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 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Favret, Mary Agnes
• Room: Gilman 313
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/15
• 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: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Thompson, Mark Christian
• Room: Shriver Hall 001
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

What does it mean to develop, to evolve, to grow up? And what's at stake, for authors having different investments, views, and experiences, in the ways human development (and other forms of development) are represented? This course examines literary and other treatments of growth of the past two hundred years. Authors studied may include Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, T. S. Eliot, Margaret Mead, R. K. Narayan, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Mao, Douglas
• Room: Maryland 217
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

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: Hodson 316
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/12
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC, ENGL-GLOBAL, MSCH-HUM, CES-RI, CES-TI

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: Hodson 316
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 1/12
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC, ENGL-GLOBAL, MSCH-HUM, CES-RI, CES-TI

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: Hodson 316
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/12
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC, ENGL-GLOBAL, MSCH-HUM, CES-RI, CES-TI

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.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
• Room: Gilman 55
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/10
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

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.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
• Room: Gilman 55
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/10
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

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.

• Days/Times: MW 11:00AM - 11:50AM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Rosenthal, Jesse Karl
• Room: Gilman 55
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/10
• PosTag(s): ENGL-LEC

This course takes up literature from the decades just before and just after the turn of the 20th century, including novels, poetry, and essays by Emily Dickinson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frances E. W. Harper, Henry James, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats. Students will also engage with critical writing from the new academic journal, Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room: Gilman 377
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

In this course we will read the major novels (and some essays) by George Eliot, one of the most intellectually engaging of British novelists. Her fiction explores ethical, social, and aesthetic issues concerning sexual politics, the limits of morality, the demands of family, the desperation of skepticism, and the capacities of the novel form. Students should leave the course with a heightened sense of the powers of the novel and the seriousness of its ambitions. Texts are likely to include Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, but our focus will be on her two last and most ambitious novels, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda.

• Days/Times: T 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Miller, Andrew
• Room: Gilman 388
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course explores the transnational convergence of Asians/Asian Americans and Latinxs/ Latinx Americans from a history of multiple imperialisms to the neoliberal, globalized present. We will situate the racialization of Asian and Latinx peoples within a larger, global framework and think critically about areas of solidarity and tension between these two multi-ethnic groups through readings in literature, history, and sociology.

• Days/Times: W 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Crisostomo, Johaina Katinka
• Room: Krieger 302
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL

The history of poetry is full of political poems of every kind — odes, epics, dramatic persona poems. And the history of literary criticism is full of denunciations of poetry that gets “too political,” and loses sight of its job to give pleasure. In this course, we will look at a range of contemporary poetry that tackles political issues — things like the causes of climate change; immigration crises; white supremacy; patriarchal gender systems; the legacies of colonialism — and study the ways it accomplishes its goals while still giving us the kinds of surprise in language that poetry has always promised. Reading will include (but not be limited to) work by Tongo Eisen-Martin, Cathy Park Hong, Sandra Simonds, Stephanie Young, and Wendy Trevino.

• Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Nealon, Chris
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

In this course, we will closely read poetic representations of perfect, vastly better, or singularly beautiful worlds in poetry from antiquity through the present. Matters to be considered will include the challenge of putting utopia into verse, relations between beauty and luxury, and the depiction of nature in a time of ecological crisis. Poets studied may include Theocritus, Tao Yuanming, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Alfred Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, Lisa Robertson, Nikki Giovanni, and Juliana Spahr

• Days/Times: W 4:00PM - 6:30PM
• Instructor: Mao, Douglas
• Room: Shaffer 303
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

Geoffrey Chaucer is sometimes called the 'father of English literature', but the deftness with which he captured the variety of the human condition, in poetic forms that were each, in themselves, startlingly new, was in so many ways an inheritance too rich for literary tradition to absorb. One reason to return to Chaucer's writing now is to see how funny (and even obscene) verse narrative can be, and how compelling a fourteenth-century love story remains. It is also to open a window onto a culture entirely different from our own but in which the power of language (the role of free speech), the freedom of the individual, the status of women, violent tensions between cultures and ethnicities and the role of religion in civil society were not only topical, but made the more so by Chaucer's powerful political vision and thought. Chaucer 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) but he is always worth reading because reading him is at once so eye-opening and such a pleasure, a way of stretching one's sense of the present by understanding (really understanding) a particular moment in the past. This class will pursue such understanding by paying particular attention to Chaucer's masterpieces, Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales. But we will begin with a quick and easy workshop on Chaucer's language, and try to define, along the way, some of the more interesting aspects of his style. 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 was about.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Cannon, Christopher
• Room: Smokler Center 301
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-PR1800

This is a larger seminar-style course devoted to the writings attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X (El-Hajj El-Malik Shabazz). While the two the key African American male icons of the Civil Rights Movement era gained prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, they are typically discussed as representing two ideological camps: racial integration deeply committed to the idea of American exceptionalism and democratic perfection, and black nationalism, a non-state ideological move that adjudged the U.S. nation state on the same terms as any other imperial power. We will explore these binaries in their thought and the social movements connected to them, and also engage with multiple cinematic representations of the two figures that have carried them forward into contemporary times.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Jackson, Lawrence P
• Room: Ames 320
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/15
• PosTag(s): HIST-US, ENGL-GLOBAL, CES-RI

That the nations of the world could ever work together seems utopian, but also unavoidable: migration, war, and not least climate change make some form of global coordination increasingly necessary. This course will give historical and philosophical depth to the idea of a cosmopolitan order and world peace by tracing it from its ancient sources through early modernity to today. At the center of the course will be the text that has been credited with founding the tradition of a world federation of nations, Immanuel Kant’s "Toward Perpetual Peace" (1795). Confronting recent and current political discourse, literature, and philosophy with Kant’s famous treatise, we will work to gain a new perspective on the idea of a world order. In addition to Kant, readings include Homer, Erasmus, Pico della Mirandola, Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham, Emily Dickinson, Tolstoy, Whitman, Rosa Luxemburg, Gandhi, Hannah Arendt, John Lennon, and Martin Luther King as well as lesser-known authors such as the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Ellen Key, Odette Thibault, Simone Weil, and Claude Lefort. Taught in English.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Frey, Christiane; Seguin, Becquer D
• Room: Gilman 381
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/15
• PosTag(s): INST-PT, CES-LSO

What does it mean to exist, and to be able to reflect on this fact? What is it mean to be a self? This course explores the themes of existentialism in literature and philosophy, including the meaning of existence, the nature of the self, authenticity and inauthenticity, the inescapability of death, the experience of time, anxiety, absurdity, freedom and responsibility to others. It will be examined why these philosophical ideas often seem to demand literary expression or bear a close relation to literary works. Readings may include writings by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Rilke, Kafka, Simmel, Jaspers, Buber, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, and Daoud.

• Days/Times: T 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Gosetti, Jennifer Anna
• Room: Gilman 479
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Frey, Christiane; ni Mheallaigh, Karen
• Room: Gilman 132
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

This is a writing intensive class exploring the current wealth of women playwrights, including Pulitzer Prize winners: Wendy Wasserstein, Paula Vogel, Lynn Nottage, and Jackie Sibblies Drury (2019 Prize for FAIRVIEW). We will discuss Script Analysis and read (and see) plays by numerous writers including Claire Barron, Kia Corthron, Theresa Rebeck, Sarah Ruhl, Danai Gurira, Caleen Sinnette Jennings, and Hansol Jung. This class will include a mid-term and a Final Paper.

• Days/Times: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Denithorne, Margaret
• Room: Krieger 103
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/14
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course offers a broad survey of tragic drama in the Western tradition, from its origins in ancient Greece to the twentieth century. In lectures and discussion sections, we will study the specific literary features and historical contexts of a range of different works, and trace the continuities and transformations that shape them into a unified tradition. Key questions and themes throughout the semester will include what counts as tragic, the tragedy of social and political conflict, the bearing of tragedy on the meaning and value of life, the antagonistic relation between world and humans, the promises and dangers of tragedy for contemporary culture. Authors to be studied: Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Shakespeare, de la Barca, Racine, Goethe, Strindberg, Lorca, and Beckett.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Lisi, Leonardo
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Lippincott, Tom; Sirin Ryan, Hale
• Room: Gilman 55
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Backer, Samuel Ehrlich; Messner, Craig A
• Room: Gilman 195
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/10
• PosTag(s): COGS-COMPCG

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

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room: Maryland 309
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Stocks, Shawntay
• Room: Remsen Hall 140
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

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

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

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Miller, Andrew
• Room: Gilman 277
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

• Days/Times: MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Jackson, Jeanne-Marie
• Room: Maryland 114
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Da, Nan
• Room: Krieger 300
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

• Days/Times: MW 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Feinsod, Harris
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A survey of American literature from 1865 to today.

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

A survey of American literature from 1865 to today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Gil'Adí, Maia
• Room: Gilman 381
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

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

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Ong, Yi-Ping
• Room: Gilman 10
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/12
• PosTag(s): CES-CC, CES-ELECT

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

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