4000-Level Course Descriptions
FALL 2025 | WINTER 2026
ENGL-4211-001 | Romanticism | P. Melville
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This course focuses on British literature from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, otherwise known as the English Romantic period. The course will not only consider the Romantic movement as a complex and conflicted response to a shared set of literary and philosophical anxieties, but will also pay close attention to the interplay between the socio-political concerns of the Romantic period and the literature the period produced. We will cover a variety of poems and non-fiction prose (all available online), but primary texts to purchase (new or used) will include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818 version) and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
ENGL-4730-001 | Postcolonial Literature and Culture: Atrocity and Postcolonial Witnessing | C. Anyaduba
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This seminar course engages postcolonial studies in conversation with trauma and atrocity studies. It enlists notable theories and approaches of postcolonial reading to examine texts that bear witness to the traumatic histories and experiences of colonial atrocities from various regions. One of the course goals is to challenge and move beyond the Eurocentrism inherent in trauma and atrocity studies while simultaneously investigating the significance, limitations, and implications of postcolonial reading strategies. Throughout the course, we will explore the generative potential (or otherwise) and the diverse insights that postcolonialism offers for critically understanding literary and other texts that address atrocity. We will consider several key questions including but not limited to the following: What conditions drive the discursive regimes and cultural practices we now refer to as postcolonialism and postcolonial literary/cultural witnessing? What constitutes postcolonial witnessing? How does it differ from other forms of atrocity witnessing? What epistemological, ethical, and political frameworks does this type of witnessing support, and to what end?
ENGL-4742-001 | Cultural Studies: Culture, Power, Property | B. Cornellier
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This seminar invites students to reflect on past and current controversies about cultural ownership, cultural appropriation, and representational ethics in (post)imperial, settler colonial, and post-colonial contexts. The course starts with a theoretical examination and a critique of the regime of property of European capitalism and colonialism. Students will then explore different ways this regime of property is implemented (and contested) in the realm of culture, with a focus on BIPOC subjects pushing back against forces of extraction and appropriation. In doing so, this course seeks to anchor the scholarly and political project of cultural studies to the urgency of current materialist and decolonial critiques of racial capitalism, resource extraction, and dispossession. Topics include: the origins and limits of copyright and intellectual property legislations; imperialism, museology, and repatriation; curatorial practices and cultural capital; Orientalism and the performing arts; “found footage” films and ethnographic refusal; “Indian play” and Native sports mascots; “New Age” settler colonialism and gentrification.
WINTER 2026
ENGL-4160-001 | Young People's Texts and Cultures | H. Snell
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
class="search-coursedescription" data-bind="html: $data.Description, visible: !isNullOrEmpty($data.Description())">This course offers a focused study of an area of young people's texts and cultures, such as narrative fiction and film, digital or material culture. It may be organized as an exploration of texts and cultures of a particular period, consider a figure, genre, or theme across a range of historical periods and/or contemporary moments. Possible topics include Victorian children's literature, the tween and the teen, revisionist fairy tales, and transnational literacy. This course may be repeated for credit once when the topic varies.
ENGL-4242-001 | Medieval Literature and Culture | Z. Izydorczyk
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
class="search-coursedescription" data-bind="html: $data.Description, visible: !isNullOrEmpty($data.Description())">This course discusses representative works in medieval literature and culture. Topics vary from year to year and often include medieval romance and visionary allegory. The texts studied may include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's Morte d'Arthur, Pearl, and Piers Plowman and the work of Chaucer. Some continental predecessors in translation (Romance of the Rose and Chretien's romances), lays and metrical romances, lyrics, mystery plays and works by known female authors, as well as texts from medieval revivals in later centuries, may also receive attention. Students may repeat this course once when the topic varies. Restrictions: Students may not hold credit for this course and ENGL-2221 | ENGL-2301 | ENGL-4302.
ENGL-4403-001 | Author, Genre, or Form: Mad Scientists, Machines, and Monsters: Science, Technology, and the Gothic | K. Ready
Course Delivery: IN PERSON
This section of Author, Genre, or Form/Topics in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Cultures focuses on the Gothic in relation to the history of science, technology, and culture. The emergence of the Gothic as a genre has been identified as a reaction to Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism, both of which contributed to the rapid development of science and technology during the period. Yet, by the end of the eighteenth century the relationship between science, technology, and the Gothic had already become complicated. From the eighteenth to the early twenty-first century this relationship has continued to evolve, as innovations in science and technology provide ongoing sources of inspiration for the Gothic in literature and other media, providing a vehicle for the expression of cultural anxieties about science, as well as utopian dreams about its transformative possibilities, and challenging assumptions about the fixedness of disciplinary boundaries. In their treatment of science and technology, Gothic writers, film makers, etc. challenge, in various unsettling ways, boundaries between nature and culture, the human and the non-human, and the conscious and the unconscious.
In thinking through the relationship between science, technology, and the Gothic, we will be particularly interested in representations of the mad scientist over time. As part of this exploration, we will be considering different technological mediations of the mad scientist narrative and what happens with the shift from one medium to another.