Graduate Courses

Please consult the University Calendar for a full listing of our graduate-level ENGL courses, not all of which are offered in a given year.

fall 2025

ENGL 578 LEC A1: Film Studies
Women and the Silent Screen
L. Czach

The silent period of film history is often considered a golden age for women’s participation in filmmaking. Not only were women in front of the screen as actors, but they also played a major role behind the scenes as directors, camera operators, writers, editors, and producers. Women also worked in theatres as ticket takers, ushers, coat check girls, projectionists, theatre managers, and were courted as an audience. This course will examine women’s contributions to silent film production examining the many roles that women occupied including screen stars such as Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Greta Garbo, Anna May Wong and Josephine Baker; screenwriters Adela Rogers St. Johns, Frances Marion and Elinor Glyn; directors Alice Guy Blaché, Nell Shipman, and Lois Weber, amongst others. We will also examine various cinematic stereotypes that emerged during the silent era such as the vamp and the flapper.

ENGL 591 LEC A1: Canadian Texts
Literary Ecologies 
S. Krotz

This course explores literatures in Canada “obliquely” through the ecocritical methods of what Canadian literary scholar Laurie Ricou has termed “habitat studies.” An approach to literary ecology, habitat studies expands practices of reading to engage deeply with the more-than-human communities and spaces with and in which we live. We begin, then, by thinking about Canada not as a geopolitical or cultural construct, but as a set of shared habitats in bioregions that pay no heed to our borders. Each student will be assigned an animal, plant, or feature of the topography that will become their “habitat guide.” Over the course of the term, they will research their guide’s complex ecological significance through a diverse assemblage – a “literary ecology” – of texts that name, describe, and respond to this guide, drawing it into story and poetry and / or narrating its ecological significance. 

As we experiment with this method, we will consider the following questions: How is literature ecological, and how is ecology literary? What definitions of “nature” and “wilderness,” animal, plant, and human define our literary imaginaries and ecological relationships? How might literary ecology, conceived through habitat study, transform these imaginaries as well as notions of literary history, reading, and place? How does this method bring Indigenous and settler writing and thinking into conversation? How does it invite us to “listen,” as Ricou puts it, beyond our human languages? How have writers articulated such practices of listening? What happens when we let a species or feature of the land (instead of an author or literary movement) guide our reading, research, and perhaps even the forms of our scholarly writing? How does this highly focused yet widely interdisciplinary approach to literary study help us attend to the particularities of our habitats? Prompted by environmental writings and habitat guides that draw our thinking and reading outside the walls of the classroom, we will conduct as many of our seminar meetings as possible (until the temperatures drop below about 10 degrees) in the North Saskatchewan River Valley below the U of A campus.

ENGL 694 LEC A1: Literary Techniques
Listening to Literature
M. O’Driscoll

The seminar explores the cultural impact and critical significance of shifting our attention away from the visual, print text that is the common object of study in literary studies to sonic expressions of those texts in thematic, formal, performance, or remediated modalities. Such an approach requires thinking at the convergence of literary studies and sound studies and considering ways in which literary texts, over varying historical periods, have engaged sound in ways that invite established or new audile techniques in literary listening. There is a recent, but compelling, conversation that has emerged at this convergence, and includes engagements with early acoustic recordings of the late nineteenth century poetries, radio and analogue recording as a cultural force in Anglo-American modernism, the Caedmon era and the mid-century cultivation of a middle-brow listening audience, the establishment of an official poetry reading cultures and the phenomenon one might recognize as “poet’s voice,” and the simultaneous counter-currents of avant-garde, resistant, multimedia, and born digital sound objects that trouble the ease of that recognition. Central to such analysis are recently established sonic approaches to literature such as those evident in broad-ranging collections by Jason Camlot & Katherine MacLeod as well as Anna Snaith, Marjorie Perloff & Craig Dworkin, Charles Bernstein, and others, but also formative monographs such as Camlot’s Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings, Julie Beth Napolin’s The Fact of Resonance: Modern Acoustics and Narrative Form, Nicole Furlonge’s Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature, and Brandon Labelle’s Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance. These resonant interlocutions are backed by a range of theoretical and critical work in the field of sound studies that includes media histories (Jonathan Sterne and Lisa Gitelman), the philosophy of sound (Don Idhe, Lisbeth Lipari, Salome Voegelin, Gascia Ouzounian), and critical race, disability, and decolonial studies (Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Rey Chow, Mara Mills, Dylan Robinson). The objectives of this seminar will be to offer participants a way into the critical vocabulary for hearing and listening to literature; an appreciation of the history of audio technologies and the ways in which those technologies have shaped our understanding of listening as a phenomenological experience; a political and historical contextualization of the disciplinary and social privilege of sight over sound; and a survey of key moments in recorded literary history. 

ENGL 695 LEC A1: Literary Themes
Literature and Culture of the “Forever War,” a.k.a. the Global War on Terror”
T. Tomsky

Since 2001, the US has reorganized world politics through its open-ended Global War on Terror (GWOT). Also known as the “long war,” a “perpetual,” “endless” and “forever war,” the Global War on Terror mostly takes place across the landscapes of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Kenya, Syria, Palestine, Yemen, Algeria, Libya, Niger and beyond. Such a war is largely invisible to many in the so-called West, not least because this war is defined, as historian Samuel Moyn noted in 2021, “by a near complete immunity from harm for the American side.” This course examines the critical theory, literary texts, and cultural forms that engage with this ever-shifting war and its wide-ranging forms of pre-emptive violence. In its use of aerial warfare, large scale indiscriminate attacks, targeted killings, covert operations, and systematic oppression, the GWOT functions in a state of permanent security focused on perceived future threats. This modus operandi is not exceptional, but part of a contemporary pattern of violent securitization, which can be observed elsewhere, for instance, in the surveillance practices against and biopolitical management of the racialized Other, such as irregular migrants and targeted communities in Europe and North America. In this course we will explore a range of literature and culture about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, while keeping an eye to the patterns of exclusions and colonial violence beyond those sites. Together, we will read prisoner testimonies and poems by former Guantánamo detainees, drone tweets, short stories, novels, autotheory, and contemplate films and artwork, which illuminates the consequences of the GWOT, that began with the terror attacks against the U.S. on September 11, 2001. We will investigate the contributions of literature and culture in helping us apprehend the scale of this unending war, its regimes of surveillance, incarceration, and killings. We will explore the social visions and possibilities proposed by writers and artists in response to the crisis of war and neo-imperialism. 

Possible Texts

• Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)
• Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008)
• Kamala Shamsie, Home Fire (2017)
• Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq, Trans. Jonathan Wright (2014)
• Hassan Blasim, God 99, Trans. Jonathan Wright (2018).
• Sinan Antoon, The Book of Collateral Damage, Trans. Jonathan Wright (2020)  
• Dionne Brand, Inventory (2006)
• Josh Baker, [select podcast episodes] I’m Not a Monster: The Shamima Begum Story (2023)
• Chris Morris, dir. Four Lions (2010) 
• Hanif Kureishi, “My Son the Fanatic” (1997)
• Rajkamal Kahlon, “Did you Kiss the Dead Body?” artwork 
• Tonje Hessen Schei, dir. Drone (2014)
• Teju Cole, Drone tweets (2013) 
• Marc Falkoff, ed. Select poems from Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak (U of Iowa P, 2007)

WRS 603 LEC A1: Writing Centre Theory
A. Chilewska

This course introduces students to research in Writing Studies with a focus on writing in the disciplines and in writing centres. WRS 603 will help students identify different stages in the writing processes, become familiar with different tutoring models, become aware of diversity and equity, recognize underlying ethical issues regarding tutoring, and articulate their own tutoring philosophy. Students who successfully complete WRS 603 will become eligible to apply to become tutors at the Writing Services and/or tutors in WRS 102 courses.

Winter 2025

ENGL 569 LEC B1: Theory
The Poetics and Politics of Witnessing
C. Bracken

The title of the course deliberately echoes the title of an essay by Derrida first published in English in 2000.  Derrida remarks that it is impossible to decide on “the biographical or autobiographical truthfulness of a witness” who “claims to be recording” an episode from their own life, yet it is equally impossible to remain in this undecidability.  The source of this paradox lies in the structure of testimony itself.  The witness does not prove that something happened in the past but asks only to be believed.  Testimony remains “haunted,” structurally, by “what it excludes”: the possibility of fiction.  This course will study the undecidable boundary between testimony and literature.  Although it will primarily be a theory course, with readings drawn from different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, we will weigh theoretical texts against readings from literature and film.  Areas of focus will include tales of witchcraft and ghosts, which involve a testimony that borders on fantasy (and which, just as importantly, remain enduringly popular with audiences), and acts of perjury, which cannot be detected unless the audience finds a reliable way to distinguish fact from fiction.  Historically, thee seem to be the places, or topoi, where the theory of testimony came to emergence – with all its problems and paradoxes.

Potential Readings:

• Ashforth, The Trials of Mrs. K. 
• Blanchot/Derrida, The Instant of My Death /Demeure: Fiction and Testimony
• Certeau, The Possession at Loudun
• Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan
• Gurney, Myers and Podmore, Phantasms of the Living
• Hume, “Of Miracles”
• James, The Turn of The Screw
• Miller, The Crucible
• Peirce, “Hume on Miracles”
• Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting
• It Came from Outer Space, dir. Arnold
• Rashomon, dir. Kurosawa
• Stories We Tell, dir. Polley

ENGL 574 LEC B1: Creative Writing
What Can (all) Writers Learn from Indigenous Narratives
C. Kerr

In this course we will do a deep dive into Indigenous narratives and break down exactly how Indigenous writers are creating stories. Have you ever wondered from a creative perspective why a story works? What makes a story? How come some stories are forgettable and others linger? This course will explore how award-winning Indigenous writers create their craft and give students the skillset to do the same thing for their stories. This course will be a hybrid creative workshop-seminar class where students will be expected to explore their own creativity.

ENGL 578 LEC B1: Film Studies
Cinemas of Revolution and Rebellion
B. Capper

This graduate seminar will take a historical and theoretical approach to global cinemas of revolution and rebellion. We will explore how cinema has shaped, visualized, and participated in a range of revolutions and rebellions from the 1920s to the present, including but not limited to Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban communism; anti-colonial and decolonial struggles; demands for prison abolition; and movements for women’s and sexual liberation. We will ask: What is the relation between cinematic form and revolutionary politics? What role have films played in political organization and mobilization? And how has cinema been a site for imagining, contesting, and reconceiving the very idea of “revolution,” particularly in relation to questions of race, gender, labour, and nation? Throughout, film screenings will be paired with readings in critical and political theory, as well as film history and theory.

ENGL 583 LEC B1: Cultural Studies
Speculative Energy Futures
M. Simpson

This graduate seminar will explore the issue of energy futurity—as a problem, as an opening, and on both counts as a matter of and for culture. Using the distinction between firmative and affirmative speculation offered by the theory collective uncertain commons as a point of entry for our inquiries, we will undertake a three-part study: a preliminary consideration of key concepts and debates in the Energy Humanities with which to frame our work; then an analysis of key modes of firmative speculation from the recent past and present that foreclose energy futurity by sedimenting transition-without-transformation; and, lastly and most extensively, an analysis of exemplary instances of affirmative speculation in contemporary society and culture that work to unnerve the givenness of energy futures-to-come. Key terms for (and so theoretical perspectives on) our endeavor will include: aesthetics; affect; materiality; temporality; mediation; capital. A prime aim in this course is to consider what happens—to imagine what could become possible—when taking up energy as focus yet also frame: as at once object and analytic.

The syllabus will combine readings in critical and cultural theory with selected aesthetic materials drawn from fiction, film, photography, and art. While these aesthetic materials will speak most directly and self-evidently to specific topics on the syllabus, they will also serve to articulate points of connection across many topics—whether by putting concepts, issues, and debates from earlier readings in new light, or by anticipating concerns in readings to come, or both. Engaging with this range of theoretical and aesthetic materials will allow us to consider the ways in which and the ends to which speculative energy futurity might inflect or even reorient the practice of critical and cultural inquiry today. 

Selected potential materials may include:

• After Oil Collective Solarities (Minnesota 2022)
• China Miéville “Covehithe” in Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories (Pan Macmillan 2015)
• Climaginaries Network Carbon Ruins exhibits
• Dominic Boyer Blob
• E.E.R.K. Collective Energy Emergency Repair Kit (Fordham 2024)
• Elizabeth LaPensée Thunderbird Strike (2016)
• Emily St John Mandel Station Eleven (Knopf 2014)
• Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, Patricia Yaeger, eds Fueling Culture (Fordham 2017)
• Paolo Bacigalupi The Windup Girl (Night Shade 2010)
• Shell energy scenarios
• Tsēmā Igharas Black Gold
• uncertain commons Speculate This! (Duke 2013)
• Waubgeshig Rice Moon of the Crusted Snow (ECW 2018)

ENGL 635 LEC B1: Early Modern Texts
Early Modern Masculinities
M. Cárdenas

How useful is the category of masculinity to personal and societal flourishing? What does it mean to be a good man, as opposed to simply a good person? Modern chauvinistic Internet personalities have woefully answered such questions to the general detriment of people of all genders. Yet as writers like Richard Reeves have suggested, boys and men may be gravitating to Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, and the like in the absence of alternative cultural models of masculinity.

This graduate seminar will provide a historical perspective on such issues. Students will consider widespread discourses in the early modern period for questions and answers on masculinity and manliness—many destructive, many surprising. Masculinities then and now are not homogenous or consistent; they are constructed and deconstructed in complex and contradictory ways, and they intersect with age, class, race, marital status, and other identities. To navigate these manly ideas and exemplars of the renaissance, readings will combine critical examinations of gender and masculinity (e.g., Eve K. Sedgwick, Between Men), scholarly texts specific to the early modern period (e.g., Alexandra Shepherd, Jennifer Jordan, Michael Kimmel, Elizabeth Hodgson), and primary texts by and about men. These may include literature and treatises concerning manhood, like Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier, as well as literary works by authors like Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Aphra Behn, and John Milton. Seminar participants will have a chance to synthesize and critique these early modern masculinities through in-class discussion, seminar presentations, and critical essays.

ENGL 680 LEC B1: Postcolonial Texts
Black “Archive Fever”: Decolonial Intimacies and Canadian Art Institutions
M. Bucknor

Following on Karina Vernon’s groundbreaking book, The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology, that “unearths and brings critical attention to the little-known history and cultural production of … Black writers on the Canadian prairies,” this course mines archives to understand the mechanisms of Black Canadian cultural production. Intervening between Canadian literary and cultural historiography, Black transnational studies, Caribbean literary histories, and Black biopolitics, this course explores the ways in which the archives of artists and art institutions expose the artistic vulnerabilities and resilience strategies of Caribbean Canadian writers. Turning to affective economies, informal Black Atlantic circuits of artistic collaborations and affective friendships, the course is interested in mapping the affective registers of racial vulnerabilities, but also the mechanisms that Black subjects employ to reframe suffering as imaginative pathways for new forms of being (Weheliye 2014). 

The course will investigate how Canadian cultural institutions such as the CBC, the Canada Council for the Arts, literary magazines such as Tamarack Review and the culture of book reviews, and publishing outfits such as Sister Vision Press and Sandbery Press also position Canada as a site of Black global cultural production and international literary development. Central questions include how can intimacy (“intimacies of shared catastrophe” Gandhi 2006; “intimacies of violent contact” Lowe 2006; “monstrous intimacies” Christina Sharpe 2009; maroon intimacies Cummings 2011) as an analytic framework help to mine the affective affiliations of Black artistic friendships that demonstrate how Black subjects preserve their human dignity within delimiting arts and media institutions? How might decolonizing the archives provide alternative histories of book production in Canada and expose the intricacies of Black cultural production? How might this course provide a model for the applicability of the conceptual framework of intimacy to decolonize Black transnational history and to offer a different epistemological framework to counter racial capitalism? The course will investigate material from various archives and train students in archival research.

Readings might include, but not limited to the following:

Archive Theory

• Bastian, Jeannette A. et al. Decolonizing the Caribbean Record: An Archives Reader. 
  Sacramento, California: LibraryJuice Press. 2018
• Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. (Translated by Eric Prenowitz), 
  Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Hall, Stuart, “Constituting an Archive,” Third Text, vol. 15, no. 54, 2001, p. 89–90. 
  DOI:10.1080/09528820108576903.
• Smith, Shawn Michelle, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture, 
  Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1999.
• Stoler, Ann Laura, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2009.
• Schwartz Joan M. and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records and Power: The Making of Modern 
  Memory,” Archival Sci, no. 2, p. 2–3; 7–9.
• Taylor, Diana, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 2003.
• Thompson, Cheryl. “Black Canada and Why the Archival Logic of Memory Needs Reform.” Les ateliers de l'éthique The Ethics Forum, Volume 14, Number 2, Fall 2019.

Archival Practice

• Austin, David, Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness. Toronto, Between the Lines, 2018.
• Clarke, George Elliott. Odyssey’s Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2002.
• Compton, Wade. Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002.
• Mills, Sean. The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in the Sixties 
  Montreal. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2010.
• Siemerling, Winfried. The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the Past. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2015.
• Vernon, Karina. The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology. Waterloo, Ontario. Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2020

Thinking Intimacy

• Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006.
• Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.
• Lowe, Lisa. “The Intimacies of Four Continents.” Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, edited by Anna Laura Stoler. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006, pp. 191-212.
• Sharpe. Christina. Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. Durham & London

Caribbean Canadian Literature and the Archives

• The Austin Clarke Fonds, William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library
• The Makeda Silvera Archives, University of Ottawa
• The Shani Mootoo Archives, Simon Fraser University
• The CBC Archives, Library and Archives Canada

WRS 601 LEC B1: Composition Theory
N. Bray

In WRS 601, we explore questions like:

• Why is writing hard for many people?
• What is good writing? Who gets to decide what is good writing?
• How should we best teach writing in school and workplace settings?
• How should we provide feedback to writers and assess writing?
• How do technologies like ChatGPT impact our writing?
• What does a healthy writing process look like?
• How can we use writing to improve learning?

WRS 601 provides a solid grounding in the current research and practices in Writing Studies and prepares students to coach and teach writing. We take an interdisciplinary approach and address writing issues in different disciplines and contexts, like education and the workplace. An important learning objective of the course is to help students develop healthier writing processes and to improve their writing skills. This course has an experiential learning option that allows students to practice the theory they learn in the classroom if they are interested.

Students who complete WRS 601 may be eligible to apply to become Graduate Teaching Assistants for WRS 102 (Writing in the Disciplines) and to become instructors of WRS 101 (Exploring Writing).

Previous Offerings

2024-25 Fall and Winter Term Courses
2023-24 Fall and Winter Term Courses

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