What is “the common good”? How do individuals consider this idea, this question, and how are societies led, or misled, by its pursuit? Together, we will explore sources from a range of perspectives: What does Aristotle’s theory of the common good teach us? Or the Federalist Papers, the design of Baltimore’s public transportation system, meritocracy in higher education, the perniciousness of pandemics, proliferation of nuclear weapons, restorative justice, or intimate love? Drawing from film, journal articles, literature, and other sources—authors/creators include Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Bong Joon-ho, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Sandel, and more—this First-Year Seminar is as much about how we ask and interrogate challenging, timeless questions as it is about the answers themselves. Engaging our material and each other, we will work together to hone the habits of scholarly inquiry essential to this practice: reading, writing, talking. The seminar will culminate in a final, collaborative research project that seeks to map, and manifest, versions of the common good.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Watters, Aliza
• Room: Greenhouse 113
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

Poets, novelists, and essayists have gravitated to painting and its powers as a way of testing the powers of their own medium; the visual arts have served them as stimulus and challenge. This course broadly concerns the relation of these two art forms; more narrowly, it concerns attempts by writers to respond adequately to paintings that moved them We are likely to read work by Virgil Lessing, Virginia Woolf, Ali Smith, W,H. Auden, Mark Doty, and Rainer Maria Rilke; and study paintings by Cezanne, Klee, Brueghel, Morisot, Turner, and Monet.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Miller, Andrew
• Room: Gilman 277
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/12
• 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 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Jackson, Jeanne-Marie
• Room: Maryland 114
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/15
• 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: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Da, Nan
• Room: Krieger 300
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course investigates the literature and phenomena of walking: its history, its great poets, its social and cultural meanings, and some practices that organize mobile attention to the outdoors. How might a simple walk raise awareness of necessity and freedom, public and private space, the environment, and the rhythm of thinking itself? Our readings will range from Henry David Thoreau’s praise of “sauntering” to the French avant-garde practice of urban “drift” in small cadres of two or three, from urbanist Jane Jacobs’s descriptions of the city’s “sidewalk ballet” to Sunaura Taylor’s exploration of walking for the differently abled, and from novelist W.G. Sebald’s distinctive meditations on environmental history through his rambles along English shorelines to Garnette Cadogan’s searing account of walking and the perception of race. Importantly, we’ll adopt these writers’ practices of attention in our own exploration of the landscapes, built environments, and urban geography of the Johns Hopkins campus and Greater Baltimore. Several classes will meet outdoors for collective walks, so comfortable shoes and a good raincoat are required. Aside from reading carefully and participating actively in discussions, assignments will prompt you to move through the world and to craft compelling records of your experiences, observations, and curiosity in writing and other media.

• Days/Times: MW 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Feinsod, Harris
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course is about one of most profound political, social, and cultural issues of our times: mass migration, the movement of masses of people out of their countries and places of origin and increasingly across continents and oceans. It is based in the methods of the literary humanities and will help you develop your skills in reading works of literature. We will look at some key works from across disciplines and media--literature, anthropology, philosophy, and film--to help us understand the experience of migrants in the modern world.

• Days/Times: T 4:30PM - 7:00PM
• Instructor: Mufti, Aamir
• Room: Gilman 413
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

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: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room: Shriver Hall 104
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

This course looks at the ways in which the Bible has and can be read as literature.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM, F 12:00PM - 12:50PM
• Instructor: Thompson, Mark Christian
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/10
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC, ENGL-PR1800

This course looks at the ways in which the Bible has and can be read as literature.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM, F 12:00PM - 12:50PM
• Instructor: Thompson, Mark Christian
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/10
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC, ENGL-PR1800

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. Classes will provide the background necessary to read these texts both closely and historically and in the light of cultural continuities and differences. The course will also equip students to critique the categories by which texts have been made into such monuments, and so to read against their grain. Students should come away from the reading understanding how English literature has been traditionally understood as well as how it might be understood completely otherwise.

• Days/Times: MW 9:00AM - 9:50AM, F 9:00AM - 9:50AM
• Instructor: Cannon, Christopher
• Room: Gilman 17
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/10
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC, ENGL-PR1800

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. Classes will provide the background necessary to read these texts both closely and historically and in the light of cultural continuities and differences. The course will also equip students to critique the categories by which texts have been made into such monuments, and so to read against their grain. Students should come away from the reading understanding how English literature has been traditionally understood as well as how it might be understood completely otherwise.

• Days/Times: MW 9:00AM - 9:50AM, F 9:00AM - 9:50AM
• Instructor: Cannon, Christopher
• Room: Gilman 17
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/10
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC, ENGL-PR1800

A survey of American literature from 1865 to today.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room: Hodson 316
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 17/20
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

A survey of American literature from 1865 to today.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room: Hodson 316
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 18/20
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

Events of recent years have made history palpable; the pandemic, increasing visibility of climate change, and political unrest have all given us the felt sense that history is happening now, here, to us. Our focus in this course will be that sense of history, as rendered by novels. While we will read one foundational 19th century novel most of our texts will be more recent. I hope that this course allows us to recognize historical experience more sharply, and to think about our relation to it more powerfully, with more adequate concepts. Students will write a series of brief papers and a final research paper.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Miller, Andrew
• Room: Gilman 388
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Modernist art was a field for radical innovation. Never before or since have so many major breakthroughs in the arts occurred in so short a period. This course will focus on some of the great modernist disrupters of literary forms--prose fiction, poetry, dramatic spectacle. Writers and others to be considered may include Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, Marcel Proust, Guillaume Apollinaire, Franz Kafka, and Oskar Schlemmer.

• Days/Times: T 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Mao, Douglas
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Climate imagination in early modernity. This is an introduction to study of the literature of climate imagination with a focus on pre-modern literature. During the period 1500-1750, the ground was laid for modern thinking about humans, climate, and their environment. We will explore how affective responses, conceptual frameworks, and storytelling developed around climate crises, including the "little ice age," flood, earthquake, disease, and storm; and around human entanglement with non-human beings and environments in the era of scientific revolution, early capitalist enterprise, early journalism, and colonial settlement. We will focus on English drama, nonfictional essay and journalism, and poetry that all grapple with the representation of climate crisis in Europe and its maritime and colonial worlds. Topics may include: genres of worldmaking (pastoral, georgic, myth); representations of anthropogenic climate change and civic response; race-making, indigeneity, and climate; Extreme Weather journalism; land management, gardens, extraction, forestry, rivers; Health and plague.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Achinstein, Sharon
• Room: Maryland 217
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800, ENVS-MAJOR, ENVS-MINOR, MSCH-HUM, ARCH-RELATE, CES-LE

In this course, we will examine literary, historical, and theoretical texts on the American South from the first half of the twentieth century. Thematically, the course focuses on literary representations of labor history, histories of racialization, and political struggle. We will interrogate the construction of a region across a range of texts, tracing the emergence of Southern literature as an object of study in the early twentieth century. How did literature in the first half of the twentieth century negotiate the historical legacies of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Great Depression? How has literature shaped the popular understanding of Southern identity? We will focus in particular on the ways that literature mediates, critiques, and reimagines important historical and political conjunctures in the history of the American South.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Murphy, Jamison F
• Room: Krieger 302
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

This course introduces students to variety of approaches to literary studies, underscoring their common interest in the nature of data, its collection, and its analysis. Materials are drawn from the fields of British empiricism, Law and Literature, Marxist and Foucauldian critique, the Birmingham School, New Criticism, Genre Studies, New Historicism, Structuralism, Systems theory, Russian formalism, computational analytics, and the Sociology of Literature.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Da, Nan
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

Classicists, medievalists, and early modernists have always been interested in the history of the books (and the papyri and the rolls) in which the texts they study survive, and this course will survey these traditional modes of bibliography and their importance. We will also look at the social contexts of reading in all periods as a more theoretically sophisticated account of book history has urged us to do in recent decades. Particular attention will be given to modes of transmission of texts between written media, including the digital, but with an emphasis on the synchronic and diachronic importance of orality and aurality, dictation and transcription.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Cannon, Christopher; Dean, Gabrielle
• Room: Gilman 108
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/14
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

This course is a survey of U.S. Latinx literature that introduces students to the major trends in the tradition. While Latinx literature draws on literary traditions that span more than 400 years, our course will focus on more contemporary forms of the tradition, its “canon,” and how authors are currently “queering” this canon. Emphasizing the historical and aesthetic networks established in the Latinx literary canon that continue into the present while exploring the relationship between genre and socio-historical issues, we will read from a diverse tradition and range of genres that reflect the contested definition of “Latinx” and its shifting demographics in the U.S. We will also investigate how U.S. Latinx literature speaks to and expands “American” literary traditions, and how unique ethnic identities such as Mexican American, Nuyorican, Cuban American, and Dominican American offer different yet interconnecting representations of what it means to be Latinx in the U.S. This class ultimately underscores the heterogeneity of Latinx literature and asks how particular generic conventions stage the constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and class to establish a historically grounded understanding of the diverse literary voices and aesthetics that comprise U.S. Latinx literature.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Gil'Adí, Maia
• Room: Gilman 381
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/12
• 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: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room: Gilman 10
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/12
• PosTag(s): CES-CC, CES-ELECT

In this course, we will survey the major works of three of the greatest, most relentless innovators of the twentieth century – Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce – who explored and exploded narrative techniques for depicting what Woolf called the “luminous halo” of life.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/20
• 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
• Room: Gilman 132
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 20/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

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: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

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
• Room: Gilman 219
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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: Murphy, Jamison F
• Room: Smokler Center 301
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• 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 17
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

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:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

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:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• 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
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

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
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

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
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

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
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

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
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• 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 119
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• 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 119
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• 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:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): ENVS-MAJOR

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: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• 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: Gilman 277
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

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 D
• Room: Bloomberg 168
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

This course will introduce you to the long conversation that has come to be called "literary theory," with the aim of helping you learn to love not only reading literature, but describing it. Our readings will range, with possible authors including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. This course is open to both undergraduate and graduate students.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Thompson, Mark Christian
• Room: Maryland 309
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• 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:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• 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:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/12
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

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: Open
• Seats Available: 7/7
• PosTag(s): n/a

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 381
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/15
• PosTag(s): MLL-ENGL, MLL-SPAN

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: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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 El?bieta
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 23/25
• PosTag(s): n/a

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: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• 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: Krieger 304
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• 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: Maryland 114
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): COGS-COMPCG

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: Open
• 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: Open
• Seats Available: 9/10
• PosTag(s): n/a