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: 1/15
• 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: 2/15
• 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

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

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: Closed
• 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: 3/25
• 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 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: Closed
• Seats Available: 3/14
• 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: Miller, Andrew H
• Room: Gilman 400
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/15
• 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 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Mao, Douglas
• Room: Hodson 211
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This is the moment for a course on the Canadian climate activist, poet and novelist Margaret Atwood. Best known for her dystopian The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Atwood's warning visions in poetry, short stories, non-fiction and novels attend to themes of malevolence, metamorphosis, memory, genetic mutation, totalitarianism, corporate control, feminism, free speech, and climate disaster, while rooted in traditions of folktale, myth, and ironic detachment. Among other works, including poetry and non-fiction, we will read novels The Handmaid's Tale, Surfacing, Alias Grace, and Oryx and Crake, exploring Atwood's "writing with intent." Readings: 80-100 pages of Atwood novels per week. Course format: Short lectures with seminar discussion; 9 Discussion posts; Take-home midterm; two short papers, and one final presentation

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Achinstein, Sharon
• Room: Gilman 55
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This lecture survey will attempt to answer why the zombie has become such a fixture in contemporary literature and cinema. We will track this figure across its many incarnations--from its late-eighteenth-century appearance in ethnographic fictions growing out of the modern cultures of racialized slavery in the Americas right up to twenty-first-century Hollywood blockbusters in which the origins of the figure in the cultures of racialized slavery are perhaps not overt yet continue to manifest. What are the implications of the zombie's arc from a particular human being targeted for domination by a sorcerer to a living-dead horde created by radiation or epidemic? "Texts" may include: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man Who Was Used Up"; H.P. Lovecraft, "Herbert West--Re-Animator"; Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse; Victor Halperin, dir., White Zombie; George Romero, dir., Dead series; Edgar Wright, dir., Shaun of the Dead; Alejandro Brugués, dir., Juan de los Muertos; Colm McCarthy, dir., The Girl with All the Gifts; Colson Whitehead, Zone One; Jordan Peele, dir., Get Out. Fulfills the Global and Minority Literatures requirement.

• Days/Times: MW 9:00AM - 9:50AM, F 9:00AM - 9:50AM
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room: Gilman 132; Gilman 17
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 20/20
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC, ENGL-GLOBAL, CDS-EWC

This lecture survey will attempt to answer why the zombie has become such a fixture in contemporary literature and cinema. We will track this figure across its many incarnations--from its late-eighteenth-century appearance in ethnographic fictions growing out of the modern cultures of racialized slavery in the Americas right up to twenty-first-century Hollywood blockbusters in which the origins of the figure in the cultures of racialized slavery are perhaps not overt yet continue to manifest. What are the implications of the zombie's arc from a particular human being targeted for domination by a sorcerer to a living-dead horde created by radiation or epidemic? "Texts" may include: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man Who Was Used Up"; H.P. Lovecraft, "Herbert West--Re-Animator"; Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse; Victor Halperin, dir., White Zombie; George Romero, dir., Dead series; Edgar Wright, dir., Shaun of the Dead; Alejandro Brugués, dir., Juan de los Muertos; Colm McCarthy, dir., The Girl with All the Gifts; Colson Whitehead, Zone One; Jordan Peele, dir., Get Out. Fulfills the Global and Minority Literatures requirement.

• Days/Times: MW 9:00AM - 9:50AM, F 9:00AM - 9:50AM
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room: Gilman 132; Gilman 377
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 20/20
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC, ENGL-GLOBAL, CDS-EWC

This lecture survey will attempt to answer why the zombie has become such a fixture in contemporary literature and cinema. We will track this figure across its many incarnations--from its late-eighteenth-century appearance in ethnographic fictions growing out of the modern cultures of racialized slavery in the Americas right up to twenty-first-century Hollywood blockbusters in which the origins of the figure in the cultures of racialized slavery are perhaps not overt yet continue to manifest. What are the implications of the zombie's arc from a particular human being targeted for domination by a sorcerer to a living-dead horde created by radiation or epidemic? "Texts" may include: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man Who Was Used Up"; H.P. Lovecraft, "Herbert West--Re-Animator"; Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse; Victor Halperin, dir., White Zombie; George Romero, dir., Dead series; Edgar Wright, dir., Shaun of the Dead; Alejandro Brugués, dir., Juan de los Muertos; Colm McCarthy, dir., The Girl with All the Gifts; Colson Whitehead, Zone One; Jordan Peele, dir., Get Out. Fulfills the Global and Minority Literatures requirement.

• Days/Times: MW 9:00AM - 9:50AM, F 8:00AM - 8:50AM
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room: Gilman 132; Gilman 377
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 20/20
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC, ENGL-GLOBAL, CDS-EWC

What secrets can we, or should we, keep to ourselves? And what information is available to the state? This course examines the history, philosophy, politics, and literature of privacy and surveillance.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
• Room: Gilman 17
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This class reads how literature represented the causes of early climate disasters during the European period of transition from magic to science as ways of knowing. How did people understand the new experiences of climate in the age of coal mining, colonization, and extreme weather conditions in the 'little ice age' in Europe. Readings include plays, poems, fiction.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Achinstein, Sharon
• Room: Shriver Hall 104
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800, ARCH-RELATE, ENVS-MAJOR, ENVS-MINOR

Study of the literature and criticism of the Chinese Diaspora in North America from the 1980s to the present, with emphasis on narrative choices, plotting, cross-cultural decision-making, realism, immigration, competing political/interpretive/economic systems, and historical memory and trauma. Authors include Yiyun Li, Ken Liu, Madeleine Thien, Chia-Chia Lin, Weike Wang, Max Yeh, Iris Chang, Amy Tan, with an option for Chinese language students and native speakers to read works in Chinese by Glenn Cao and Chang Lin.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Da, Nan
• Room: Krieger 302
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a famous parable about the limits of scientific endeavor, but it grew out of a culture where the line between science and literature was not at all secure, and writers often considered themselves in collaboration with the newest scientific disciplines. This course will follow that collaboration and debates that emerged in British Romanticism as the disciplines of geology, meteorology, anatomy, demography, evolutionary biology and Literature itself began to take their modern shape.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Favret, Mary Agnes
• Room: Gilman 17
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

Emily Dickinson’s life and poetry has recently been the subject of movies, novels, art installations and TV series; fiction writers, poets, artists, screen-runners, and filmmakers have found their own voices in response to hers. To understand why she has been so popular, we will focus on the formal, historical and gendered aspects of her poetry. We will also watch some of the following: Dickinson, A Quiet Passion, Wild Nights. Exams are unlikely. Instead, expect close attention to your own writing, as we pay close attention to hers. The course will center on our conversation, which should be rigorous, stimulating, and entertaining.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Miller, Andrew H
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Students interested in Black print culture will engage in intensive archival research, both collaborative and individual, using the Sheridan Library’s Rare Book and Manuscript collections, and will create an online exhibition. Texts include poems, printed lectures, pamphlets, novels, periodicals, ephemera, correspondence, etc., alongside relevant critical and theoretical reading. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

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: Feinsod, Harris
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• 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: Feinsod, Harris
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 1/1
• PosTag(s): n/a

Love and war; two forces that brought people together and drove them apart. What did these concepts mean in the medieval world? How were they expressed? What role did love play in binding people, families, and kingdoms together, guiding their motivations, connecting them to the divine? How did war – whether intensive battles as we encounter in the Song of Roland or prolonged campaigns during the crusades – divide people, create categories of difference, force migrations, and change the shape of polities? How were love and war linked? We will read a series of primary texts covering some of the major genres of medieval writing including chanson de geste, romance, poetry, and memoir, as a lens through which to answer these questions. Together we will read a series of medieval texts in their historical context, probing how people used storytelling, sentiment, memories and personal experience to navigate their worlds. Designed as a freshman seminar, the course exposes students to a variety of historical methods, close-reading and critical analysis, with an emphasis on developing critical writing skills.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Lester, Anne E.
• Room: Krieger Laverty
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): HIST-EUROPE

This course studies the representation of religious themes in modern literature and cinema. Most of the works it covers are not defined as sacred but include religious themes as part of their narrative, images, language, and symbolic meaning. The course will cover materials related to the three monotheistic religions and general questions across religions, nations, and cultures. It also includes asking general theoretical questions such as: what is faith, and why do we need it? What are the differences between genres and media when representing religious topics, how god is represented in artistic forms, and how contemporary tensions between tradition and modernity enter the creative sphere?

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Stahl, Neta
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course revisits the Latinx canon and problematizes distinctions such as “high” and “low” culture. You will read authors beloved in Latinx literature such as Sandra Cisneros, Cristina Garcia, Piri Thomas, and Oscar Acosta to investigate the ways the field has, by necessity, championed progressive politics over what we would call “high literature.” Placing these canonical authors in conversation with more recent “better” writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Justin Torres, Manuel Muñoz, Juno Díaz, and Ruben Reyes, this course will also delve into aesthetic theory (Kant, Adorno, Ponce de León, Benjamin, Gikandi), to ask what is “good” literature? Spanish Majors and Minors should register for Section 2 of this course.

• Days/Times: T 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Gil'Adí, Maia
• Room: Gilman 186
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course revisits the Latinx canon and problematizes distinctions such as “high” and “low” culture. You will read authors beloved in Latinx literature such as Sandra Cisneros, Cristina Garcia, Piri Thomas, and Oscar Acosta to investigate the ways the field has, by necessity, championed progressive politics over what we would call “high literature.” Placing these canonical authors in conversation with more recent “better” writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Justin Torres, Manuel Muñoz, Juno Díaz, and Ruben Reyes, this course will also delve into aesthetic theory (Kant, Adorno, Ponce de León, Benjamin, Gikandi), to ask what is “good” literature? Spanish Majors and Minors should register for Section 2 of this course.

• Days/Times: T 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Gil'Adí, Maia
• Room: Gilman 186
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

When is an action just an accident--and when should it be called intentional? What about a double murder that is planned to look accidental … but goes very wrong in practice? And who is responsible in these situations? This course explores these and other fascinating stories of planned actions, accidents, and unintended consequences. Reading and watching twentieth-century literature and movies, we will follow a range of different creators as they think about what an intentional action is and is not, and how accidents impact how we understand our world. What can these works tell us about how we intend, act, or make meaning at the limits of our control? Texts will include films by Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Justine Triet, and fiction by Kate Chopin, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Wright, James Cain, and Patricia Highsmith.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Siraganian, Lisa
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 18/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

The years 1880-1930 constitutes one of the most intense periods of experimentation in Western drama. We will look closely at texts and performance practices from this time to trace how dramatists upended the conventions that had governed the theatre since the time of Shakespeare and imposed a completely new understanding of the artform. Authors to be read will include August Strindberg, Maurice Maeterlinck, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, W. B. Yeats, Sophie Treadwell, Luigi Pirandello, Federico García Lorca.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

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: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 20/20
• PosTag(s): CTAL-CONCEPT, CTAL-TEXT

This course surveys the stories and storytellers of key moments of resistance or revolution, such as the 1848 Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution, the 1968 Student Movement, Occupy, Arab Spring, and Women Life Freedom. We will critically examine how such moments are, or become, narratives and how, as such, they may or may not acquire afterlives. To this end we will investigate a variety of materials, produced from a variety of points of view: the press, participants, observers, commentators, instigators, theorists, and those reconstructing the events after the fact as histories or fictions. Key themes include notions of personhood, citizenship, solidarity, equality, and futurity, as well as the aesthetics of how social uprisings are represented in a variety of media. Readings might include texts by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Alejo Carpentier, C.L.R James, Peter Weiss, Manuel Puig, Carlos Fuentes, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Audre Lorde, Joshua Clover, and others.

• Days/Times: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Todarello, Josh
• Room: Krieger 307
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): CDS-SSMC

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: Bloomberg 168
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

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: Bloomberg 168
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): COGS-COMPCG, MSCH-HUM

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:
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room:  
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 18/18
• PosTag(s): CES-RI

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:
• Instructor: Stocks, Shawntay
• Room:  
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a