English and Film Studies

ENGL 358 - American Texts 1900

When in early winter 2026 the United States under Donald Trump invaded Venezuela and menaced Greenland, the naked display of imperial power serving extractive desire (for oil and minerals) restaged a well-worn drama all too familiar from US social, cultural, and political history. This course will offer students an opportunity to explore earlier versions of this drama as depicted in literary texts from the US long nineteenth century. We will consider episodes in the rise of extractive empire across five fictional narratives: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, from 1850, about whale oil pasts and futures; John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, from 1854, about gold mining, border politics, and Native American removal; Rebecca Harding Davis’ “Life in the Iron-Mills,” from 1860, about coal-fired industry; Martin Delaney’s Blake; or the Huts of America, from 1859-1862, about hemispheric resistance to slavery’s circuitry; and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, from 1905, about petroculture and finance.

Instructor: Mark Simpson

ENGL 397 - Histories of the Book

In Histories of the Book, students will explore the many ways in which books are and have been produced, read, collected, borrowed, sold, destroyed, adapted, stolen, digitized, and more. The central question for this course is: How have humans throughout history interacted with books and bookish objects or text-adjacent materials? Students will be asked to consider how books influence—and have been influenced by—authorship, reading habits and abilities, and the ever-changing publishing industry. From cuneiform tablets, scrolls, and hand-copied medieval manuscripts to the invention of the printing press and mass production to contemporary digital publishing, books and reading have adapted to new technologies and, in turn, influenced the development of new technologies as well.

This course introduces students to book history, which is an interdisciplinary field that draws methods and theories from media studies, literary studies, history, information studies, communication, and digital humanities. Book history is also intrinsically linked to other disciplines such as disability studies, political science, and sociology through topics such as accessible book formats, book banning and burning, and bookish communities. These themes will run throughout the course and be considered in different temporal, political, and geographical contexts.

Instructor: Ellen Forget

ENGL 481 - Studies in Empire & Postcolonial

Early to mid-twentieth century France welcomed many African American writers, artists, and musicians who sought escape from segregation and other violent forms of anti-Black racism back home. Across the Atlantic, the historical context of Jim Crow is accompanied by the Négritude movement in France and the Algerian war of independence. While France became a second home for the Harlem Renaissance, a decidedly queer Black Modernism emerged as a movement within a movement that included gay novelists like James Baldwin and Claude McKay. The queer legacy of other proponents has been recuperated by Black critics including the writer Chester Himes, the painter Beauford Delaney, and the poet Gwendolyn Bennett. Moreover, the afterlife of the celebrated performer Josephine Baker continues in contemporary queer and trans of colour cultures.

This course gives students the opportunity to examine the complexities of this particular era of Black cosmopolitanism through the critical lenses of queerness and coloniality. We will interrogate interpretative possibilities of aesthetic forms in literature, art, and performance that explore Black diasporic dislocation as well as liberation across the double hegemonic pulls of American imperialism and French colonialism. We will question how metropolitan locations like Paris and Marseille become sites of both emancipation and violence, how they are reclaimed by Black queer and trans presence, and what kind of political possibilities emerge. We will consider how expressions of homosociality and homoeroticism act as interruptive forces toward unanticipated revolutionary solidarities and anticolonial resistance even as pressures of complicity with violence against Black and other bodies of colour mounts through the twentieth century. Overall, this course revisits varied classic and recently revived cultural productions to study the radical potential of Black modernist traditions and techniques.

Instructor: Arshad Said Khan

WRITE 494 - Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry

Prerequisite: WRITE 392 or WRITE 394 unless waived by Instructor; a minimum grade of B+ in the prerequisite course is strongly recommended.

Instructor: Marilyn Dumont

WRITE 498 - Advanced Creative Writing Nonfiction

Prerequisite: WRITE 397 or WRITE 398 unless waived by Instructor; a minimum grade of B+ in the prerequisite course is strongly recommended.

Instructor: Jana Pruden, Writer-in-Residence