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.

• Days/Times: Th 9:30AM - 12:30PM
• Instructor: Da, Nan
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

This graduate seminar will examine the long history, dating back to the eighteenth century, of reflection on the nature of the modern university and the place of the humanities within it. With a focus on the much-discussed “crisis” of the contemporary humanities, it will examine the emergence and evolution of the humanistic disciplines. Have the humanities in the academy always been in crisis? What could this possibly mean and what does it imply about how we practice the humanities today?

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:30PM
• Instructor: Mufti, Aamir
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course considers the 'conjugal imaginary' in early modern European religious, scientific, economic, and political thought. Readings in early modern literature (More, Erasmus, Shakepseare, Milton, Cavendish, Behn, Locke, Astell) as well as theorists of family, feminism, and sexuality (Engels, Foucault, Cooper, Butler, Lowe, Kottman, Federici, Wynter). Topics include: the ‘sexual contract’ and patriarchalism; the 'private' as opposed to the 'public' sphere; the disciplining of the body; the establishment of racialized and gendered categories of humans; the definition of labor as production or reproduction; coercion and consent; the new anthropological logics regarding the global (in cross-confessional intimacies or with with partners outside Europe); and the new sciences of population and economies of resource management that shaped the emergent colonial logics. We will ask how early modern sexual regimes of consigning the family and sexuality to the intimate and economic spheres shape the meaning of politics in the period 1500-1700.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:30PM
• Instructor: Achinstein, Sharon
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course explores texts from the 19th and 20th centuries that query the distinction between magical, occult, and supernatural discourses and scientific and rational inquiry. Modernism has often been seen to usher in a new and thoroughly disenchanted literature. But this view overlooks texts from across the wider period that challenge the boundaries between ‘official’ and ‘heterodox’ knowledges. Ranging across genres including experimental literatures, life writing, ghost stories and folk tales this course explores how and why writers such as H.G. Wells, Vernon Lee, Zora Neale Hurston, H.D., Shirley Jackson, R.K. Narayan, and J.M. Coetzee imagine the re-enchantment of the world.

• Days/Times: T 10:00AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: Hobson, Suzanne
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

This is an independent study for third years preparing for their candidacy oral exams

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

This is an independent study for third years preparing for their candidacy oral exams

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

This is an independent study for third years preparing for their candidacy oral exams

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

This is an independent study for third years preparing for their candidacy oral exams

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Mao, Douglas
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 3/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

This is an independent study for third years preparing for their candidacy oral exams

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Miller, Andrew H
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

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.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 31/40
• PosTag(s): n/a

We will use the meanings and methodologies of “materiality” to examine the medieval world, by analyzing objects, texts, networks, patterns of circulation and appropriation, aesthetics and enshrinement, production and knowledge communities.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Lester, Anne E.
• Room: Gilman 305
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

Humanists possess a reservoir of scholarly abilities that prime them for contributing to debates well beyond the academy. This semester-long workshop will introduce graduate students to the basics of writing for such broad audience. Each session will be organized around particular topics in public humanities writing, including the pitching, writing, editing, and publishing processes of newspapers, magazines, and online outlets. We will also consider the forms of writing that most allow scholars to draw from their academic training and research: reviews, personal essays, op-eds, interviews, and profiles. Throughout the course we will see how the interdisciplinarity, comparativism, and multilingualism of fields from across the humanities can be helpful for reaching wide audiences. Beyond the nuts and bolts of getting started in so-called “public” writing, this course aspires to teach graduate students how to combine quality writing with academic knowledge, scholarly analysis with a general intellectual readership—and, ultimately, make academic knowledge a public good. Taught in English.

• Days/Times: T 3:30PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Lurtz, Casey Marina; Seguin, Becquer D
• Room: Gilman 490
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Knowing who or what counts as a person seems straightforward, until we consider the many kinds of creatures, objects, and artificial beings that have been granted—or demanded or denied—that status. This course explores recent debates on being a person in culture, law, and philosophy. Questions examined will include: Should trees have standing? Can corporations have religious beliefs? Could a robot sign a contract? Materials examined will be wide-ranging, including essays, philosophy, novels, science fiction, television, film. No special background is required.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Siraganian, Lisa
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course explores recent developments and disputes in critical theory in relation to their longer philosophical genealogies. The three topics—autonomy, form, and critique—have been the subject of much recent debate, contention, and new analysis, yet each was also a source of critical and philosophical interest in years past. Our aim will be to make sense of today’s exciting and controversial interventions in conversation with earlier theory. “Historical” theory writing will include Poe, Adorno, Benjamin, Lukács, Cavell, R. Williams, Shklovsky, and Jameson; contemporary theory will include Stephen Best, Barbara Fields, Sharon Marcus, Walter Benn Michaels, Sianne Ngai, Nicholas Brown, Rita Felski, Caroline Levine, Mark McGurl, and Toril Moi.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Siraganian, Lisa
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/12
• PosTag(s): n/a