof, and how the human experiences evoked can be radically recontextualized and engaged through environmental attention to the text. We will read theoretical and philosophical works on geography and topography in literature along with environmental literary theory in approaching literary works by writers from the late 18th to the mid 20th centuries. Readings may include works by Goethe, Novalis, Heine, Thoreau, Schnitzler, Thomas Mann, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Brecht, Woolf, Borges, and other writers from the late 18th through 20th centuries. Discussions will invite phenomenological, de- or post-colonial, and ecological perspectives.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Graduate
  • Days/Times: T 3:30PM - 5:30PM
  • Instructor: Gosetti, Jennifer Anna
  • Room: Gilman 479
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 15/15
  • PosTag(s): n/a

Borges in Theory
AS.215.747 (01)

The course engages close readings of Borges critical essays and some of his fiction in order to establish the points of interpellation that Post-modern theory takes from or shares with Borges's meditation on the problem of writing.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Graduate
  • Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 3:30PM
  • Instructor: Egginton, William
  • Room: Gilman 479
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 15/15
  • PosTag(s): n/a

Modern American Poetry: Engaging Forms
AS.300.623 (01)

A dive into the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Muriel Rukeyser, and Langston Hughes (among a few others), exploring American modernism’s aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations. How do these texts’ formal ambitions engage with philosophical thinking as well as social concerns and political theorizing? Writing assignments: two short presentation papers and either two 10-12 pages papers or one, multi-drafted, 20-25-page seminar paper.

  • Credits: 3.00
  • Level: Graduate
  • Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
  • Instructor: Siraganian, Lisa
  • Room: Gilman 208
  • Status: Open
  • Seats Available: 15/15
  • PosTag(s): n/a

Course # (Section) Title Day/Times Instructor Room PosTag(s) Info
AS.060.602 (01)ProseminarTh 1:00PM - 4:00PMMiller, AndrewGilman 130D
AS.060.623 (01)The Sentimental ImaginationT 1:00PM - 4:00PMMao, DouglasGilman 130D
AS.060.630 (01)All That Jazz: African American Literature and Music, Origins through the 1950sW 1:00PM - 4:00PMJackson, Lawrence PGilman 130DENGL-GLOBAL
AS.060.659 (01)Bodies on Stage in Early Modern DramaF 1:00PM - 4:00PMDaniel, AndrewGilman 130DENGL-PR1800
AS.060.687 (01)Literature and Political GeographyM 1:00PM - 4:00PMAchinstein, SharonGilman 130DENGL-PR1800
AS.060.800 (01)Independent StudyMiller, Andrew 
AS.060.822 (01)Teaching AssistantMiller, Andrew 
AS.060.855 (01)Fifth-Year TeachingMiller, Andrew 
AS.060.857 (01)Fifth-Year ServiceMiller, Andrew 
AS.060.893 (01)Individual WorkThompson, Mark C 
AS.060.894 (01)Independent ReadingThompson, Mark C 
AS.211.633 (01)Representing the Holocaust: Theory and PracticeW 1:30PM - 3:30PMSpinner, Samuel JacobGilman 443
AS.213.608 (01)Literary Geographies: Landscape, Place and Space in LiteratureT 3:30PM - 5:30PMGosetti, Jennifer AnnaGilman 479
AS.215.747 (01)Borges in TheoryW 1:30PM - 3:30PMEgginton, WilliamGilman 479
AS.300.623 (01)Modern American Poetry: Engaging FormsM 1:30PM - 4:00PMSiraganian, LisaGilman 208