This course serves as an introduction to the basic methods of and critical approaches to the study of literature. Some sections may have further individual topic descriptions; please check in SIS when searching for courses.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room: Gilman 219
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course serves as an introduction to the basic methods of and critical approaches to the study of literature. Some sections may have further individual topic descriptions; please check in SIS when searching for courses.

• Days/Times: MW 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Da, Nan
• Room: Hodson 211
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 9/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

What makes a poem queer? How can we tell? How has it changed over time? Understanding “queerness” to mean a non-normative array of lesbian, gay, trans and asexual ways of being, this undergraduate seminar will read across a long historical arc from the classical period to early modern poetry in order to think about how the lyric and the shorter narrative poem have transmitted queer feelings and recorded queer lives. Authors include Sappho, Virgil, Catullus, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Beaumont, and Philips.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

This undergraduate seminar looks at select works from the vast 19th and 20th century literature of tyrrany and subjugation, including by Melville, Greene, Garcia Marquez, Naipaul and Rushdie.

• Days/Times: T 4:30PM - 7:00PM
• Instructor: Mufti, Aamir
• Room: Gilman 377
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 1/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

This lecture will trace the the history of English-language detective fiction through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Why does the figure of the detective appear when it does? How does it change over time, and what can we learn from that? We will pay special attention to the way clues and suspense operate, the role of the reader in figuring out the mystery, and the complicated relationship of the detective with official authority. Authors will likely include some selection of Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammet, and Raymond Chandler.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
• Room: Bloomberg 274; Bloomberg 274
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/20
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

This lecture will trace the the history of English-language detective fiction through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Why does the figure of the detective appear when it does? How does it change over time, and what can we learn from that? We will pay special attention to the way clues and suspense operate, the role of the reader in figuring out the mystery, and the complicated relationship of the detective with official authority. Authors will likely include some selection of Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammet, and Raymond Chandler.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
• Room: Bloomberg 274; Krieger 300
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/20
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

This lecture will trace the the history of English-language detective fiction through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Why does the figure of the detective appear when it does? How does it change over time, and what can we learn from that? We will pay special attention to the way clues and suspense operate, the role of the reader in figuring out the mystery, and the complicated relationship of the detective with official authority. Authors will likely include some selection of Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammet, and Raymond Chandler.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
• Room: Bloomberg 274; Gilman 10
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 4/8
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

From antiquity through our own day, writers have used their craft to try to imagine perfect, or at least vastly improved, human societies. Utopian literature spans broad forms: cloud cuckoo land visions of prosperity and abundance, detailed plans for the governments of the future, and ambiguous auguries combining utopia with its opposite: dystopia. Imagining better worlds is a heterogenous and ancient tradition, but beginning in the late 19th century, writers like H. G. Wells and Charlotte Perkins Gilman began to suspect that a perfect future was inseparable from a united one: ending hardship depended on bringing all people into a shared way of life and belief. But do utopian demands for consensus threaten the freedom to live as one chooses? Can utopia coexist with diversity? In this course, we will read from a broad range of prose utopias from the 19th century to the present, including Kang Youwei’s Datong Shu (1884), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1886), George Schuyler’s Black Empire (1938), and Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974). Students in this course will develop a familiarity with a range of themes and conflicts that characterize utopian writing, and craft their own written reflections that consider the tensions between utopian visions of the future and the people those visions may exclude, marginalize, or assimilate.

• Days/Times: MW 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Shallit, Jonah Forest Lubiw
• Room: Gilman 400
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 8/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

This course focuses on great literary documents of seafaring in its historical and environmental aspects. Writers and filmmakers may include Columbus, Douglass, Melville, Conrad, Carson, Cousteau, Walrond, McKay and Sekula. How have seas, sailors, ships and their cargoes helped to shape our imagination and understanding of major events and processes of modernity, such as the encounter with the New World, slavery, industrial capitalism, marine science, the birth of environmental consciousness, and contemporary globalization? What part did seafaring play in the formation of international legal systems, or in epochal events such as the American and Russian Revolutions? How does contemporary piracy compare to its “golden age?” How can we discern a history of the “trackless” oceans, and how do we imagine their future now that “90% of everything” crosses an ocean, and the seas are described as both rising and dying? Our focus in the course will be on writers and filmmakers listed above, but our approach to what is sometimes called “Blue Humanities” or “ocean studies” will be interdisciplinary, and so we will also read excerpts from historians and theorists such as Laleh Khalili, Marcus Rediker, and Jeffrey Bolster.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Feinsod, Harris
• Room: Gilman 219
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 2/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

This course will survey what have long been thought to be the monuments of English literature from the earliest recorded texts to the end of the early Modern period, in a great variety of genres (from epic to lyric, fable to drama). Classes will provide the background necessary to read these texts both closely and historically, in the light of cultural continuities and differences.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Cannon, Christopher
• Room: Gilman 388
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 9/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

In this course, we'll explore relations between media via films about writers and fictions about film. Along the way, we'll visit with an array of troubled wordsmiths, glittering stars, obsessive fans, and unscrupulous executives; in at least two or three cases, we'll read a novel about cinema and then watch that novel's own cinematic adaptation. Texts may include films by Billy Wilder, Jean-Luc Godard, Jane Campion, Pedro Almodóvar, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and Cord Jefferson as well as fictions by Elizabeth Bowen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Manuel Puig, Abdellah Taïa, and Sharlene Teo.

• Days/Times: T 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Mao, Douglas
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

In this course we will read a selection of foundational texts by Sigmund Freud, and pair them with a cluster of literary works--the Oedipus Cycle of Sophocles, William Shakespeare’s tragic drama “Hamlet”, Henry James’s short novel “The Turn of the Screw,” Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter” and Jeremy O. Harris’ “Slave Play”—which have inspired psychoanalytic ideas and multiple critical generations of psychoanalytic literary interpretation. The goal of this course is to acquaint you with the essential components of Freud’s theory, to assess the relationship of that theory to the literary models from which Freud drew inspiration, and to acquaint you with the variety of forms that psychoanalytic literary criticism has taken up to the present. Questions regarding paternity, maternity, sibling rivalry, the couple form and the nature of the family as a historically pervasive yet flexible psychic structure will orient, but not limit, our class discussions. Building out from psychoanalysis, we will conclude with a consideration of the family abolition argument.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room: Gilman 388
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

All of Austen's completed novels, as well as a selection of her letters. We will examine both her influence on the novel form, and her work's relation with her social context. We will also consider why Austen has such unprecedented cultural authority today. Open to both undergraduates and graduate students.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 4/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

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

The English Department offers qualified majors the option of writing a senior essay. This is to be a one-semester project undertaken in the fall of the senior year, resulting in an essay of 30-35 pages. The senior essay counts as a three-credit course which can be applied toward the requirements for the major. Each project will be assigned both an advisor and a second reader. In addition, students writing essays will meet as a group with the Director of Undergraduate Study once or twice in the course of the project. The senior essay option is open to all students with a cumulative GPA of 3.6 or higher in English Department courses at the end of the fall term of their junior year. Project descriptions (generally of one to two pages) and a preliminary bibliography should be submitted to a prospective advisor selected by the student from the core faculty. All proposals must be received at least two weeks prior to the beginning of registration period during the spring term of the junior year. Students should meet with the prospective advisor to discuss the project in general terms before submitting a formal proposal. The advisor will determine whether the proposed project is feasible and worthwhile. Individual faculty need not direct more than one approved senior essay per academic year. Acceptance of a proposal will therefore depend on faculty availability as well as on the strength of the proposal itself. When completed, the senior essay will be judged and graded by the advisor in consultation with the second reader. The senior essay will not be part of the Department’s honors program, which will continue to be based solely on a cumulative GPA of 3.6 in English Department courses.

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

The English Department offers qualified majors the option of writing a senior essay. This is to be a one-semester project undertaken in the fall of the senior year, resulting in an essay of 30-35 pages. The senior essay counts as a three-credit course which can be applied toward the requirements for the major. Each project will be assigned both an advisor and a second reader. In addition, students writing essays will meet as a group with the Director of Undergraduate Study once or twice in the course of the project. The senior essay option is open to all students with a cumulative GPA of 3.6 or higher in English Department courses at the end of the fall term of their junior year. Project descriptions (generally of one to two pages) and a preliminary bibliography should be submitted to a prospective advisor selected by the student from the core faculty. All proposals must be received at least two weeks prior to the beginning of registration period during the spring term of the junior year. Students should meet with the prospective advisor to discuss the project in general terms before submitting a formal proposal. The advisor will determine whether the proposed project is feasible and worthwhile. Individual faculty need not direct more than one approved senior essay per academic year. Acceptance of a proposal will therefore depend on faculty availability as well as on the strength of the proposal itself. When completed, the senior essay will be judged and graded by the advisor in consultation with the second reader. The senior essay will not be part of the Department’s honors program, which will continue to be based solely on a cumulative GPA of 3.6 in English Department courses.

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

The English Department offers qualified majors the option of writing a senior essay. This is to be a one-semester project undertaken in the fall of the senior year, resulting in an essay of 30-35 pages. The senior essay counts as a three-credit course which can be applied toward the requirements for the major. Each project will be assigned both an advisor and a second reader. In addition, students writing essays will meet as a group with the Director of Undergraduate Study once or twice in the course of the project. The senior essay option is open to all students with a cumulative GPA of 3.6 or higher in English Department courses at the end of the fall term of their junior year. Project descriptions (generally of one to two pages) and a preliminary bibliography should be submitted to a prospective advisor selected by the student from the core faculty. All proposals must be received at least two weeks prior to the beginning of registration period during the spring term of the junior year. Students should meet with the prospective advisor to discuss the project in general terms before submitting a formal proposal. The advisor will determine whether the proposed project is feasible and worthwhile. Individual faculty need not direct more than one approved senior essay per academic year. Acceptance of a proposal will therefore depend on faculty availability as well as on the strength of the proposal itself. When completed, the senior essay will be judged and graded by the advisor in consultation with the second reader. The senior essay will not be part of the Department’s honors program, which will continue to be based solely on a cumulative GPA of 3.6 in English Department courses.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Mao, Douglas
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course explores the development of English law and the English legal tradition from the Norman Conquest through the English Revolution (ca. 1066-1688). We will begin by tracing the impact of the Norman Conquest of England and examine the origins and development of English legal and political institutions such as kingship, the common law, the evolution of legal procedure, and the court and jury system, ideas of franchise, treason and the emergence of Parliament. We will also consider how English law constructs legal categories including aliens, women, heirs, traitors as well as the legal framework for the emergence of the English Church under the Tudors. When applicable the implications of these institutions for developments in the contemporary American and British legal systems will be addressed.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Lester, Anne E.
• Room: Hodson 313
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 2/25
• PosTag(s): INST-GLOBAL, CES-LSO, CES-PD

How has the Holocaust been represented in literature and film? Are there special challenges posed by genocide to the traditions of visual and literary representation? Where does the Holocaust fit in to the array of concerns that the visual arts and literature express? And where do art and literature fit in to the commemoration of communal tragedy and the working through of individual trauma entailed by thinking about and representing the Holocaust? These questions will guide our consideration of a range of texts — nonfiction, novels, poetry — in Yiddish, German, English, French and other languages (including works by Primo Levi and Isaac Bashevis Singer), as well as films from French documentaries to Hollywood blockbusters (including films by Alain Resnais, Claude Lanzmann, and Steven Spielberg). All readings in English.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Spinner, Samuel Jacob
• Room: Gilman 400
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/15
• PosTag(s): INST-GLOBAL

A course that examines how women's bodies are depicted in horror literature and film, asking: how are issues of race, class, national identity, and belonging illuminated through the genre and its ongoing fascination with gender and sexuality? Why do we return to women's bodies to illuminate our fears? Why do we represent women's bodies through the horror genre? Focusing on speculative fiction and film, we will investigate how women's bodies speak to issues of power and spectatorship through affects such as disgust, terror, titillation, and pleasure.

• Days/Times: M 3:40PM - 6:10PM
• Instructor: Gil'Adí, Maia
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 0/8
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

A course that examines how women's bodies are depicted in horror literature and film, asking: how are issues of race, class, national identity, and belonging illuminated through the genre and its ongoing fascination with gender and sexuality? Why do we return to women's bodies to illuminate our fears? Why do we represent women's bodies through the horror genre? Focusing on speculative fiction and film, we will investigate how women's bodies speak to issues of power and spectatorship through affects such as disgust, terror, titillation, and pleasure.

• Days/Times: M 3:40PM - 6:10PM
• Instructor: Gil'Adí, Maia
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 2/10
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

This course is grounded in the double conviction that translation is the most intimate form of reading and that literary translation is a form of literary writing. The goals of this course are to better understand the potential and challenge of translation as we learn to practice it ourselves. We will study what translators say about their craft and work closely with a wide range of translations. There will be two parts to each seminar: --discussion of assigned readings and analysis of published translations --workshopping of our translations. Students are free to translate from any language into English. Reading knowledge of a language other than English is required.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Jewiss, Virginia C
• Room: Mergenthaler 431
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 4/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

One of the greatest works of literature of all times, the Divine Comedy leads us down into the torture-pits of Hell, up the steep mountain terrain of Purgatory, through the “virtual” space of Paradise, and then back to where we began: our own earthly lives. We accompany Dante on his journey, building along the way knowledge of medieval Italian history, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion. The course also focuses on the arts of reading deeply, asking questions of a text, and interpreting literary and scholarly works through discussion and critical writing. Conducted in English. For undergraduate students only.

• Days/Times: MW 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Saiber, Arielle
• Room: Gilman 119
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 7/30
• PosTag(s): MLL-PITAL

Stories entertain us, but we can also receive guidance from them, and we can tell them to impart guidance to others, to exercise influence, to make a point. This course will explore the ways that stories make their points in the genre sometimes called “fable,” in works by authors ranging from Aesop to George Saunders, from the 4th century to the present.  We’ll debate what fables actually are – Short morality tales about animals?  Portraits of exemplary figures that demonstrate how to live? - in part by reading many examples of the form and some theories of it, in part by writing fables of our own.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Cannon, Christopher; Choi, Susan
• Room: Gilman 108
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): WRIT-FICT, WRIT-READ

An introduction to Shakespeare, in which every play we read we will also see performed. Close textual work and a focus on historical context will be accompanied by visits to local theatres, recordings of live performances, and Shakespeare films.

• Days/Times: TTh 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Stoll, Abraham D
• Room: Merrick 105
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

William Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen are the two most frequently performed playwrights in history, and both have been credited with reinventing drama: Shakespeare for the Elizabethan stage and Ibsen for the modern. In this course we will pair plays by each author – those that stand in an explicit relation of influence as well as those that share a significant set of concerns – in order to investigate how each takes up and transform key problems in Updated description: the literary, political, and philosophical tradition for their own historical moment. Plays to be studied by Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, Coriolanus, The Tempest; by Ibsen: Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck, An Enemy of the People, The Master Builder. As part of the course, we will try to organize at least one excursion to a Shakespeare or Ibsen performance in the Baltimore-D.C. area. This class counts towards the requirement of text-based courses for the minor in comparative thought and literature.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 11/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

Literary and philosophical imaginations of moral community in the post-WWII period. Texts include: Coetzee, Disgrace; McEwan, Atonement; Achebe,Things Fall Apart; Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World; Roy, The God of Small Things; Lessing, The Grass is Singing; Mistry, A Fine Balance; Morrison, Beloved; and essays by Levi, Strawson, Adorno, Murdoch, and Beauvoir on the deep uncertainty over moral community after the crisis of World War II. Close attention to novelistic style and narrative will inform our study of the philosophical questions that animate these works. What does it mean to acknowledge another person’s humanity? Who are the members of a moral community? Why do we hold one another responsible for our actions? How do fundamental moral emotions such as contempt, humiliation, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, and regret reveal the limits of a moral community?

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 8/12
• PosTag(s): CES-CC, CES-ELECT

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: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/19
• PosTag(s): CES-LSO, CES-ELECT, MSCH-HUM

Although fundamentally grounded in human existence, Illness, pain, and suffering are also cultural experiences that have been depicted in literature and film. The way different cultures relate to and convey pain is embedded in the cosmogonic ideas each society holds about suffering and its outcomes. Reading through different literary texts from different parts of the world and drawing on movies that portray varied experiences of illness, this course aims to help students think about illness and its ramifications in a more transcultural way in order to understand how illness functions across different geographic, climatic, political, and social conditions. The students will also gain a better understanding of the causes of pain, its symptoms, and the different manners in which the authors and filmmakers whose works we will study mediate it to their readers and viewers. From basic traditional potions to hyper-modern medical technologies, illness also mobilizes different types of science across cultures and social classes. By the end of the course, students will develop an ethics of reading for illness not a as monolithic condition but rather as an experience that has unique cultural codes and mechanisms that need to be known to better understand it and probably treat it.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: El Guabli, Brahim
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 2/14
• PosTag(s): CDS-GI, MSCH-HUM

This course proposes an in-depth exploration of Homer’s Iliad in translation. Our goal will be to learn the skill of slow reading in order to gain a fuller understanding of the poem. We will study, on average, two books per week. Core topics include: understanding the tradition of oral poetry out of which the Iliad emerged in the 8th century BCE, the past it evokes, and the historical and social context in which – and in response to which - it grew. We will examine the poem’s extraordinarily complex structure and self-positioning within the so-called ‘epic cycle’, as well as themes it treats, including: kingship and reciprocity, the role of honour and glory, family, death, memory, and – most poignantly of all - the role of song and art in the midst of war. The course will be writing intensive, and will require the submission of a short piece of critical writing each week.

• Days/Times: TTh 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: ni Mheallaigh, Karen
• Room: Gilman 108
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 2/25
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

How do we experience stories when we have to wait to see what happens next? This class juxtaposes 21st-century television with 19th-century fiction — Baltimore’s own The Wire alongside Dickens’s Bleak House, amongst others — to think about how artists manipulate our behavior as readers to expand our thinking: to make us perceive the structures of society differently, to make us understand something new about the possibilities of fiction as an art form. Whether we’re forced to wait or eager to rush ahead to the next part, how we read or watch stories has always been the subject of lively debate — and central to narrative’s lasting impact.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Bronstein, Michaela
• Room: Bloomberg 178
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 7/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course explores the portrayal of women in ancient Greek drama through the lenses of feminist theory, gender studies, and the intersection of performance and gender. By analyzing key passages from significant texts and contextualizing them within their social, cultural, and theoretical frameworks, students will examine how ancient narratives about women continue to resonate with contemporary gender issues. The course will culminate in the creation of a theatrical piece—a compilation of women's monologues from ancient Greek drama—allowing students to design, adapt, and perform their interpretations in a final performance.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Gerolemou, Maria G
• Room: Hodson 211
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 8/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course reads major works in European literature before 1800 (give or take) depicting the devil. It examines the history of the various social, cultural and political guises under which the devil appears, and the function that representing radical evil performs aesthetically. Among our readings may be selections from the Bible; Dante’s Inferno; Milton’s Paradise Lost; Goethe’s Faust; and many other major hellish works.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Thompson, Mark Christian
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

This course will introduce students to a range of literary expressions of labor, political struggle and historical change, focusing on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth- centuries. This course moves through late-nineteenth century fictional representations of labor struggles and communal imaginaries, the racialized and classed struggles of the Reconstruction era, and artistic engagement with the Left during the Great Depression, and concludes with two works of speculative fiction from the late twentieth century. We will question how a range of authors deal with political commitment, historical representation, and utopian imagination. The course will highlight scholarship that questions how histories of U.S. racial formation – particularly focusing on the enslavement of Black Americans and the dispossession of Native Americans – are entwined with the literary and political imaginations of authors of social fiction.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 1/16
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

The world is ending, the planet is dying, civilization is falling to ruin – now what? For millennia, theatermakers have asked and answered this question through their art. Why does theater keep staging such scenes of devastation and renewal? In this course, you will read a selection of such apocalyptic plays, as well as works in other genres that ask us to imagine that, when all else has withered away, the theater will somehow survive. Course materials will range from medieval morality plays and Shakespearean tragedies to recent novels, avant-garde theater, and Broadway musicals. With the help of texts by and about BIPOC performers, we will also ask: For whom, exactly, is the world supposed to be ending? For whom did it end at least once already – whether years or centuries ago? And what does theater offer to communities who have already survived the apocalypse, or who currently live in apocalyptic times? As an introduction to college-level studies in English, this course teaches the fundamental skills of close reading, attentive viewing, deep discussion, powerful writing, and effective revision.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Grobe, Christopher Arthur
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course serves as an introduction to the basic methods of and critical approaches to the study of literature. Some sections may have further individual topic descriptions; please check in SIS when searching for courses.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Miller, Andrew H
• Room: Gilman 219
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This will be an in-depth study of several Jane Austen novels with an emphasis on how they have traveled outside of the country of her birth – e.g. to the United States, India, and East Asia—through the work of individuals and the flows of global capitalism. Students will gain perhaps a disorienting sense of what Austen means in different cultures at different historical moments, and conduct individual research to learn more. Knowledge of another language is not necessary but could prove useful.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Favret, Mary Agnes
• Room: Hodson 313
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

This discussion-based seminar will survey science fiction written by indigenous authors in what are now the United States, Canada, and Australia. We will investigate by what means and to what ends this particular genre has been taken up by indigenous peoples both to reflect on their settler-colonial pasts and presents and to imagine decolonial futures. Texts may include: Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead; William Sanders, "The Undiscovered"; Daniel Heath Justice, The Way of Thorn and Thunder; Blake Hausman, Riding the Trail of Tears; Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow; Claire Coleman, Terra Nullius; Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth. Fulfills the Global and Minority Literatures requirement.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room: Latrobe 107
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 7/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL, CDS-GI

The remit of this course is simple, at least on the surface: we will spend a full term reading Leo Tolstoy's classic (and very long) 1867 novel _War and Peace_. Along the way, we will augment our discussions of the primary text with readings of critical materials drawn from History, Philosophy, and Narrative Theory, covering topics ranging from Napoleon's rise, to philosophies of non-violence, to the stultifying effects of aristocratic marriage. We will pay special attention to the status of _War and Peace_ as world literature, exploring both the non-Russian influences on the text, and its influence, in turn, on global writers in later periods including the postcolonial. Students with native or advanced Russian literacy are welcome to read in Russian; everyone else will read from an English translation.

• Days/Times: T 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Jackson, Jeanne-Marie
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

The British nineteenth century was marked by rapid industrialization and increasing social inequality. It gave birth to some of the most well-known novelists and thinkers in the English language, while introducing technologies of communication and surveillance that continue to trouble us today. It was also a period of the British Empire’s overseas expansion and racial-economic empowerment, especially in Africa, East Asia, and the Mediterranean. This course surveys a wide range of literary, artistic, intellectual developments that took place across a wide geographical terrain in the British imperial nineteenth-century, as well as later imperial and post-imperial renditions of it.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 12:50PM, F 12:00PM - 12:50PM
• Instructor: Jackson, Jeanne-Marie; Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
• Room: Krieger 180; Gilman 119
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 7/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC, ENGL-GLOBAL

The British nineteenth century was marked by rapid industrialization and increasing social inequality. It gave birth to some of the most well-known novelists and thinkers in the English language, while introducing technologies of communication and surveillance that continue to trouble us today. It was also a period of the British Empire’s overseas expansion and racial-economic empowerment, especially in Africa, East Asia, and the Mediterranean. This course surveys a wide range of literary, artistic, intellectual developments that took place across a wide geographical terrain in the British imperial nineteenth-century, as well as later imperial and post-imperial renditions of it.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 12:50PM, F 12:00PM - 12:50PM
• Instructor: Jackson, Jeanne-Marie; Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
• Room: Krieger 180; Gilman 119
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 14/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC, ENGL-GLOBAL

This lecture course will introduce students to the literature and literary culture of nineteenth-century America and its wider world. Focusing on history, genre and print practices, and culturally hybrid narrative logics, the course will move from the deeply curious and disturbing qualities of this body of literature to the origins and real asks of liberalism, progressivism, national and transnational ideology, secularism, and global modernity. Our core literary selection will comprise of nineteenth century American literature, including but not limited to the works Alexis de Tocqueville, Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, Jane Johnson Schoolcraft, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Spofford, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Edgar Allen Poe, David Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Francis Parkman, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Yung Wing, and Sui Sin Far.

• Days/Times: MW 9:00AM - 9:50AM, F 9:00AM - 9:50AM
• Instructor: Da, Nan
• Room: Gilman 119; Gilman 186
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

From quacks to plague, from humors to hypochondria, from AIDS to cancer, this lecture course examines literary representations of suffering, disease and treatment across genres and across time. In particular it explores how early modern literature represents and occasionally satirizes medicine, and how contemporary writers inherit and revise early modern modes. Over the semester, students will become familiar with the diverse array of forms of medical practice, the classed and gendered hierarchies in which medical practitioners were organized during different historical periods, and the various stances and attitudes towards medicine as discourse, profession, and field of knowledge that result. After an initial grounding in some historical and methodological basics, we will proceed to wrestle with a range of literary texts (prose works, poetry, drama, and memoir). Authors will include Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Moliere, Gunn, Sontag, Lorde, and Boyer.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room: Gilman 132; Gilman 219
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800, ENGL-LEC, MSCH-HUM

From quacks to plague, from humors to hypochondria, from AIDS to cancer, this lecture course examines literary representations of suffering, disease and treatment across genres and across time. In particular it explores how early modern literature represents and occasionally satirizes medicine, and how contemporary writers inherit and revise early modern modes. Over the semester, students will become familiar with the diverse array of forms of medical practice, the classed and gendered hierarchies in which medical practitioners were organized during different historical periods, and the various stances and attitudes towards medicine as discourse, profession, and field of knowledge that result. After an initial grounding in some historical and methodological basics, we will proceed to wrestle with a range of literary texts (prose works, poetry, drama, and memoir). Authors will include Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Moliere, Gunn, Sontag, Lorde, and Boyer.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room: Gilman 132; Krieger 302
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800, ENGL-LEC, MSCH-HUM

This lecture course will introduce students to the literature and literary culture of nineteenth-century America and its wider world. Focusing on history, genre and print practices, and culturally hybrid narrative logics, the course will move from the deeply curious and disturbing qualities of this body of literature to the origins and real asks of liberalism, progressivism, national and transnational ideology, secularism, and global modernity. Our core literary selection will comprise of nineteenth century American literature, including but not limited to the works Alexis de Tocqueville, Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, Jane Johnson Schoolcraft, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Spofford, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Edgar Allen Poe, David Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Francis Parkman, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Yung Wing, and Sui Sin Far.

• Days/Times: MW 9:00AM - 9:50AM, F 9:00AM - 9:50AM
• Instructor: Da, Nan
• Room: Gilman 119; Gilman 186
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

The word “podcast” was coined in 2004 as a portmanteau of “broadcast” and “iPod.” As the name implies, podcasts were born when an old mode of audio transmission (radio broadcast) met a new technology (portable mp3 players like Apple’s iPod, or rather RSS feeds adapted to handle audio files). But even back then, “podcasts” were more than just time-delayed radio programs you could carry around in your pocket. They also included a wide range of born-podcast formats: free-flowing talk shows, scripted audio-essays, anthologies of audio-journalism, etc. In this course, we will study the historical origins and contemporary range of podcasts as a medium for writing and performance. We will consider how this medium has absorbed genres from other media (memoir, essay, drama, documentary, fiction, autofiction, etc.) and combined them in innovative ways. We will also explore genres made possible for the first time by podcasts—whether by their ability for on-demand playback, by their low cost of distribution, or by their openness to audio-experimentation. The primary skills taught by this course are careful listening and analytic writing. This is not a course in podcast production. It will, however, require students to analyze podcasts by “quoting” them in both text-based papers and audio-essays. As such, this course will teach some basic skills in editing audio, writing scripts, and mixing sound.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Grobe, Christopher Arthur
• Room: Gilman 381
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

From quacks to plague, from humors to hypochondria, from AIDS to cancer, this lecture course examines literary representations of suffering, disease and treatment across genres and across time. In particular it explores how early modern literature represents and occasionally satirizes medicine, and how contemporary writers inherit and revise early modern modes. Over the semester, students will become familiar with the diverse array of forms of medical practice, the classed and gendered hierarchies in which medical practitioners were organized during different historical periods, and the various stances and attitudes towards medicine as discourse, profession, and field of knowledge that result. After an initial grounding in some historical and methodological basics, we will proceed to wrestle with a range of literary texts (prose works, poetry, drama, and memoir). Authors will include Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Moliere, Gunn, Sontag, Lorde, and Boyer.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room: Gilman 132; Hodson 303
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 4/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800, ENGL-LEC, MSCH-HUM

This course will examine representations of, and confrontations with, climate change in science fiction. We will focus on narratives that explicitly foreground the current planetary catastrophe of anthropogenic global warming and its various cause and consequences, especially those texts that produce and/or critique new forms of climate change denialism. We will also engage with various community partners working to confront climate change. We will examine these projects and narratives alongside climate change discourse, literary theory, and literary criticism to develop an understanding of the difficulties and stakes of imaginatively rendering climate change through speculative frameworks, and to explore the relationships between climate change, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and settler colonialism.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Shipko, David Thomas
• Room: Gilman 119
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 8/15
• PosTag(s): ENVS-MAJOR, MSCH-HUM

The British nineteenth century was marked by rapid industrialization and increasing social inequality. It gave birth to some of the most well-known novelists and thinkers in the English language, while introducing technologies of communication and surveillance that continue to trouble us today. It was also a period of the British Empire’s overseas expansion and racial-economic empowerment, especially in Africa, East Asia, and the Mediterranean. This course surveys a wide range of literary, artistic, intellectual developments that took place across a wide geographical terrain in the British imperial nineteenth-century, as well as later imperial and post-imperial renditions of it.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 12:50PM, F 12:00PM - 12:50PM
• Instructor: Jackson, Jeanne-Marie; Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
• Room:  
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC, ENGL-GLOBAL

A careful semester-long reading of James Joyce’s masterpeice Ulysses, one of the greatest and most intimidating novels in world literature.

• Days/Times: T 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
• Room: Gilman 388
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

The English Department offers qualified majors the option of writing a senior essay. This is to be a one-semester project undertaken in the fall of the senior year, resulting in an essay of 30-35 pages. The senior essay counts as a three-credit course which can be applied toward the requirements for the major. Each project will be assigned both an advisor and a second reader. In addition, students writing essays will meet as a group with the Director of Undergraduate Study once or twice in the course of the project. The senior essay option is open to all students with a cumulative GPA of 3.6 or higher in English Department courses at the end of the fall term of their junior year. Project descriptions (generally of one to two pages) and a preliminary bibliography should be submitted to a prospective advisor selected by the student from the core faculty. All proposals must be received at least two weeks prior to the beginning of registration period during the spring term of the junior year. Students should meet with the prospective advisor to discuss the project in general terms before submitting a formal proposal. The advisor will determine whether the proposed project is feasible and worthwhile. Individual faculty need not direct more than one approved senior essay per academic year. Acceptance of a proposal will therefore depend on faculty availability as well as on the strength of the proposal itself. When completed, the senior essay will be judged and graded by the advisor in consultation with the second reader. The senior essay will not be part of the Department’s honors program, which will continue to be based solely on a cumulative GPA of 3.6 in English Department courses.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 1/1
• PosTag(s): n/a

The course is designed to question our assumptions about what counts as reading : what we read, to what ends and with what effects. The Romantic era (roughly 1750-1830) is particularly well suited to raise these questions, as it saw the shift to more private reading, greater social focus on literacy, new modes of mass distribution of print, as well as the cultivation of the idea of "literature." Even as so-called "literature" allied itself with print culture, it trained its audience to "read" rocks, and faces and skies, to interpret fragments and blanks, to equate reading with dreaming. Lingering in the eighteenth century for the first half of the course, we will encounter the culture of "lecture" and inscriptions, the guides to oratory and recitation, scrapbooks newspapers, and the slow move away from understanding reading as a fully embodied and shared phenomenon to an activity primarily of individual minds, with consequences that affect us still. This course is open to both undergraduate and graduate students.

• Days/Times: M 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Favret, Mary Agnes
• Room: Latrobe 107
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/12
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

This course introduces students to a wide array of contemporary critical models in the analysis of literature. It does so slowly, clearly, and with examples from literature. But why? Why do it? You’ve said it to yourself before: I read the book, so I know what it means. Throughout the course we will learn how to read all over again, but in a new and improved, lit critty way. In so doing, we will find out what we mean when we say we “deconstructed” something, or when a friend at a football game suggests that there is something seemingly irrevocable yet endlessly contingent in narrative frames and their desiring machines. Literary theory: it’s not for the faint of heart. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Thompson, Mark Christian
• Room:  
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course, conducted as a humanities research lab, will focus on the literature, history and future of the Port of Baltimore and its relation to other world seaports. We’ll start by exploring some great literary works focused on Baltimore’s harbor, and we’ll compare and connect them to works set in other port cities from New York City to Havana, Cuba, and the Panama Canal Zone. Alongside this, we’ll study the function of modern ports—their “critical logistics,” environmental challenges, and roles in creating civic imagination. We’ll conduct field visits at dredge facilities, marine terminals, and or sites of postindustrial redevelopment, and we will visit archives that record the changing shape of the port of Baltimore. This is a literature class because our big questions are fundamentally about stories: how do Baltimore and those who live or travel here tell the story of the seaport? What stories are missing? What does it mean to find or recover these stories? Answering those questions will also require us to learn and integrate historical and archival methods and observational and interview techniques, so students should bring to the class a spirit of curiosity and openness to collaboration and experimentation. Undergraduates Only.

• Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Feinsod, Harris
• Room: Greenhouse 113
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 4/7
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

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

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

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Da, Nan
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 9/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

The course considers the transatlantic writing of three women in the early modern period, Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, and Phillis Wheatley. We will consider issues of identity, spatiality, religion, commerce, enforced labor, sexuality, race, and gender, along with literary tradition, formal analysis and poetics. We will read a good deal of these early women writers. Foremost in our mind will be the question of how perceptions of space and time are mediated through the global experiences of early modernity.

• Days/Times: MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Achinstein, Sharon
• Room: Ames 218
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

This seminar offers an introduction to a key concept in contemporary critical theory and literary and cultural studies: settler colonialism, understood as a specific form of colonialism undergirded by the expropriation of land and resources rather than the exploitation of labor and thereby involving the attempted elimination and replacement of Indigenous polities and societies by an invading force. The course will have a dual focus: 1) tracing the theoretical distinction of settler colonialism from other forms of colonialism and tracking the critique implicit in this distinction of dominant forms of leftism that arguably presuppose a settler-colonial frame of reference; 2) tracking the history of what James Belich has called the “Anglo settler revolution” of the nineteenth century and engaging in a comparative analysis of the literatures produced in the course of that revolution in what are now Ireland, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 7/12
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL, CES-BM, CES-PD, CDS-GI

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: Maryland 114
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/10
• PosTag(s): COGS-COMPCG, MSCH-HUM

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, writers of narrative fiction have been working furiously to keep up with the turbulence that global capitalism has visited on the world — war, political chaos, environmental catastrophe, massive forced migration and displacement — while trying to maintain ties to the techniques of narrative that gave the 19th century reality novel its successes and its prestige. In this course we will read a range of texts, mostly in translation, that stretch and deform those conventions in order to represent the lives and struggles of characters who are caught up in immense historical change. More and more often, novelists are choosing to depict characters drawn from what Marx would have called “surplus populations” — people for whom economic stability and personal safety are out of reach, partly because they are seen as not worth employing (or exploiting). Under these conditions, we will ask, is it only possible to tell tragic stories? What do happy endings look like? What do changes do character development and point of view have to undergo, for instance, to keep up with 21st-century history? Is realism still the best vehicle for telling these stories? Readings will include novels by Sally Rooney, Eduard Louis, Fernanda Melchor, Elena Ferrante, Marlon James, and Manoranjan Byapari, as well as secondary material by Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, Jill Richards, and the Endnotes collective.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Nealon, Chris
• Room: Gilman 388
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 2/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course looks at the traditions of anticolonial thought from the early twentieth century to the present day. Comparing movements for national liberation, realignment, and literary self-determination from across the Americas and around the world, we consider the shifting claims of empires and the colonial subjects, anticolonial frameworks, and decolonial movements that sought to contest these formations. We’ll focus largely on the Americas and the Caribbean, where the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and American empires all competed, but we’ll also consider these movements in their worldwide adventure, a “global” perspective that accounts for how processes of decolonization were understood in Ireland, India, China, and elsewhere. Our focus will often be on manifestoes and essays in which anticolonial writers outlined their literary and political programs, but we’ll also look at a few poems, stories, and films. From Lenin and DuBois’s calls to think about the relationship between racial capitalism and imperialism to Getino and Solanas’s revolutionary cinema protesting American neocolonialism, how have the claims of anticolonial political thought found their expression?

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Feinsod, Harris; Seguin, Becquer
• Room: Mergenthaler 431
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 7/12
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

In this course, we will follow the development of black poetry primarily as it has evolved in the United States. Beginning with the first published African American writers of the eighteenth century and ending with several important poets writing and performing today, we will consider the shape of the African American poetic tradition as commonly anthologized and as defined by our own theoretically-informed readings of the assigned literature. Attention will be given to both canonical and neglected literary movements and groups. Readings will include poetry and essays by Frances E.W. Harper, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Harryette Mullen, Tracie Morris, and others.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 18/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course introduces students to concepts of social justice and practices of community-engaged artmaking. It also provides students an opportunity to explore the history and legacies of the Black Arts Movement, and contemporary intersections of art and social justice in Baltimore City. Local artists and scholars will share their expertise using art to challenge social injustice. In turn, students will examine their personal creative practices and how they can be used to create and advocate for change. Throughout the semester, students will develop individual art projects that respond to course topics and are rooted in the principles and process of social practice art.

• Days/Times: TTh 6:00PM - 7:15PM
• Instructor: Stocks, Shawntay
• Room: Greenhouse 113
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 8/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

In this course, we will read literary and historical texts that present visions of black utopia. Authors include “Ethiop” (William J. Wilson), Marcus Garvey, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and others.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room: Gilman 400
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 10/18
• PosTag(s): CES-RI

This course examines the intersection of speculative fiction, horror, science fiction, and hauntings with latinidad. Reading a variety of short stories, novels, and films, we investigate how genre fiction addresses the unique experience of Latinxs in the Americas, compelling us to reimagine what the speculative can be as it intersects with race and ethnicity.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Gil'Adí, Maia
• Room: Gilman 75
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 1/15
• PosTag(s): MLL-ENGL, MLL-SPAN, MSCH-HUM

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: Krieger 304
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 1/12
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

It was more or less like this. They said: You know, Hela, you’re an anxious human being. She: I’m a human being? - Why, of course. You’re not a puppy. - She pondered. After a long pause, surprised: I’m a human being. I’m Hela. I’m a girl. I’m Polish. I’m mommy’s little daughter, I’m from Warsaw…. What a lot of things I am! (Janusz Korczak, Ghetto Diary) This course isn’t what you expect. It is not easy. It is not even fun. We will tackle painful topics: orphanhood, loneliness, jealousy, death. You will learn that “Snow White expresses, more perfectly than any other fairy-tale, the idea of melancholy.” (Theodor Adorno) We will also deal with parenthood, childhood, justice, and love. We will not watch any Disney films (but we shall analyze some memes). So who is a child? “Children are not people of tomorrow; they are people today,” wrote in 1919 Janusz Korczak, pediatrician, pedagogue, and children’s author who proposed the idea of inalienable Children’s Rights. We will read folk tales from different cultures, discuss authorial fairy tales (Oscar Wilde), fantasy books (Tove Jansson’s Moomintrolls) and science-fiction (Stanisław Lem’s Fables for Robots). We will also investigate the special connection between children and animals (Juan Rámon Jimenez, Margaret Wise Brown). Many iconic children’s literature characters, such as J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, “a Betwixt-and-Between” with a Thrush’s Nest for a home, St.-Exupéry’s Little Prince, and Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking, are outsiders. All along we will consider how children’s literature reflects and shapes ideas of selfhood, from archetypal to post-humanistic ones.

• Days/Times: MW 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Jerzak, Katarzyna Elzbieta
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/30
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

The ordinary, the common, the everyday: why does literary realism consider the experiences of the average individual to be worthy of serious contemplation? In this course, we will closely read a set of novels by Flaubert, Mann, Dickens, Zola, Tolstoy, and Woolf from the period in which the development of realism reaches its climax. These novels transform the conventions for the representation of lives of lower and middle class subjects, revealing such lives as capable of prompting reflection upon deep and serious questions of human existence.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

In contemporary discussions of climate change, it is an increasingly prevalent view that capitalism will lead to the destruction of civilization as we know it. The notion that capitalism is hostile to what makes human life worth living, however, is one that stretches back at least to the early eighteenth century. In this class, we will examine key moments in the history of this idea in works of literature, philosophy, and politics, from the birth of bourgeois tragedy in the 1720s, through topics such as gender, imperialism, and economic exploitation, to the prospects of our ecological future today. Authors to be studied will include: Lillo, Balzac, Marx and Engels, Ibsen, Brecht, Heidegger, Achebe, and current politics, philosophy, theology and film on climate change.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 10/15
• PosTag(s): CES-GI, CES-LC, CES-LSO, CES-RI, MSCH-HUM

Famously, Karl Marx had little to say about gender, sexuality, or race. Yet, scholars have developed Marxist theory to account for how a capitalist political economy generates racial divisions, gender inequalities, and queer and trans subcultures. This course will introduce students to feminist, queer, trans, and Black Marxist theory. Key concepts will include: social reproduction, racial capitalism, and sexual hegemony. Students will consider how Marxist theorists envision the place of race, gender, family, and sexuality in a utopian post-capitalist future.

• Days/Times: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Amin, Kadji
• Room: Bloomberg 276
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 0/12
• PosTag(s): CES-GI, CES-LC

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

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

This course examines one of the most pervasive and iconic genres of contemporary televisual media — the medical drama. From the premiere of General Hospital in 1963 to iconic 2025 debutant The Pitt, these shows have come in all shapes and sizes: soap operas and sitcoms, emergency room thrillers and cold diagnostic procedurals. In this SOUL course, we ask why this quite specific variety of television series has captured audiences for over sixty years. How do its tropes shape public understanding of physicians and their practices? And can these series empower clinicians and public health campaigns to improve patient outcomes? In five weeks, we’ll learn about doctors and the people who play them on TV, and how, at JHU and beyond, the media reception of medicine can transform, and save, lives.

• Days/Times: T 6:00PM - 8:30PM
• Instructor: Lekan, Neah
• Room: Gilman 134
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/14
• PosTag(s): n/a

The Romantic era of literature, spanning about 1780-1840, obsessed over revolution: political revolutions, philosophical revolutions, and artistic revolutions. They often came to believe that the way to achieve these revolutions was, at least in part, a revolution of the mind. Breakthrough science of the era, combined with the Haitian and French Revolutions and the ethical and psychological questions prompted by abolition and the settler-colonial revolutions in the Americas, led writers across the globe to openly speculate on the nature and limits of freedom, the imagination, and human potential, as well as explore the nature of thinking through poetry and prose. As such, this era has proved an especially rich one for what has been called cognitive literary studies: the careful, selective use of the insights of cognitive science to interpret these explorations. Through this approach, we will not only see how Romanticism prefigured many insights cognitive studies has proven, but see how Romanticism’s urgent questions about revolt, oppression, and liberation challenge further cross-disciplinary inquiries into the mind.

• Days/Times: MWF 1:00PM - 3:30PM
• Instructor: Fautsch, Carolina
• Room:  
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 20/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

After a diagnostic introduction to his early poetry, this reading intensive seminar will concentrate upon Edmund Spenser’s masterpiece, The Faerie Queene (1590/1596), which we will read in its entirety.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room: Gilman 388
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800