This course will explore the intersection between philosophies of history and theories of the novel. We will be examining the novel’s function not only as an aesthetic and philosophical object, but also as a self-conscious historical artifact. The first part of the course will include readings of from history, philosophy, and literary theory to explore various perspectives on how the novel has been both shaper and receptacle of history, while the second part will delve into close-readings of several primary texts—a historical novel, an experimental novel, and a graphic novel—to investigate the different ways in which this protean form has been mobilized to engage with questions about the relationship between aesthetic form and historical knowledge.

• Days/Times: M 1:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Crisostomo, Johaina Katinka
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/8
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

This seminar will offer an in-depth examination of the theory and practice of the nineteenth-century realist novel in three traditions: American, British, and French. Our aim will be to understand the central theories and controversies surrounding realism, as well as to interrogate the centrality of realism to novel theory and narrative theory. Authors will likely include Jane Austen, George Eliot, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Frank Norris and William Dean Howells. Theorists and critics will likely include Erich Auerbach, M. M. Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Bertolt Brecht, René Girard, Roman Jakobson, Henry James, Fredric Jameson, Georg Lukács, Boris Tomashevsky, Ian Watt and Émile Zola.

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

“Fascism” has returned to the political vocabulary of the times suddenly and without much intellectual preparation. This graduate seminar proposes to put on a firmer conceptual footing the possibility of understanding the present political and social crisis as the “return” of fascism as a political culture across the Euro-American world and beyond. We shall examine historical and contemporary developments in (and encounter texts from) a range of regions across the world: Western Europe, the United States, Russia, and India. We shall read works of literature, theory and philosophy, literary and linguistic analysis, and sociology by such figures as Sinclair Lewis, Bertolt Brecht, Filippo Marinetti, Julius Evola, Ezra Pound, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Georges Bataille, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Margaret Atwood, and Alexander Dugin, among others.

• Days/Times: W 1:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Mufti, Aamir
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

This seminar is designed to explore some fresh ways of bridging what seems like the gap between “value” in the sense of our value judgements about literary works, and “value” in the economic sense – especially in Marx’s sense of value as a social relationship, rather than a quantity.

• Days/Times: Th 1:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Nealon, Chris
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

For English PhD candidates in their fifth year. For those who receive external funding and will neither do the expected teaching or participate in any kind of departmental service as required.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Miller, Andrew
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

When the German astronomer Johannes Kepler in his famous "Somnium" (1608) creates a fictitious dream narrative in which the earth is observed from the moon, it becomes clear that the shift from the geocentric to the heliocentric worldview entails a radical change of perspective that can be achieved only by means of the imagination. What appears as a sunrise is in reality due to the earth's own movement. Where appearance and reality diverge, the new model requires a fictional account without which it remains incomprehensible. Orbiting around Kepler’s short tale, this seminar will focus on cosmic narratives and poetic explorations of outer space, from Lucian's True Stories and Icaromenippus (2nd century CE), one of the earliest literary treatments of a journey through space, Plutarch’s dialogue On the face of the Moon (late 1st century CE), to Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638) and Kant's »Of the Inhabitants of the Stars« (1755). What is the epistemic function of literary representations of the cosmos? Are space-travel narratives thought experiments? What role does fiction and the imagination play in the science of astronomy? By pursuing these and related questions, this course will question common assumptions about the relationship of science to fiction and the literary imagination while tracing key junctures in the history of astronomy.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Frey, Christiane; ni Mheallaigh, Karen
• Room: Gilman 132
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/10
• 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: M 1:30PM - 3:30PM
• Instructor: Seguin, Becquer D
• Room: Gilman 490
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course introduces basic computational techniques in the context of empirical humanistic scholarship. Topics covered include the command-line, basic Python programming, and experimental design. While illustrative examples are drawn from humanistic domains, the primary focus is on methods: those with specific domains in mind should be aware that such applied research is welcome and exciting, but will largely be their responsibility beyond the confines of the course. Students will come away with tangible understanding of how to cast simple humanistic questions as empirical hypotheses, ground and test these hypotheses computationally, and justify the choices made while doing so. No previous programming experience is required.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Lippincott, Tom; Sirin Ryan, Hale
• Room: Gilman 55
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 19/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course introduces substantial machine learning methods of particular relevance to humanistic scholarship. Areas covered include standard models for classification, regression, and topic modeling, before turning to the array of open-source pretrained deep neural models, and the common mechanisms for employing them. Students are expected to have a level of programming experience equivalent to that gained from AS.360.304, Gateway Computing, AS.250.205, or Harvard’s CS50 for Python. Students will come away with an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different machine learning models, the ability to discuss them in relation to human intelligence and to make informed decisions of when and how to employ them, and an array of related technical knowledge.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Backer, Samuel Ehrlich; Messner, Craig A
• Room: Gilman 195
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course is for English graduate students who are pre-candidacy and need to be credited for work over the summer.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Miller, Andrew
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

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: W 1:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Mufti, Aamir
• Room: Gilman 388
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

Pushing off from Samuel Johnson’s allegation that in Donne’s poetry “heterogenous ideas are yoked by violence together”, this seminar will reconsider the status of metaphor and the nature of authorial agency. Can metaphors themselves enact violence? Or is such a question a category mistake? This seminar will build out from the intuition that figurative assemblage and social hierarchy are necessarily related, but it does not presume in advance that we all agree about how this relationship works. We will read an array of divergent accounts of how metaphors operate across literary criticism, rhetoric, and the philosophy of language (Aristotle, early modern rhetorical manuals, as well as Lakoff, Black, Davidson, Donoghue), and we will consider key metaphoric relationships (body as landscape, orgasm as death, kingdom as family, love as slavery, sexual violence as hunting) as they surface in early modern literature. Literary texts will include poetry by Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Donne, Milton, Marvell and Pope.

• Days/Times: M 1:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/10
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

This course considers modernist and modernism-adjacent texts that raise questions not only about human values but also about the very value of humanity or human beings in the world or the cosmos. Writers to be studied may include Richard Jefferies, Rabindranath Tagore, T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Mourning Dove, Graham Greene, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Stevens, and Olaf Stapledon.

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

When someone says that a politician is being “theatrical” or that a protestor is following a “script,” it is rarely meant as a compliment—but why? The implication is that true politics is never theatrical, never scripted, never performed, never entangled with spectacle. Put so baldly, this claim is hard to believe. If, instead, we take for granted that all politics is performed, we are left with several unanswered questions. What would an eye trained on performance (theater, dance, film, comedy, spoken word, etc.) see in our politics that someone else would not? Are there distinct performance traditions in politics, as there are in the performing arts? How do activists and office-holders enter these traditions, learn their ways, and apply them in everyday settings? How are civilians expected (or trained) to engage with this performance of politics—either as spectators or co-performers? What are the key genres of political performance, and what should citizens, activists, and other engaged people know about them? This course surveys key concepts in performance theory (e.g., theatricality, performativity, ritual, play) and asks students to apply these tools to two things: political events and performance-based works of art. Case studies will center around US political and performance history, and may include: the origins of US liberal-democratic political culture in stoical forms of theater, the theatricality of the Civil Rights movement, and the recent transformation of transgressive play from a radical-left to a far-right style of political performance. Students will be invited to bring their expertise in other periods and other political/performance cultures, and to help sharpen our analysis by testing our ideas against those alternate contexts.

• Days/Times: T 10:00AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: Grobe, Christopher Arthur
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/8
• 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: 4/10
• 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: 4/5
• 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: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

The privilege of thinking has faced two challenges in recent years. The advent of artificial intelligence has called into question how unique thinking is when cognition can easily be mimicked, if not (re)produced, in machines through statistical models of language. An equally prevalent, if opposing, development in critical theory is the expansion of thought to include all purposeful action, such as the spreading of information among trees regarding available resources. The first half of the semester will be devoted to the definition of thinking offered by Aristotle and its interpretation in selected texts by Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. The second half will consider the surge of interest in automatons in romantic literature (Novalis, Hoffmann, Kleist and Poe) and culminating in Kafka’s “Report to an Academy.

• Days/Times: Th 2:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Tobias, Rochelle
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/10
• PosTag(s): n/a