Department of English and Creative Writing

Please note that these descriptions are for 300- and 400-level courses only. 100-
and 200-level courses are described in course catalogue. Please note as well
general education and English major requirements met by all courses.

ENG 105 Introduction to Creative Writing (Gen Ed A3, B1; ENG Big Questions, Big Ideas)

ENG 110 Introduction to Literature (Gen Ed A3, B1; ENG Big Questions, Big Ideas)

ENG 120 Poetry Out Loud (Gen Ed A4, B2; ENG Big Questions, Big Ideas)

ENG 121 OUTRAGE: The Literature of Protest and Dissent (Gen Ed A3, C1; ENG Big Questions, Big Ideas)

ENG 160 Literatures of the World (Gen Ed A3, C2; ENG Big Questions, Big Ideas)

ENG 201 Reading with Purpose (ENG Pleasures of Reading)

ENG 205A Creative Writing: Poetry (ENG Pleasures of Reading)

ENG 205B Creative Writing: Fiction (ENG Pleasures of Reading)

ENG 205D Creative Writing: Screenwriting (ENG Pleasures of Reading)

ENG 241 US Literature I (ENG Earlier Literary Histories)

ENG 243 The Short Story (Gen Ed A3, B1; ENG Pleasures of Reading)

ENG 243H The Short Story (Honors) (Gen Ed A3, B1; ENG Pleasures of Reading)

ENG 252 British Literature II (Gen Ed A3C2; ENG Representation Matters OR Later Literary Histories)

ENG 260 Women and Literature (Gen Ed A3,B1; ENG Representation Matters)

ENG 263 Introduction to Genres: Poetry (Gen Ed A3, B1; ENG Pleasures of
Reading)

ENG 265H Introduction to Genres: the Novel (Gen Ed A3, B1; ENG Pleasures of Reading)

ENG 280 Introduction to Shakespeare (Gen Ed A3, B1; ENG Earlier Literary
Histories)

ENG 304 Film Genres: Horror (Gen Ed A3,B4; ENG Ways of Thinking)

ENG 305A Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry                                       Professor Peter Covino
(ENG Later Literary Histories)

ENG 305B Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction
(ENG Later Literary Histories)

ENG 315 Special Topics: Of Boys, Bros & Men
Professor Kyle Kusz

Over the past two decades, narratives proclaiming that “men are in crisis” or
“masculinity is in crisis” have proliferated across journalism, movies, best selling books, shows, and documentaries. While these crisis narratives are perceived by many as alarming and novel, in actuality they repeatedly recur throughout American history for distinct social and political purposes. In this class students will explore the contemporary cultural politics of these crisis narratives as they have been formed in specific texts like Kay Hymowitz’s book, Manning Up; Hannah Rosin’s book, The End of Men; Richard Linklater’s film, Boyhood; David Fincher’s film, Fight Club; Dave Portnoy’s Barstool Sports bro-centric media empire, the far-right men’s club, Proud Boys; Will Ferrell’s adult-as-adolescent film, Step Brothers, and President Trump’s association with ‘bro’ podcasters to help win the 2024 presidential election. Through the semester we will collectively engage in close readings of these texts to ascertain the meanings they offer about the plight of American men and boys. Through this exercise students will learn much about the present and future of how social power operates in American society. (ENG Ways of Thinking or Representation Matters; see advisor for Curriculum Modification form)

ENG 339 Literary Nonfiction
Professor Scott Kushner

U.S. bookstores are full of shelves labeled “nonfiction.” But what are we talking about when we talk about “nonfiction”? In this course, we’ll wrestle with this question, and we’ll find that the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, fact and story, literature and non-literature are less well defined than Barnes & Noble would have us believe. We’ll read a little theory, in order to contemplate (but not definitively map out) the conceptual landscape. And we’ll read a selection of texts in genres such as essay, article, memoir, chronicle—and even novel and poem—that will throw our categories into question and might just lead us to think differently about everything we read. (ENG Ways of Thinking)

ENG 345 Fall 2026 Topics in American Colonial Literatures
Professor Martha Elena Rojas

Unsettling: Reading American Colonial Literature as a Structure
This course takes as its theoretical focus the work of J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and the late Patrick Wolfe, critics who challenged dominant thinking about colonialism as a moment of “founding,” or a period of “settlement,” and offered the paradigm-shifting conception of settler colonialism as “a structure not an event.” Viewing settler colonialism as a structure reframes a once typical framing of American colonial literature as consisting of a body of texts written before the emergence of nation-states as politically independent of European empires, in the case of the United States, before 1776. Understanding settler colonialism as a structure also demands thinking of the concept of indigeneity as distinct from those of race, ethnicity, culture, and nation(ality). In a year which marks the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, these concerns will provide a vocabulary with which to read and re-evaluate the literature of settler colonial “America,” the oral and written stories of the Indigenous nations of coastal New England, such as the Wampanoag, Shinnecock, Narragansett, and Pequot, and the the various fictions that organize the “settling” of the English colonies and U.S. territories and the structures of freedom and unfreedom they encode, like William Bradford’s Of Plimmouth Plantation, Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Roger Williams, A Key to the Language of America, Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, and the autobiographies of Sansom Occom and Ben Franklin. We will also read 21st-century attempts to articulate a “usable past” or to challenge colonialism as past, such as Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008), Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (2017), Tommy Orange’s There There (2018) and Wandering Stars (2024), and Honorée Fanone Jeffers’ The Age of Phillis (2020). (ENG Earlier Literary Histories)

ENG 362 African American Literary Genres
Professor James Haile III

In this course, we will be studying African American literature as a genre or specific type of writing. In doing so, we will be analyzing different types of writing ranging from short story, novel, memoir, and poetics/poetry. Additionally, we will be discussing what we will term, ‘literary blackness’. That is, how blackness is captured, inhabited, and embodied through language. (ENG Representation Matters)

ENG 377 Topics in Romanticism: New England Transcendentalism
Professor David Faflik

This course examines the complex cultural phenomenon of New England
Transcendentalism in its various phases during the period from 1830–1870. A “moment” rather than a full-fledged movement, the multifaceted reform urge that was Transcendentalism touched literature and liberal religion in the United States as much as it impacted philosophy and society. It did so, moreover, through the work of some of the mid-nineteenth-century nation’s most celebrated thinkers and writers, among them the American Romantics Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. We will examine the full historical context of writings by these and other like-minded authors. We also will read deeply from their respective texts, in addition to considering lesser-known works from their friends, neighbors, and detractors. Our larger aim is to assess the importance of this Transcendental “moment” to the literary and cultural development of American Romanticism in the nineteenth century. (ENG Earlier Literary Histories OR Later Literary Histories)

ENG 385 Women Writers
Professor Heather Johnson

This course will focus on English women’s writing throughout the 20th century, with an emphasis on feminist and postcolonial writers. We will explore how women’s voices speak to issues of culture, politics, and literary innovation. This semester we will read and discuss novels and short stories by Woolf, Rhys, Winterson, Carter, Levy, and Smith. (Gen Ed A3, B4; ENG Representation Matters)

ENG/GWS 388 Queer Literature, Queer Culture
Professor Stephen Barber

This semester’s offering of ENG 388: Queer Literature, Queer Culture begins with a
query as to what these terms mean. What is meant by queer, and how, as well as why, is that term and phenomenon, definitionally resistant to identification? Then we will begin our study of the terms “literature” and “culture,” and of how queer affects both literature and culture. Our exploration, which focuses on the decades of 1880 to the present, is to include transnational theoretical essays, literary works, and cultural artifacts. Authors to be considered here include Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, as well as films from the 1950s to the present, and music from Nina Simone, Prince, to the present moment. (Gen Ed A3, C3; ENG Representation Matters)

ENG 405 Capstone in Creative Writing
Professor Peter Covino

ENG 410 Capstone in English Literary and Cultural Studies
Professor Martha Rojas
Description to come. (Gen Ed D1; ENG Capstone)

ENG 469 The Novel: Ralph Ellison’s Literature and Literary Influence
Professor James Haile III

This course is centered on Ralph Ellison’s 1952 classic Invisible Man. In the first part of the course, we closely read Ellison’s novel examining its philosophical, cultural, and literary insights alongside its critiques of modernity and psychoanalysis.
In the second part of the course, we will read two contemporary novels that were
directly influenced by the novel, Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye and Colson Whitehead’s
The Intuitionist. (ENG Ways of Thinking)

ENG 479 Renaissance Authors: John Milton’s Paradise Lost
Professor Travis Williams

We will read John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost together, slowly and carefully,
examining its historical, theological, and gender dimensions, as well as anything else
that draws our attention. You will write many online discussion posts and submit a final paper. Class discussion will count for approximately one third of the final course grade. (ENG Earlier Literary Histories)