Undergraduate Courses

The courses listed below are provided by the JHU Public Course Search. This listing provides a snapshot of immediately available courses and may not be complete.

Course registration information can be found on the Student Information Services (SIS) website.

Course # (Section)	Title	Day/Times	Instructor	Location	Term	Additional Details
AS.060.107 (01)	Introduction to Literary Study	MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM	Miller, Andrew H	Gilman 400	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 5/15 Tags: n/a
AS.060.107 (02)	Introduction to Literary Study	TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Rosenthal, Jesse Karl	Gilman 130D	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 1/15 Tags: n/a
AS.060.153 (01)	Margaret Atwood: Mythmaker	TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM	Achinstein, Sharon	Gilman 55	Spring 2026	Description: 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 Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 3/15 Tags: n/a
AS.060.216 (01)	Zombies	MW 9:00AM - 9:50AM, F 9:00AM - 9:50AM	Hickman, Jared W	Gilman 132; Gilman 17	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 11/20 Tags: ENGL-LEC, ENGL-GLOBAL, CDS-EWC
AS.060.216 (02)	Zombies	MW 9:00AM - 9:50AM, F 9:00AM - 9:50AM	Hickman, Jared W	Gilman 132; Gilman 377	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 14/20 Tags: ENGL-LEC, ENGL-GLOBAL, CDS-EWC
AS.060.216 (03)	Zombies	MW 9:00AM - 9:50AM, F 8:00AM - 8:50AM	Hickman, Jared W	Gilman 132; Gilman 377	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 7/12 Tags: ENGL-LEC, ENGL-GLOBAL, CDS-EWC
AS.060.216 (04)	Zombies	MW 9:00AM - 9:50AM, F 9:00AM - 9:50AM	Hickman, Jared W	Gilman 132; Gilman 413	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 4/12 Tags: ENGL-LEC, ENGL-GLOBAL, CDS-EWC
AS.060.311 (01)	Privacy, Surveillance, and Paranoia	W 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Rosenthal, Jesse Karl	Gilman 17	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 2/15 Tags: n/a
AS.060.330 (01)	Witches, Weather, and Wonder: Early Climate Thinking	TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM	Achinstein, Sharon	Shriver Hall 104	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 1/16 Tags: ENGL-PR1800, ARCH-RELATE, ENVS-MAJOR, ENVS-MINOR
AS.060.345 (01)	Literature from the Chinese Diaspora	MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Da, Nan	Krieger 302	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 2/15 Tags: ENGL-GLOBAL
AS.060.380 (01)	Poetics of Science: Romantic Literature	Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Favret, Mary Agnes	Gilman 17	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 10/15 Tags: ENGL-PR1800
AS.060.389 (01)	Emily Dickinson, Film, and Television	T 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Miller, Andrew H	Gilman 130D	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 3/15 Tags: n/a
AS.060.417 (01)	Black Print Culture	M 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Nurhussein, Nadia	Gilman 130D	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 8/12 Tags: ENGL-GLOBAL
AS.060.502 (01)	Independent Study		Feinsod, Harris		Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 1.00 - 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 9/10 Tags: n/a
AS.060.509 (01)	Senior Essay		Feinsod, Harris		Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 1/1 Tags: n/a
AS.060.521 (01)	Tidewater Initiative 1		Feinsod, Harris		Spring 2026	Description: This course is taken by students working with the Tidewater Initiative by permission of the Director of the Tidewater Initiative. For those in their first semester with the program. Credits: 1.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 6/10 Tags: n/a
AS.060.522 (01)	Tidewater Initiative 2		Feinsod, Harris		Spring 2026	Description: This course is taken by students working with the Tidewater Initiative by permission of the Director of the Tidewater Initiative. For those past their first semester with the program. Credits: 2.00 - 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 10/10 Tags: n/a
AS.100.152 (01)	Undergraduate Seminar: Love and War in the Middle Ages	Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Lester, Anne E.	Krieger Laverty	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Canceled Seats Available: 12/12 Tags: HIST-EUROPE
AS.211.373 (01)	Religious Themes in Film and Literature	Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Stahl, Neta	Smokler Center 213	Spring 2026	Description: 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? Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 11/15 Tags: n/a
AS.211.389 (01)	Reading Mid Lit	T 3:00PM - 5:30PM	Gil'Adí, Maia	Gilman 186	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Canceled Seats Available: 10/10 Tags: n/a
AS.211.389 (02)	Reading Mid Lit	T 3:00PM - 5:30PM	Gil'Adí, Maia	Gilman 186	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Canceled Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.300.222 (01)	Acting by Accident in Literature and Film	MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Siraganian, Lisa	Gilman 208	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 9/18 Tags: CTAL-CONCEPT
AS.300.346 (01)	Revolution in Theatre, 1880-1930	TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Lisi, Leonardo	Gilman 208	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 7/12 Tags: CTAL-TEXT
AS.300.418 (01)	The Modernist Novel: James, Woolf, and Joyce	Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Ong, Yi-Ping	Gilman 208	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 9/20 Tags: CTAL-CONCEPT, CTAL-TEXT
AS.305.288 (01)	The Aesthetics of Resistance	TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM	Todarello, Josh	Krieger 307	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 0/15 Tags: CDS-SSMC
AS.360.305 (01)	Introduction to Computational Methods for the Humanities	TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM	Lippincott, Tom; Sirin Ryan, Hale	Bloomberg 168	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Canceled Seats Available: 12/12 Tags: MSCH-HUM
AS.360.306 (01)	Computational Intelligence for the Humanities	TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Messner, Craig A	Bloomberg 168	Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 1/10 Tags: COGS-COMPCG, MSCH-HUM
AS.362.311 (01)	Black Utopias		Nurhussein, Nadia		Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Canceled Seats Available: 18/18 Tags: CES-RI
AS.362.402 (01)	Arts and Social Justice Practicum		Stocks, Shawntay		Spring 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Canceled Seats Available: 10/10 Tags: n/a
AS.060.130 (88)	Playing Doctor	MW 11:00AM - 1:15PM	Lekan, Neah	Online	Summer 2026	Description: How many times have you heard it? “I got into medicine because of [Insert Character/Show]!” Medical dramas have been mainstays of our televisual landscape since the early 1960s, and even more so since the premiere of E.R. (1994-2009). In this course, we dive deep into this most pervasive of genres. 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? Across eight weeks, we’ll explore the history of the genre, and then dive deeply into two series, House, M.D. (2004-11), and The Pitt (2025-present), to answer these questions and much more. Credits: 3.00 Status: Closed Seats Available: 13/20 Tags: n/a
AS.060.501 (01)	Independent Study		Feinsod, Harris		Summer 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 10/10 Tags: n/a
AS.001.100 (01)	FYS: What is the Common Good?	T 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Watters, Aliza	Greenhouse 113	Fall 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 12/12 Tags: n/a
AS.010.483 (01)	Three Artists (Three Sick Women): Art, Illness, Death	T 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Schopp, Caroline Lillian	Gilman 177	Fall 2026	Description: What happens when the artist becomes sick? How does illness become the subject of artistic practice? And what does art concerned with sickness tell us about the entanglement of gender and medicine in contemporary life? This course draws inspiration from Anne Wagner’s book, Three Artists, Three Women (1996), in which she explores an expectation that undergirds modernist art history: that the work of artists who are also women must reveal their femininity. We take up the challenge to this normative expectation with the work of three artists (who happened also to be three sick women) active in the post Second World War period. A German-Jewish immigrant to the US, Eva Hesse is known today for the fragile latex sculptures she made before dying from a brain tumor. Alina Szapocznikow, a Polish concentration camp survivor, employed her sculptural practice of body casting to index the symptoms and effects of her metastatic breast cancer. Hannah Wilke, an American feminist performance artist, painstakingly documented her treatments for terminal lymphoma. These artists’ careful explorations of their bodies and their illnesses trouble assumptions about femininity and feminism in the late twentieth century. They also afford an introduction to post-minimalism in the US, nouveau réalisme is Europe, and international conceptual and performance art. We constellate their interconnected work with that of others whose practices are infused in diverse ways by illness and its permeable definition: Indira Allegra, Cassils, Bob Flanagan, Yayoi Kusama, Wangechi Mutu, David Wojnarowicz, Florentina Holzinger. Readings in art history will be complemented with historical and contemporary approaches in feminist theory and critical disability studies, as well as a selection of literary and hybrid-form writings on art, illness, and death, including: Ingeborg Bachmann, Johanna Hedva, Audre Lorde, Paul Preciado, Gillian Rose. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/6 Tags: HART-MODERN
AS.060.107 (01)	Introduction to Literary Study	TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Nurhussein, Nadia	Maryland 109	Fall 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 8/15 Tags: n/a
AS.060.108 (01)	Writing in Literary Studies: Twentieth Century Prose Elegies	MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM	Houser, Julia	Shaffer 302	Fall 2026	Description: “I have finished this book and it is a pity. While I was writing it I was with her,” writes Albert Cohen toward the end of Book of My Mother (1954). “But Her Majesty my dead mother will not read these lines written for her…I do not know what to do now.” In this course, we will be reading a series of deeply painful and brilliant 20th century novels and memoirs about mourning. We will consider the ways our selected texts seek to express a sense of unbearable sadness, longing, and sometimes guilt, yet at the same time can also seek to function therapeautically or redemptively for the writer or reader, offering comfort and hope for the future; we will consider the emotional and formal techniques these texts use to capture the stark reality, the finality of loss, on the one hand, and how, on the other, they also often attempt to achieve something like revival or immortality for their beloved subjects. Meanwhile, we will be thinking about our texts in relation to the genre of poetry most famously devoted to mourning--the elegy. We will be asking: in what ways does long-form prose create an experience of grieving and remembering the dead that differs from more concise poetic forms? Do poetry and prose have different strengths in depicting the profundity of grief or the singularity of the life and personality of the departed? Do poetry and prose comment in different ways on the ordinariness or typicality of death and loss? Our focus will be on longer prose works, but we will regularly read exemplary elegiac poems to aid in our reflections about genre. And across all of our reading, we will be contemplating how our texts reflect the rapid rate of change and modernization, the range of artistic and technological innovation, the depth and complexity of cross-cultural exchange, and the scale of violence and tragedy that defined the 20th century. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 15/15 Tags: n/a
AS.060.108 (02)	Writing in Literary Studies: Playing at Empire	W 4:30PM - 7:00PM	Lekan, Neah	Gilman 413	Fall 2026	Description: Theatre history is more than the study of where playhouses were built, what they showed, and how many people they accommodated. It is a story of conquest, conflict, and conflagration. Anglophone imperial projects from eastward India to the extremest west of California and Hawaii were built on performance. Theatre history is imperial history. And so, in this course, we’ll follow Anglophone plays to non-Anglophone places. We’ll trace the displacement of Indigenous performance cultures and the rise of overtly imperial theatre industries. And most of all, we’ll interrogate how our entertainments, even now, are objects of imperial expression. Shakespeare reception will feature centrally, but we shall also branch out across traditions from the West Indies to India, Ghana to Pakistan, to far-flung Pacific lands like Japan and California. This course is an evolving genealogy of post- and/or anti-imperial dramaturgies. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 10/15 Tags: n/a
AS.060.108 (03)	Writing in Literary Studies: Gender / Genre	MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Wohlscheid, Frances	Gilman 413	Fall 2026	Description: Contemporary culture in the United States, from film and music to visual art and literature, finds two of its primary preoccupations in genre and gender. Genre and gender are both forms of classification, ways of dividing and designating categories. Yet, they are also modes of identification, affiliations that provide us with shared understandings of the world. This course seeks to ask, what exactly is the relationship between gender and genre? What pressures do gender exert on how we think about genres of popular culture, and vice versa? What does it mean to ‘bend’ or subvert gender and genre? How do genre and gender interact in shaping our politics? To answer these questions, we will read some foundational works of genre theory and contemporary literary texts, watch films, listen to music, and engage with cultural criticism focused on gender and genre. Credits: 3.00 Status: Canceled Seats Available: 15/15 Tags: n/a
AS.060.143 (01)	Nature Writing on Stolen Land	TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM	Hickman, Jared W	Krieger 307	Fall 2026	Description: What do settler colonists see--and unsee--when they encounter the rich and varied Indigenous homelands in North America and Oceania? What role does their perception and representation of "nature"--including the very construction of "nature" as a distinct category--play in enabling them to displace and imagine that they could replace longstanding Indigenous peoples in what are now the USA, Australia, and Canada? How have Indigenous peoples reiterated and reinvented their own conceptions and experiences of their homelands? This course begins to address these questions in two ways. One, by considering a wide range of representations (narrative fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, film, art, music) by both Indigenous and settler cultural producers in the US, Australia, and Canada from the nineteenth century to the present. Readings may include: Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods; Catherine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada; Barbara Baynton, Bush Studies; Duncan Campbell Scott, New World Lyrics and Ballads; Willa Cather, The Professor's House; Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock; Louise Erdrich, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country; Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass; Ali Cobby Ackermann, She Is the Earth; Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth. Two, by facilitating a series of creative reflections on the meaning of students' current occupation of the lands of the Conestoga/Susquehannock, Piscataway, and other Indigenous peoples through embodied research in the local region. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 2/15 Tags: ENGL-GLOBAL, ENVS-MAJOR, ENVS-MINOR, CDS-GI
AS.060.195 (01)	Tyrants & Dictators	T 4:30PM - 7:00PM	Mufti, Aamir	Krieger 300	Fall 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/15 Tags: ENGL-GLOBAL
AS.060.246 (01)	Medicine in Literature, Then & Now	MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM	Daniel, Andrew	Krieger 180; Croft Hall G02	Fall 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/15 Tags: ENGL-LEC, ENGL-PR1800
AS.060.246 (02)	Medicine in Literature, Then & Now	MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM	Daniel, Andrew	Krieger 180; Gilman 134	Fall 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/15 Tags: ENGL-LEC, ENGL-PR1800
AS.060.246 (03)	Medicine in Literature, Then & Now	MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM	Daniel, Andrew	Krieger 180; Shriver Hall 001	Fall 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/15 Tags: ENGL-LEC, ENGL-PR1800
AS.060.265 (01)	Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Figuring Out Your Life	MW 10:00AM - 10:50AM, F 10:00AM - 10:50AM	Rosenthal, Jesse Karl	Shaffer 307; Shriver Hall 001	Fall 2026	Description: Reading major novelists from the nineteenth century including Austen, C. Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and Conrad. We will pay attention to formal conventions, and relation to social and historical context. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 7/15 Tags: ENGL-LEC
AS.060.265 (02)	Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Figuring Out Your Life	MW 10:00AM - 10:50AM, F 10:00AM - 10:50AM	Rosenthal, Jesse Karl	Shaffer 307; Gilman 134	Fall 2026	Description: Reading major novelists from the nineteenth century including Austen, C. Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and Conrad. We will pay attention to formal conventions, and relation to social and historical context. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 3/15 Tags: ENGL-LEC
AS.060.265 (03)	Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Figuring Out Your Life	MW 10:00AM - 10:50AM, F 10:00AM - 10:50AM	Rosenthal, Jesse Karl	Shaffer 307; Gilman 413	Fall 2026	Description: Reading major novelists from the nineteenth century including Austen, C. Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and Conrad. We will pay attention to formal conventions, and relation to social and historical context. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 15/15 Tags: ENGL-LEC
AS.060.320 (01)	Coming to America: The West Indian Immigrant Novel	TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Wellington, Shalima Z	Gilman 55	Fall 2026	Description: At various points in the twentieth century, the United States saw large numbers of immigrants from the British West Indies. As these immigrants settled, they began to form communities and develop literature that reflected their experiences in their new home. With special attention to the novel, this course examines how this literature tackled the complicated relationship between race, immigration, and citizenship. To investigate this relationship, this course may examine novels like Claude McKay's Home to Harlem, Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones, Elizabeth Nuñez's Beyond the Limbo Silence, and Caryl Phillips's Dancing in the Dark. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 10/15 Tags: ENGL-GLOBAL, CDS-MB
AS.060.321 (01)	American Literary Naturalism in Black and White	M 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Loftis, Cameron Jalayer	Shriver Hall Board Room	Fall 2026	Description: In this course we will explore one of the most vexed topics in the study of American literature: naturalism, a genre concerned with the biological and social forces that limit individual freedom. For years, critics and readers have debated whether naturalism presents a world in which humans are hopelessly trapped by forces beyond their control or one in which those forces can eventually be controlled and society improved. Is naturalism skeptical, even derisive toward, the idea of progress, or is it a toolkit that enables writers to act as progressive scientist-reformers? In the US context, many naturalist novels have been immediate best-sellers—Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Richard Wright’s Native Son—but their reputations have tended to diminish over time, as naturalism became increasingly associated with despair, poor prose style, and scientific racism. Yet one of the central suppositions of this course is that this reputation has a lot to do with who has been considered naturalist, i.e., a fairly exclusive cohort of white American male writers. From the late 1890s to the 1940s, African American writers drew on naturalism to contest the very social order that the worst aspects of the genre propped up. This course offers a rare opportunity to read these black naturalists alongside white American male and female naturalist authors in an effort to develop a more nuanced account of the genre than the reduction of it to pessimism or Social Darwinism. The class might appeal to those interested in the relationship between scientific understandings of the body and literature; minority authors and mainstream tradition; literature and urbanization. Or those who simply prefer their art, coffee, romance, etc. a little bitter. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 10/15 Tags: ENGL-GLOBAL
AS.060.328 (01)	The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White	TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM	Jackson, Lawrence P	Gilman 219	Fall 2026	Description: This course surveys American literature and social history during what was then known as the New Negro movement (roughly 1912-1934), today popularly called the Harlem Renaissance. Since the1980s, scholars have revised claims that the “Renaissance” was a literary failure characterized mainly by exotic and primitive caricatures. Today the era is noted for renewing ideas of American pluralist nationality, a project, in the words of one critic, “of reconceiving the United States as something other than a white nation.” To think through some of these claims, the course juxtaposes the classic modernist work of white American writers alongside the classics of African American Harlem Renaissance literature. We will pay close attention to the evolution and instantiation of racial stereotypes during the 1920s and the operation of modernist literary techniques. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 6/15 Tags: ENGL-GLOBAL
AS.060.345 (01)	Literature from the Chinese Diaspora	MW 9:00AM - 10:15AM	Da, Nan	Shriver Hall 001	Fall 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 13/15 Tags: ENGL-GLOBAL
AS.060.350 (01)	Reason and Romance: Literature of the British Eighteenth Century	Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Mao, Douglas	Shaffer 304	Fall 2026	Description: Any era can be characterized by its oppositions. Perhaps none were more defined by their polarities, however, than the eighteenth century in Britain. Reason and passion, honor and ribaldry, skepticism and fantasy, tradition and revolution: in capturing the tensions between these dyads, the literature of the period furnishes a wildly energetic field through which to examine questions of consciousness, freedom, gender, celebrity, race, and political theater that continue to shape our lives today. Authors examined may include Jonathan Swift, Mary Wollstonecraft, Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, John Gay, Charlotte Lennox, and Alexander Pope. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 5/15 Tags: ENGL-PR1800
AS.060.363 (01)	Henry James	TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Bronstein, Michaela	Bloomberg 276	Fall 2026	Description: Henry James was one of the most influential and challenging novelists in American history. The bulk of this class will immerse us his major works, including both his literary experimentation and the complex social and political situations his fictions analyze. We’ll also look at afterlives today — at more recent writers and artists who show what these novels still can do. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 14/15 Tags: n/a
AS.060.384 (01)	The Contemporary Novel	Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Nealon, Chris	Smokler Center 213	Fall 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 10/15 Tags: n/a
AS.060.393 (01)	The Poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer	W 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Cannon, Christopher	Shriver Hall Board Room	Fall 2026	Description: Chaucer's poetry is timeless because he wrote so well that he always rewards reading (and the Middle English in which he wrote is very easy to master) and he is always worth reading because his poetry is at once so eye-opening and such a pleasure, a way of stretching our sense of the present by understanding (really understanding) the past. This class will pursue such understanding by paying particular attention to Chaucer's masterpieces, Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales. Our goal will be to learn to enjoy Chaucer's poetry by reading it carefully enough to take the full measure of what exactly it is about. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 7/15 Tags: ENGL-PR1800
AS.060.410 (01)	Art and Literature of Revolution in the Americas	W 4:30PM - 7:00PM	Feinsod, Harris; Joyce, Robin	Gilman 186	Fall 2026	Description: This course asks how early 20th-century writers and artists in the US, Latin America, and the Caribbean have pictured and imagined the histories of revolution in the Atlantic world. How did the Haitian and Mexican revolutions spur the art of the Harlem Renaissance? How did the writers and artists of the Black diaspora arrive at new histories of self-emancipation? Writers and artists to be considered include Elizabeth Catlett, Alejo Carpentier, Mariano Azuela,The course will be taught in the study room at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and students will participate in the research for and production of an upcoming museum exhibition at the museum. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/12 Tags: ENGL-GLOBAL
AS.060.444 (01)	From Papyrus to the PDF: The Transmission of Texts	T 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Cannon, Christopher; Dean, Gabrielle	Gilman 108	Fall 2026	Description: Texts are conveyed to readers in songs, scrolls, books, and digital files. Some of them survive over extended periods because they are successfully transferred from one form to another, while others are frozen in the past, Many are lost altogether. The form in which a text is communicated often determines how it is read -or if it can be read at all. The study of texts as they move between readers and through time illuminates more than the history of the “book” though, since the medium of the message has often shaped how we understand all aspects of the humanities. This course surveys the long history of "books," paying attention to oral and scribal traditions as well as print and the digital, paying special attention to the interactions between materiality and social contexts. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 6/12 Tags: ENGL-PR1800
AS.060.489 (01)	Performative Politics	T 3:00PM - 5:30PM	Grobe, Christopher Arthur	Gilman 130D	Fall 2026	Description: Performative politics, political theater, politics as performance art — the language we use to describe politics today is often drawn from the performing arts and performance theory. In this course, through readings in drama and performance theory, and through performance-minded attention to political events, we will study what theater scholar Janelle Reinelt and politics scholar Shirin Rai have called the shared “grammar of politics and performance.” Case studies will center on US politics since World War II, but students are invited and welcome to bring their knowledge of other periods and cultures to the conversation. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 5/12 Tags: n/a
AS.060.501 (01)	Independent Study		Feinsod, Harris		Fall 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 10/10 Tags: n/a
AS.060.509 (01)	Senior Essay		Feinsod, Harris		Fall 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.060.509 (19)	Senior Essay		Rosenthal, Jesse Karl		Fall 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 5/5 Tags: n/a
AS.060.521 (01)	Tidewater Initiative 1		Feinsod, Harris		Fall 2026	Description: This course is taken by students working with the Tidewater Initiative by permission of the Director of the Tidewater Initiative. For those in their first semester with the program. Credits: 1.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 20/20 Tags: n/a
AS.060.522 (01)	Tidewater Initiative 2		Feinsod, Harris		Fall 2026	Description: This course is taken by students working with the Tidewater Initiative by permission of the Director of the Tidewater Initiative. For those past their first semester with the program. Credits: 2.00 - 3.00 Status: Approval Required Seats Available: 20/20 Tags: n/a
AS.197.214 (01)	The Moral Life of Mining	TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM	Jackson, Jeanne-Marie	SNF Agora 109	Fall 2026	Description: This course takes South Africa as a point of departure for a broader investigation of how mining shapes morality in modern life. Focusing on diamond and gold mining between the late-nineteenth century and the present day, we will read across different and sometimes contradictory frameworks for posing questions of right and wrong, e.g. Christian theology, moral economy, moral reasoning, Black Consciousness philosophy, and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Our syllabus will draw from a wide range of fields and genres, including Calvinist and liberation theology, literary fiction, social and economic history, political speeches, and corporate mission statements, and include visual as well as written texts. Students will also have the chance to converse with guest speakers who have historical, scientific, and/or industry expertise in mining on the African continent. The overarching course objective is to understand how the problem of mining in Africa – in all its exploitation and innovation, ground-level grime and c-suite extravagance – has shaped evolving and conflicting moral vocabularies. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 7/15 Tags: CES-PD, CES-TI, CES-RI
AS.211.325 (01)	Otherness: Cinema, Music, Literature	Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Stahl, Neta		Fall 2026	Description: This course is a comparative journey through literature, music and cinema. The term 'Otherness' is known to be rooted in the Self-Other opposition as it emerged in German Idealism, adopted by psychoanalysis and transformed to Post-Colonial and Feminist theories. This theoretical framework will allow us to explore the role of the Other in literature, cinema, and music. Students will become familiar with the historical development of the notion of the “stranger” through reading, listening and analyzing various contemporary works of prose, cinema and music from various countries. We will analyze the ways in which these works depict Otherness and will investigate questions regarding their social, political and philosophical framework as well as the literary, musical and cinematographic devices they employ. At the center of our discussion will stand questions: Who is the Other? How do stories, music and films shape and challenge our perspective of the Other and of ourselves? Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 13/15 Tags: n/a
AS.211.441 (01)	Literary Translation Workshop	Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM	Jewiss, Virginia C	Mergenthaler 431	Fall 2026	Description: 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 4/12 Tags: n/a
AS.300.311 (01)	God and Modern Literature	TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM	Lisi, Leonardo	Gilman 186	Fall 2026	Description: Modernity has often been described as the age in which God has died. But concern with the nature and experience of divinity pervades modern literary texts. In this course we will sample a variety of works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries that investigate the possibilities and limitations of religious belief under the conditions of modernity. Authors to be read include Kierkegaard, G. M. Hopkins, George Eliot, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Hermann Hesse, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Solvej Balle, and Jon Fosse. This class counts towards the requirements of a text-based course for the minor in Comparative Thought and Literature. Credits: 3.00 Status: Waitlist Only Seats Available: 0/12 Tags: n/a
AS.300.319 (01)	Fictions at Work	TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM	Siraganian, Lisa	Gilman 208	Fall 2026	Description: When you are working for a business, how do you distinguish your ideas, actions, and responsibilities from the firms’—if that is even possible? What is corporate culture or a corporate person, and how is it similar or different from any other kind of culture or person? These and related questions inspired and fascinated writers from the nineteenth century through the present. By reading and thinking about short stories, novels, films, and a play, we will explore these issues and potential resolutions to them. The course especially considers how problems of action, agency, and responsibility in capitalism become an intriguing challenge for writers and filmmakers. Texts by Herman Melville, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alice Munro, and George Saunders, and David Mamet; films Charlie Chaplin, Boots Riley, Kitty Green, and Bong Joon-ho. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 14/20 Tags: n/a
AS.300.372 (01)	Children’s Literature and the Self: From Fairy Tales to Science-Fiction	TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM	Jerzak, Katarzyna Elzbieta	Gilman 219	Fall 2026	Description: - 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. 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” (Adorno). We will also deal with parenthood, childhood, justice, and love. We will not watch any Disney films. Who is a child? “Children are not people of tomorrow; they are people today,” wrote in 1919 Janusz Korczak, pediatrician, and children’s author who believed in children’s rights. We will read folk tales, 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 Peter Pan, “a Betwixt-and-Between,” Little Prince, and 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. Credits: 3.00 Status: Open Seats Available: 1/25 Tags: n/a